Yam Gong’s Moving a Stone (Zephyr Press, 2022), translated from Chinese by James Shea and Dorothy Tse, explores the poet’s role as a “perfect fool” attempting to shift an immovable stone—a possible metaphor for reimagining the lives of ordinary Hong Kong residents. His lines capture fleeting moments that haunts him through grief of what is lost (his friends, his youth, and ideals he once held), as when he writes, “Imagine / when you bolt into the room: / those to be seen are no longer seen / Those who laughed vanish with their laughter / Debts of gratitude and vengeance are obliterated / and the earth spins as usual.” The earth spins, and through Yam Gong’s masterful retellings, speakers and subjects often blur, as does reality and the imagination, as seen in the encounter between the speaker and his wife, likened to a bus that “stopped suddenly / My head crashed through the windowpane.” What is captured is the essence of a feeling. Elsewhere, we’re left wondering who speaks in lines like “rub[bing] black bean sauce / and a love potion / gently on your body / and mine”—a Born in 1949, Yam Gong is a celebrated Hong Kong poet whose honors include the Hong Kong Youth Literature Award, the Workers’ Literature Award, and the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature for his first book And So You Look at Festival Lights along the Street (1997). His later books include And So Moving a Stone You Look at Festival Lights along the Street (2010) and And So Moving a Stone (Hide-and-Seek-Peekaboo) You Look at Festival Lights along the Street (2022).
Tiffany Troy: What is the act of literary translation to you?
James Shea: The meaning of literary translation varies in many ways based on what I’m translating and why. In the case of Moving a Stone, we wanted to introduce Yam Gong to English-speaking readers, so we felt an obligation to contextualize his work in certain ways that we probably would not have considered if we were translating someone more familiar to English readers. Fundamentally, however, the act of literary translation is an act of literary creation.
Dorothy Tse: Literary translation is a very different experience when done in collaboration with someone else. Working with James, for instance, involved in-depth discussions about the meaning and effect of the original text. It became a dialogue that explored language, nuance, and intention—a way of arriving at a deeper understanding of a work through conversation.
TT: In your Translators’ Note, you write of the opportunity to visit Yam Gong several times at his home in Peng Chau, where he moved shortly before his retirement at the age of seventy-one. Could you speak about how you came to learn of Yam Gong’s poetry? Why did the two of you embark on a collaborative journey to bring Yam Gong’s work to an English-speaking audience?
DT: The idea for the translation project began with James’s interest in Hong Kong literature, and my wish to introduce him to some of my favorite writers from Hong Kong. He had moved here about twelve years ago, but, at the time, Hong Kong literature was still largely under-translated. So if I wanted to share the work that I loved, I had to translate drafts myself. I also felt that Yam Gong’s poetry shared certain qualities with James’s own work, which made me think he’d really enjoy it.
JS: I did feel a resonance between Yam Gong’s poetry and my own, and the fact that he was self-taught as a poet made his work especially intriguing. Most poets in the U.S., including me, are heavily educated, so it was refreshing to discover a poet who learned how to write poems without a teacher or classmates. He dropped out of school at the age of 13 and went right to work. He used to buy secondhand poetry books at street stalls and even now he’s still learning–he’s been taking English lessons in retirement.
TT: There’s something to be said about the imperative of poetry to Yam Gong, a self-taught poet who writes for the common folk as his intended audience. I felt that in some poems, like “Blind Drifting,” Yam Gong showcases his mastery of Cantonese with a brevity that twists and turns through each rhyme and accretes with each repetition. What techniques do you deploy to carry that same velocity and virtuosity in the English translation?
JS: “Blind Drifting” was a poem that we almost did not include in the book, because it’s quite long and so different from his other poems. But for those very reasons, we decided to keep the poem and showcase Yam Gong’s range as a poet. On occasions, we’ve read the poem bilingually together with Yam Gong at literary readings and it really makes an impression on the audience. The hardest part was settling on the phrase “blind drifting,” but once we established that phrase, we just used concision and some attention to sound to keep the poem lively and moving along.
DT: As James mentions, the phrase “blind drifting” was the most challenging term to settle. The original Chinese word 盲流 (mángliú), literally “blind flow,” refers to China’s rural migrants moving into cities in an unregulated, often precarious way, thereby lacking stable employment and housing. Yam Gong reimagined the phrase by focusing on the motion inherent in liú (to flow). We leaned toward the word “drift” because it captures the sense of a person being carried along by larger forces.
TT: This differs from the more narrative poems, for example, in the eponymous poem, “Moving a Stone,” Yam Gong writes of “that perfect fool” who “tries to please me / well aware / that I created / a giant stone / no one can move / including me.” The speaker contrasts the “bright-eyed innocence” of the fool with his comparative cynicism. Even so, the speaker still “like[s] that” though “it must be so / he still tries to please me.” How do you carry Yam Gong’s ambivalence across?
DT: For Yam Gong, there are often many voices within a single poem, and sometimes it’s difficult to detect these shifts because of the nature of Chinese. The translation process actually made us more aware of the many layers and the complexity of meaning in his poetry. I’m glad the ambivalence comes through.
JS: Ambivalence is a good term for Yam Gong’s poetics; or, perhaps, it’s an openness or reluctance to settle on a single way of thinking. His work is full of paradox, which is another way for him to step outside of our typical impulse for closure and certainty. In “Moving a Stone,” we take the speaker to be God, and once Yam Gong’s speaking in the voice of God, it starts to become quite playful. We tried to retain that sense of playfulness–in fact, Yam Gong, who’s now in his mid-70s, comes across as rather youthful in his work in part because of his openness.
TT: What are you working on today?
JS: I’m writing poems toward a new manuscript and just received a grant to write constraint-based poems that engage the climate crisis.
DT: After this translation project, I have become more interested in the adventure of experiencing different languages. I have started writing in English and translating my own work between Chinese and English, and I will see how it develops. Another project I am working on is finishing my scholarly book on Xi Xi, another Hong Kong author I deeply admire.
Born in 1949, Yam Gong is a celebrated Hong Kong poet whose honors include the Hong Kong Youth Literature Award, the Workers’ Literature Award, and the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature for his first book And So You Look at Festival Lights along the Street (1997). His later books include And So Moving a Stone You Look at Festival Lights along the Street (2010) and And So Moving a Stone (Hide-and-Seek-Peekaboo) You Look at Festival Lights along the Street (2022).
Dorothy Tse is a writer from Hong Kong. Her debut novel Owlish, translated by Natascha Bruce, was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Barrios Book in Translation Prize. Her novel City Like Water, also translated by Natascha Bruce, is forthcoming in 2026.
James Shea is the author of three poetry collections: Star in the Eye, The Lost Novel, and Last Day of My Face, winner of the 2024 Iowa Poetry Prize. Recipient of grants from the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, Hong Kong Arts Development Council, and National Endowment for the Arts, he is the director of the Creative and Professional Writing Program at Hong Kong Baptist University.