Second  Fall 

Translator’s Note

I encountered Li Hongqi serendipitously. For a while, I was translating the poems of Wu Ang, all culled from a self-published collection from 2002 titled What Awakens Me. Apropos of its title—half accusatory and half desirous—the book’s cover is a photo of someone pointing their finger directly at the camera. The lens zooms in on the hand but not the person: we can see the soft creases of their knuckles and their neatly trimmed nails, while their face fades into its surrounds as a blurred-out smear. The back jacket of the book is more disturbing: eight babies placed in a circle on a bed, their stubby little feet brushing up against each other, their tiny faces either blooming in delight or pinched in confusion. I found myself unnerved by the photo, repelled by it, although I couldn’t put my finger on why. There is no indication that the babiesare in any discomfort—the discomfort, the ugliness, they’re all my own. I think of that single, damning finger on the front of the book, and I take the blame. While flipping through the collection, tweaking some last-minute edits, I texted Wu Ang late at night: “The cover design of this book is really something.” She texted me back almost immediately, despite almost fourteen hours between us: “The artist is Li Hongqi, he’s quite intense.”

The exact word that Wu Ang used was li hai, which could mean excellence or brutality. We use li hai in praise of someone whose exceptional practice impresses us. We also use it to bemoan their severity, when they hold us to a standard far beyond our own—the characters that makeup li hai literally mean to whet a blade, and to harm. Li’s intensity is double-sided: it dazzles at the same time that it cuts through us, and Li is always sure to twist the knife. If Li wields his words like a weapon, however, its edge is dull, jagged, blunt. He doesn’t so much want us to bleed out as he wants us to feel the wound, and share his injury. There is something sinister in his work that I find stimulating, even seductive. Li rarely dwells in imageries of explicit violence, but there is a persistent perverseness that is as rakish as it is sweetly earnest. Maybe Li’s poems, then, are less like a knife than a finger: when directed at us, it makes us feel blamed, bullied, and chosen, like an initiation. The thrill of being let in on a secret, the seedier the better. A subtle depravity, the whispered promises of filth and complicity—these are the pernicious pleasures that Li plies me with in his poems; “Chasing after an asphyxiating atmosphere / Right now everything is perfect.”

Cecily Chen