Live Encounters Poetry & Writing June 2026
Reading Virgil in Autumn, poems by Ma Yongbo.
Reading Virgil in Autumn
Before facing the future, return first to the silence of the dead,
phantoms shun you three times; even your own father
passes dreadfully through the yard, his long hair ablaze, his face unseen.
Those phantoms drifting in the air pierce straight into your eyes,
every embrace of ecatasy passes hollow and unfulfilled,
while suffering, woven with memories of suffering,
becomes sorrow doubled upon sorrow.
Enjoying is the gate of ivory, suffering the gate of horn,
whichever gate you take to leave the underworld,
you return to the same lost path.
Dido looks Aeneas up and down,
her desperate silence drifting like white doves upon heaving tides.
Smoke curling upward from the funeral pyre,
and masts dwindling low above the sea
measure the helpless rift between love and duty.
After death, we are mere shadows, never to walk the mortal world again,
though surrounded by shades of the departed,
it cannot compare to carving oars beneath the sun.
See how the wedge-shaped prow rises high once more,
its hull cleaving the water, ploughing through the waves—
exile itself becomes homeland, and all things have only just begun.
Therefore, Virgil—my guide, my master—
I shall take jagged reefs for an altar,
no longer dividing the underworld from the living world.
From you alone I learn the true meaning of courage;
as for fate, I must turn to others for answers.
Spending a Quiet Afternoon Reading Ovid on the Double Ninth Festival
Sunlight glimmers high above,
chrysanthemums everywhere shake their small fists in quiet protest.
Green mountains lie not far away, I do not go,
yet they remain, unchanging,
autumn and silence abide there too,
as do the brown birds,
for years, they have trodden through fallen leaves,
wandering toward the deeper mountains,
like a crowd of noisy, tumbling children leaving school.
The gaunt little lake lingers there,
lingering over blue skies and distant echoes.
Dark silt hidden in reed beds,
a frail symbol of humanity, also dwells there.
And so I stay at home,
on the low southern slopes of Purple Mountain,
immersed in Ovid’s recollections,
lingering through a slow, tranquil afternoon.
He preserve autumn cherries in dark crimson lees.
for he once said:
so long as one knows not who he is,
one may live long into old age.
Thoughts on Reading
Sylvia Plath’s Diaries
“How dreadful it is to live into a cold middle age—
well‑educated, once full of promise,
yet fading into the crowd, good for nothing.”
To live into a cold old age,
to live through any cold, indifferent years,
is no less sorrowful.
So long as you go unseen by others,
so long as such words ring like the tongue of a politician.
She brought it all to an end.
She outwitted middle age, never to be given the chance
to break down doors in valiant old age,
and die the death of a young person.
© Ma Yongbo
Ma Yongbo was born in 1964, Ph.D, representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry. He is the founder of polyphonic writing and objectified poetics. He is also the first translator to introduce British and American postmodern poetry into Chinese, making contributions that fill gaps, the various postmodern poetry schools in Chinese are mostly guided by his poetics and translation. He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986 included 9 poetry collections.He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Amy Lowell,Williams, Ashbery and Rosanna Warren. He published a complete translation of Moby Dick, which has sold over 600,000 copies. He teaches at Nanjing University of Science and Technology. The Collected Poems of Ma Yongbo (four volumes, Eastern Publishing Centre, 2024) comprising 1178 poems, celebrate 40 years of writing poetry.