Moving a Stone

Moving a Stone is a bilingual poetry collection by acclaimed Hong Kong poet Yam Gong, selected and translated by James Shea and Dorothy Tse. The book includes a vivid array of poems from work written over four decades; a generous introduction and extensive endnotes place the work in the context of the Chinese poetic tradition, Hong Kong history, and global literature. Shea and Tse describe Yam Gong’s wide range of influences, from ancient and contemporary Chinese poetry and Chinese mythology to the writings of Modernist poets including Fernando Pessoa and Nâzim Hikmet, noting that Yam Gong’s poems “broaden what may be considered poetic in Chinese” thanks to “surprising interjections of Cantonese”—a spoken dialect that is “generally not regarded as a literary language”—alongside classical and standard Modern Chinese.

This heterogeneity of influences and registers is evident in these translations, which include vital, often lyrical, scenes from the Hong Kong of Yam Gong’s youth, as in these lines from “Reclamation”: 

if someone tossed a coin from the ferry
you’d hear us plashing into the waves
emerging only when the coin was between our teeth 
Resolved to be a wild stray,
I’d roam from sampan
to sampan

By contrast, in “Back Pain,” a plainspoken description of X-ray results veers into the philosophical:

Nothing found      Nothing seen     Nothing
     diagnosed 
Why can’t I spit a mouthful of blood at this positivist world? 
Cough    cough    cough
What’s really killing me is my cough—
coughing is a phenomenon
not an essence

Yam Gong’s metaphysical searching, his oblique meaning-making, and his witty, allusive wordplay are all evident in “Third Bank,” in which, as Shea and Tse note, “Yam Gong plays with the sound of Wittgenstein’s name in Chinese, writing it in different ways to create a refractive effect,” an effect the translators ingeniously recreate with different iterations of the name, evoking “the bending of light passing through glass”:

Wittgenstein wrote a poem 
We prepare glass
when language passes through 

When Wittgenstine passes through
When Wittgenstinestine and his language pass through there’s a light
curving
and breaking 
        sidestepping 
into unspeakable 
snow