For My Daughter
by Liao Yiwu | translated by Katie Farris and Ming Di
Let me sit her in this corner.
The imagined
praying cell.
With my hands handcuffed, with my hands
behind me.
Making a sign of the cross,
my hands.
For you, Miao Miao, my daughter,
a sign of the cross.
The little thing that probes and peeks,
a sign of the cross.
I eat you from the dust every day,
a sign of the cross.
The cement sunroof splits; a moon.
I see you
on that mountain, on that fog in the mountain, you in a saddle.
Liao Yiwu is a writer, musician, and poet from Sichaun, China. He is the author of The Corpse Walker, God Is Red, and For a Song and a Hundred Songs, a memoir of the four years he spent in prison after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. His work has been published in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and Sweden. He has received numerous awards, including the prestigious 2012 Peace Prize awarded by the German Book Trade and the Disturbing the Peace Award given by the Václav Havel Library Foundation. Liao escaped from China in July 2011 and currently lives in Berlin, Germany.
Katie Farris is the author of boysgirls, (Marick Press, 2011), a hybrid form text which has been lauded as “truly innovative,” (Prague Post), and “a little tour de force” (Robert Coover). She’s a co-editor of Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose (Tupelo Press, 2014), and has also co-translated several books of poetry from the French, Chinese, and Russian. Her translations and original work have appeared in anthologies published by Penguin and Greywolf, as well as literary journals including Virginia Quarterly Review, Western Humanities Review, and Hayden’s Ferry. She received her MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. Currently, she worked as an Associate Professor at the MFA program at San Diego State University as well as a core faculty member at New England College’s MFA program.
Ming Di is a Chinese poet based in the US with six books of poetry in Chinese and four in collaborative translation including River Merchant’s Wife (Marick Press, 2012). She attended Boston College and Boston University and taught Chinese at BU before moving to California. She has translated many poets from English to Chinese including Marianne Moore, Anne Carson, etc. She edited and co-translated New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Tupelo Press, 2013). She selected and translated with Neil Aitken The Book of Cranes (Vagabond Press, 2015) and with Jennifer Stern Empty Chairs – Poems by Liu Xia (Graywolf Press, 2015). She co-founded Poetry East West journal and serves as the China editor for Poetry International Rotterdam.