A Few Poems

Zhang Zhi [China]

The Manuscript Age 

Treading Mt. Tai under his feet
Old Tu Fu 
Gave two lines
“When I am on the mountaintop
I will overlook other mountains”

Lying on the mountaintop and drunk
Old Huang Xiang 
Gave a cry
“I’ll add height to the earth
With my genital”

Sitting at the foot of the mountain
Old Diablo
Is silent—
No one knows
He is taken by the throat
By an invisible country

A Poem of Fourteen Lines: To the 16-year-old A Wen

Taught by your parents
You began to work as a prostitute
When you were quite sixteen, you say

Pressed by the life in reality
I began to work as a poet
When I was quite sixteen, I say

Now still sturdy your little breasts
And also famous I am as a poet—
You can’t comprehend the great changes in my heart
While I fail to make clear your burning beauty

It is not so much to say you are opening freely on the bed of the country
As to say you grow silently in my poem lines
Whose heart is blown away by the nightly wind in June
Your hollow eyes will not hold the fiery sigh 

The World Is Swaying in a Binoculars

1.
The world fouled by 
trash, semen, nuclear waste, heroin, blood and AIDS
can never be cleaned 

2.
Look! The world has entered KTV chartered room
Who knows which beautiful beast
delightfully moaning under his hips again
Tonight, the damned world will surely play rough
— It is also OK
if you image the scene  
to be the Third World War

3.
Rivers run east
Prostitutes go west
The world is like a lost lamb
standing at a crossroads 
asking robots going north and south
“To whom I should bow, sir?”

4.
The world is applauding for politicians with its feet 
The politicians bathe the world in blood 

5.
The world cannot see clear our faces 
maybe we have no face 
“We can be shameless since we have no face”
a certain damned artist said so.

6.
The world is waving its penis
howling on the top of the UN Edifice
“Behold, it is great”
In fact, last night 
this fellow whispered to me in the dream
“Sir, my penis is of no use”

7.
The world is unhurried
The world is not frightened
The world has gone under the wheel of history
but no blood is coming out
Who has ever seen the real blood

8.
Whetting the knife, the world
is gouging out its own flesh
day and night. Dearth
is singing an everlasting song in a drop of blood
“Breast-fattening cream fattens the breast, not the waist”

Title Lost

No one can calculate
What time 
The sun will no more damp
Frost will no longer fall on the land
What time
Our hearts and blood
Will no more burn in vain
What time 
The world is no longer a volcano
We are no longer on the volcano
A pile of ashes
What time
The wind, waving its black lightning 
Will attack the dying sky 
What time 
No one can calculate

About the author:
Zhang Zhi, born in Phoenix Town of Baxian County, Sichuan Province in 1965, is an important poet, critic, translator and publisher in contemporary China. His pen name is Diablo, English name is Arthur Zhang, and ancestral place is Nan’an of Chongqing City. He is a doctor of literature. He is the current president of the International Poetry Translation and Research Centre, editor-in-chief of Rendition of International Poetry Quarterly (multilingual), editor-in-chief of the English edition of World Poetry Yearbook, and advisor to the Center for Globalization of Chinese Poetry of Nankai University. He began to publish his literary and translation works since 1986. Some of his literary works have been translated into more than forty foreign languages. He has ever won Literature prizes from Greece, Brazil, America, Israel, France, India, Italy, Austria, Lebanon, Macedonia, Russia, Japan, Egypt, Belgium, Armenia, and Bangladesh. His main works include poetry collections such as RECEITA (Portuguese-English-Chinese), SELECTED POEMS OF DIABLO (English), POETRY BY ZHANG ZHI (German-English-Portuguese), Selected Poems of Diablo (Chinese-English), A Jigsaw Picture of the World (Albanian), Feu Follet On Paper (Arabic), Poison (Arabic), and The Mirror Image of Ghost City (Serbian), collection of poetry criticism entitled Series Essays on Avant-Garde Chinese Poets, and poetry translation A & 1 IS THE FOUNDER (English-Chinese), Selected Poems of Tareq Samin (English-Chinese), My Secret Lover, You (Chinese), 103 Hieroglyphs About Love (Russian-English-Chinese), and translated a novel НАЗОВИ ИМЯ БОГА (Russian-Chinese), etc. In addition, he has edited Selected Poems of Contemporary International Poets (English-Chinese), Selected New Chinese Poems of 20th Century (Chinese-English), A Dictionary of Contemporary International Poets (multilingual), Chinese-English Textbook 300 New Chinese Poems (1917—2012), and Century-Old Classics·300 New Chinese Poems (1917-2016), etc.