Yi Lei, born Sun Gui-zhen in Tianjin, China, in 1951, was one of the most influential figures of Chinese Poetry in the 1980s. Sent to the countryside to work on a farm in 1969, two years later she became a reporter for the Liberation Army and a staff member of the newspaper the Railway Corps. Yi Lei studied creative writing at the Lu Xun Academy and earned a BA in Chinese literature from Peking University. In 1991 she moved to Moscow, where she lived and wrote for a number of years. A recipient of the Zhuang Zhongwen Literature Prize, Yi Lei’s work has been translated into English, Japanese, French, Italian, and Russian. She died in 2018.
Judges’ Citation
One of shortest poems in My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree creates — in just five lines! — lasting theological perspective: ‘When life ends, / Memory endures.
Selected poems
by Yi Lei
Black hair like youth
Runs wild in March.
Dark papery leaves fly
Teeming, swarming,
Bum-rushing March.
Black hair in March
Is gentle, strangers’ eyes
Softer. Memory:
A feast on offer. Youth,
Born of the primordial sea—
Embrace me. Drape my skin
Old as clouds
In something suppler.
Black hair
Blown free, rootless,
Wanders the desert’s
Countless tombs, sways
Across a vacant sky,
Whips at fresh mud in rain.
Days blaze past. I have
Lost sight of my own black hair
In the mirror. Let me
Watch it now
For the next thousand years.
Black hair weedy
In dirt-poor soil.
Thirsty, deluded,
Squandering its spoils.
Black hair has no idea.
The story of black hair
Is my story.
When I die, let me drift
Like a dandelion
Of black hair.
Black hair
Like holy water
No way, there is no way
To be saved except to die.
When black hair cries,
Itsw tears snuff themselves out
Like candles.
So will my life cease to flicker.
Black hair
Exhausted brush fire
Fanned by misery
Whistling
Through the last century.
Black hair, ?Shredded black flag
Of a women’s glory
Ragged and battered
In March wind.
Forsaking dignity
Absolved of chastity
With its pride in knots
Black hair smiles easily
In March.
If waterfall, it will plummet.
If cloud, it will scatter.
Eyes plaintive, wide,
Black hair waits to be spun
By hardened hands
Into rock.
March 25, 1987
Copyright © 2020
Black Hair
the Chinese written by Yi Lei
Hot. Having burned me but also
Warmed me. I regard it from a distance.
The flowers choking it, bleeding onto it,
Red legacy binding our generations.
From below, we thousands cast upon it a
beatific, benighted, complacent, complicit,
decorous, disconsolate, distracted, expectant,
execrative, filthy, grievous, guileless,
hallowed, hotheaded, hungry, incredulous,
indifferent, inscrutable, insubordinate, joyful,
loath, mild, peace-loving, profane, proud,
rageful, rancorous, rapt, skeptical, terrified,
tranquil, unperturbed, unrepentant,
warring eye.
Copyright © 2021
Red Wall
the Chinese written by Yi Lei