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Chen Xianfa is a poet, essayist and journalist born in Anhui Province, China, where he still lives. He has published four books of poems: Death in the Spring (1994), Past Life (2005), Engraving the Tombstone (2011) and Poems in Nines (2018) which was awarded the Lu Xun Literature Prize. A Selected Poems appeared in 2019. He has published two collections of essays, Heichiba Notes (2014 and 2021). Other awards include China’s Top Ten Influential Poets (1998-2008), the Hainan Biennial Poetry Prize (2011), Yuan Kejia Poetry Prize (2013), Tian Wen Poetry Prize (2015) and the Chenzi’ang Poetry Prize (2016).

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Chen Xianfa: Five Poems translated by Martyn Crucefix and Nancy Feng Liang

A WORLD OF BUTTERFLIES

Suddenly, we will lose
all kinds of ways,
every intonation,
struck dumb in the face of things moving quickly towards us.

Speechless, I stand beside a rock,
and displayed on the rock, a butterfly…