Hi, Happy Women’s Day!
Here is a poem by Li Suo 里所. She lives in Beijing and works with books, in connection with Shen Haobo. She was born in Kashgar, left after primary school. Last year she was at Vermont Studio Center, together with Lucas Klein, who translated her poems.
This poem is part of the huge response by Chinese poets to the virus crisis. I found it in a compilation circulated on WeChat that was soon deleted. Many, many links, websites and so on have been deleted in the last few weeks. Don’t know if Cuijian.com is still down. Can’t have Chinese rock’n’roll quoting The Internationale to all eternity, can we. Anyway, poetry matters. There was a heated discussion about Tang poetry on boxes from Japan with relief goods form Wuhan. An article in the 长江日报 on February 12 argued against quoting poetry in this context, because Adorno had said writing poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. That guy received a lot of flak in the following days, some in poems. The poem by Li Suo was probably inspired by a hospital boss in Wuhan who said they didn’t need to care if the women working there had their periods. Don’t remember exactly when. Anyway, huge response. Great poems. Some of it can be found on Poemlife, compiled by 左右: https://www.poemlife.com/index.php?mod=showart&id=81584&str=1985&from=timeline&isappinstalled=0
I have put Li Suo’s poem on my blog, you can find the original there, and my German version, here https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2020/03/08/they-%e9%87%8c%e6%89%80/
and here http://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2020/03/07/sie-%e9%87%8c%e6%89%80/ .
Martin Winter
THEY
By Li Suo
We need their wombs to be fertile
need their bodies to fight the virus
after abortion
We need their hair
We need their moving tears
when their heads are shaved
We need their soft smiles
in the face of brutal rules
but we don’t need their periods
We do need them to give their blood
But we don’t need
their blood down there
Don’t need to hand them sanitary pads
Don’t need to know how many they need
in a day
We need them to go on standing
Need them to cry
need them to laugh
need them to be there
to demonstrate
in the face of this catastrophe
they have achieved even more
equality
February 2020
Translated by MW, March 8, 2020