Guanyin Mountain

1 Minute Read Time

This piece by Chen Xianfa is translated from Chinese into English by Martyn Crucefix and Nancy Feng Liang

Black tallow leaf. Phoenix-tree leaf. Nim-tree leaf. 
Yellow sumac leaf.
Acacia leaf. Leaf of the beech tree. 
Fine rain and clumsy clock leaf.
Leaf of the grasshopper’s close-to-zero vision.
Leaf of paint peeling from a red pillar in an old temple.
Leaf of one action with many outcomes or one outcome with multiple causes. 
Leaf of climbing five hundred steps inside my body.
Leaf of dopamine secretion to counter the emptiness.

Acer leaf. Oak leaf. Cottonwood leaf. 
Leaf of the hazel.
Yellow-veined acanthus leaves. Pagoda-tree leaf.
Leaf of a dead heart
with dancing limbs in the square.
Leaf, on its knees in the filthy water of this age.
Leaf accepting humiliation as nothing less than a strange gift. 
Leaf knowing the search for conformity will not diminish despair, 
me, the leaf—

Martyn Crucefix

Between a Drowning Man is published by Salt (2023). Recent publications: Cargo of Limbs (Hercules Editions, 2019); These Numbered Days, translations of Peter Huchel (Shearsman, 2019) won the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, 2020; translations of essays by Lutz Seiler, In Case of Loss, is published by And Other Stories (2023). A Rilke Selected, Change Your Life, is published by Pushkin Press (2024). Blog and website at http://www.martyncrucefix.com.

Nancy Feng Liang

is a bilingual poet and translator living in Massachusetts and North Carolina. She has translated Henry David Thoreau’s Wild Fruits into Chinese (China’s Culture and Development Press, 2018) and Chen Xianfa’s Poems in Nines (Anhui Education Press, 2018). Her most recent poetry collection, Qi Cun Tie, was published by Taiwan Showwe Press (2020). She graduated from Harvard University with a Masters degree in 2004.

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