by Tang Siu Wa, translated from the Chinese by Jennifer Feeley

WINTER DAY WHIRLING

I have such a strange premonition
This suddenly cold winter day
It must be that something will be taken away from me
Some lives, fragile and oppressed

(He didn’t used to be so lean
Like a magnolia that’s been plucked)

On this day, people have no way to return
Friends are all so far away
We are cut off from one another like withered branches
Faces overwhelmed by different speeds

Only death is close
So very close
The dispossession is about to begin, at military speed
Snatching the bodies we once owned
Seizing our strong, free actions
Deleting our uttered testimonies

Sometimes I clutch my arms
As if clutching the quick slipping
World, letting death reset
The distance among us:
The ones far-off press in, the ones close by fade away
The confined take flight, the silenced gain strength
He writes abstract words, more intimate than fate

Like harnessing the force of a waltz
Whirling and twirling
Toward all that cruelty
Whirling

—Written on December 12, 2018, upon hearing news of Meng Lang’s passing

冬日旋轉

我是如此怪異地預感
這一驟寒的冬日
必然將有什麼，自我身邊被剝奪
一些生命，脆弱並遭受催迫

（他本非如此瘦削
如一朵木蓮被捻下）

這一天人們無法回來
朋友們都離得那麼遠
我們一一像枯枝疏離隔阻
被不同的速度漫過臉龐

只有死亡是近的
非常近的
剝奪將要開始，行軍速度
要抄走那些我們曾擁有的身體
篡奪自由強壯的行動
刪除我們說過的證詞

有時我抱住自己的臂膀
權如，抱住了急速滑墮的
世界，便任由死亡重置
我們之間的距離：
遙遠者迫近，親近者消逝
被限制的飄飛，沉默著的強壯
他寫下抽象的詞語，比命運更親密

就像在圓舞曲中借力
大大地旋轉
向殘忍的一切
旋轉

——2018.12.12，聞孟浪先生喪訊後

Tang Siu Wa 鄧小樺 (author) is a poet, prose writer, curator, and human rights activist from Hong Kong, as well as the founding editor of the literary magazine Fleurs des Lettres and co-founder of the House of Hong Kong Literature. She is the author of the poetry collections Unmoved Bottle and The Opposite of Sound, the essay collections A Motley of Banalities and As If Nothing Happened, and a collection of interviews Asking Directions from the People. She is also the editor of the anthologies Wait and See: Collected Works of Six New Hong Kong Writers, The Tomb of Film, and The Same Darkness Befalls Dawn: Hong Kong June Fourth Poetry. She teaches creative writing at various institutions in Hong Kong and writes columns and criticism for a variety of local media.

Jennifer Feeley (translator) is the translator of Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi, which won the 2017 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and a 2017 Hong Kong Publishing Biennial Award in Literature and Fiction. With Sarah Ann Wells, she is the coeditor of Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinema. Currently, she is translating a short story collection by Shi Tiesheng and the first two books in Chen Jiatong’s White Fox Dilah series. She is the recipient of a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship to translate Xi Xi’s semi-autobiographical novel Mourning a Breast (Photograph of Jennifer by Shi Lessner.)