That Night, We Walked along the Dan River
That night we walked along the Dan River
chatting about vegetation, fish and insects, ancient and contemporary sages.
The river flows near our feet,
but the running water can’t get any closer.
It looks so unfamiliar that we have nothing to say.
Two middle-aged men are two kids chasing the wind
by the river that washes our black hairs gray.
How careless we are!
And the people who carry water by the river, the wooden waterwheels, the peach blossoms
that mirror themselves by the water.
These small things of the ages
all know us.
That night we walked along the Dan River.
The moonlight is like snow bleaching the world.
We are tired sit on the stone steps,
watching the river flow quietly
into wheat, cabbage, melons;
into ironware, silk, sorrow far away to the sky.
We are as quiet as pebbles.
Nianxi Chen, born in 1970 in Northern China, began writing poems in 1990. In 1999, he left his hometown and labored as a miner for 16 years. In 2015, he couldn’t continue work due to an occupational disease. In 2016, he was awarded the Laureate Worker Poet Prize. His rise to fame as a "migrant worker poet" was featured in a 2021 New York Times article. Chen's poetry book, Records of Explosion, provides lyrical documentation of the hidden costs behind China's financial boom. Chen's poems in translation have appeared in Tupelo, Rattle, Plume, Versopolis, Hayden's Ferry Review, Southern Humanities Review, and forthcoming 2024 in Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, Terrain, and Itinerant.
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Meigs Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia, is the coauthor of The Creative Ethnographer's Notebook (2024), the poetry book Imperfect Tense (2016), and five other books on the arts of language and education. Recipient of six NEA Big Read Grants, a 2023 NEA Distinguished Fellowship, a Hambidge Residency Award, and the Beckman Award for Professors Who Inspire, she was appointed in 2020 as Fulbright Scholar Ambassador. Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Georgia Review, Bitter Southerner, Lilith, American Poetry Review, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Mom Egg, Plume, Tupelo, Rattle, Hawaii Pacific Review, and elsewhere. She and Kuo Zhang are the exclusive translators for Nianxi Chen, China's labor poet laureate.
Kuo Zhang is an Assistant Professor in Education at Siena College and received her PhD in TESOL & World Language Education at the University of Georgia. Her poem, “One Child Policy,” was awarded second place in the 2012 Society for Humanistic Anthropology (SHA) Poetry Competition held by the American Anthropological Association. Her poems have appeared in The Roadrunner Review, Lily Poetry Review, Bone Bouquet, K’in, DoveTales, North Dakota Quarterly, Literary Mama, Mom Egg Review, Adanna Literary Journal, Raising Mothers, MUTHA Magazine, Journal of Language and Literacy Education, and Anthropology and Humanism.