Assistant Editor Lisa Low: Translated by Yuemin He, “End of the Year Poem, 2020” by Zhihao Zhang begins where many of us begin our days (regularly, but perhaps especially during a global pandemic): looking at our phones. This mundane act gives way to a reflection that, like the year 2020 itself, is filled with rote action, uncertainty, and contradiction: “Nothing is more interesting than boredom / Nor more saddening than uninteresting.” This translation is of one of a series of yearly reflection poems by Zhang that both acknowledges distance and brings us closer, in the context of the pandemic’s devastation, to loved ones and each other.
To hear Yuemin read the translated poem, click below:
End of the Year Poem, 2020
From my cellphone album I retrieve
Today of last year
Under scrutiny
All the plants on the balcony
Grow so luxuriantly
A while later though
I start to feel like in a trance
Last year I did the same on the same day
Sitting at home and sorting out
My life: in the mist of the big dye vat
Is a bit of blue, and then red
Nothing is more interesting than boredom
Nor more saddening than uninteresting
I have been living like this
Ending each year with a funeral poem
Yet I don’t know how to proceed this year
Too sad not to want to live on
Each day of this year was but a bubble dream
Yesterday I switched to another cell phone
Today I fumbled around the camera here and there
When it finally directed towards me
I saw the one who died in my stead
Standing behind me, whispering:
“Go forth, to love and hate for me.”
Translator’s Note: Zhihao Zhang, a renowned Chinese contemporary poet, has been writing end-of-the-year poems for 15 years, to reflect on the state of being of the world from a poet’s perspective. This poem is the most recent in the series.
Zhihao Zhang is the winner of the prestigious Luxun Literary Prize for poetry in 2017 and the editor-in-chief of Chinese Poetry, a quarterly poetry magazine in Wuhan, China. He has published three poetry collections along with several novellas and many essays.
Yuemin He is a professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College. She has published book chapters, reviews, essays, short stories, and translations. Her poetry translations appear in the Oxford Anthology of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, second edition (Oxford University Press, 2015), Metamorphoses, Ezra, and the Northern Virginia Review.
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