A Poetic Dialogue between Chinese Poet Ma Yongbo and Helen Pletts, a British poet based in Cambridge
Excerpt from Response Poetry section of Ma Yongbo and Helen Pletts’ forthcoming bilingual poetry book entitled ‘Night-Shining White’
This sequence of bilingual poetry opens the Response Poetry section of Ma Yongbo and Helen Pletts’ forthcoming bilingual poetry book entitled ‘Night-Shining White’ to be published by Editor Pete Taylor, Open Shutter Press in 2025. The poetry collection is over 320 pages long and would in fact have been longer, 420 pages, but for the decision to omit some of the Chinese versions of Ma Yongbo’s poetry which is already available in print. Their very unusual bilingual book confirms their first long year journey as co-translators and close friends who continue to produce a large body of new poetic material in response to each other’s lives and the everyday events around them. They plan to continue working together lifelong. Their poetry is published significantly on International Times.IT
How did their creative journey begin?
Poet Deborah Bogen’s initial translations of 3 poems by Ma Yongbo, were published 12th February 2024 in Vox Populi, inspiring Helen Pletts to leave a comment on the Vox Populi website, Edited by Michael Simms. Their first comments to each other are still on the site. Michael Simms went on to publish one of their first co-translations ‘Midway Stop’. The significance of Ma Yongbo’s poetry in English has continued rising from that special day, with his own translation of his poetry into English, besides their co-translation, with hundreds of translations completed so far and published all over the world.
Ma Yongbo has translated and published many of Helen Pletts’ poems in China. Their unique Response Poetry developed out of their close working.
This combined poetic dialogue (Response Poetry) between Helen Pletts and Ma Yongbo in ‘I am morning, you are night’ is a striking example of transnational, transcultural collaboration that weaves together complementary visions of time, distance, and connection. Their poems function as mirrored fragments of a shared consciousness, where themes of duality, liminality, and distance are explored with distinct yet harmonizing voices. Here’s an analysis of how their interplay succeeds:
Both poets anchor their work in light/dark, presence/absence, and spatial-temporal divides, but with contrasting textures.
– Helen Pletts leans into fragmentation and existential tension: ‘the glass must shatter us’ suggests irreconcilable edges, while her ‘night spider’ spins dreams that stretch but never fully bridge gaps. Her tone is elegiac, with echoes of modernist dislocation (e.g., ‘nowhere to rest our feet’).
– Ma Yongbo softens these edges with fluidity and shared motion: ‘we flow on the same river’ and ‘the line of light’ propose unity across time zones. His imagery—knights guarding a ‘homeland of poetry,’ or spiders cocooning the earth—frames separation as creative collaboration rather than rupture.
Their differences (Helen Pletts’ starkness vs. Ma Yongbo’s lyricism) create a call-and-response rhythm, like dawn answering night.
The poems often mirror titles and themes while diverging in perspective:
– ‘Walking through night and day simultaneously’: Helen Pletts’ spider stretches dreamers into elastic isolation, while Ma Yongbo’s spiders collaborate to ‘wrap the earth into a cocoon’—a metaphor for poetic creation.
– ‘A Spring Darkness Halting’: Helen Pletts’ darkness is a ‘tempest’ of absence; Ma Yongbo’s becomes a ‘sphere of silver light,’ transforming speed into transcendence.
This structural mirroring enacts the very connection they describe, as if their words are ‘the glass mirror view of a window, / seen from either side.’
The bilingual presentation (English/Chinese) deepens the theme of duality. Ma Yongbo’s lines often invoke classical Chinese poetics (e.g., the ‘silver scales’ of rooftops recalling traditional ink paintings), while Helen Pletts’ work resonates with European metaphysical abstraction (e.g., ‘the edge of the world’ as a shattered mirror). The translations themselves become part of the dialogue, with each language adding layers to shared metaphors.
Together, Helen Pletts and Ma Yongbo craft a choral lyricism, a poetic ecosystem, where separation and unity coexist. Their combined work thrives not in unanimity but in productive tension—like the ‘eight-hour time difference’ that becomes a ‘river’ they both navigate. The collection succeeds as a meditation on how art bridges divides, making the ‘invisible’ threads between worlds palpable.
Helen Pletts and Ma Yongbo create a rare synergy where two voices, though distinct, amplify each other’s strengths. The interplay feels less like a conversation and more like a shared incantation—one that turns time zones and languages into a single, shimmering horizon.
A sample of six of their Response Poems:
I am morning, you are night
I am morning, you are night
The twilight and early dawn,
Drawn between us, the softer edges
Of never starting, nor ending;
The extended conversation
Shuts before it opens.
Land is impossible
There is nowhere to rest our feet,
As we disappear,
The other approaches
As we are not, the other is.
The edge of the world
Is the glass mirror view of a window,
Seen from either side.
And the leaning point is where
The glass must shatter us,
And all we are
(31st January 2025)
Response Poetry by Helen Pletts
Response Poetry translated by Ma Yongbo
I am morning, you are night
I am morning, you are night,
A time difference of eight hours,
Is an invisible river between us;
We stand on either shore, keeping watch,
Like two knights taking turns on guard,
Protecting the peace of the castle, the homeland of poetry.
You scatter seeds that no-one has ever seen.
In the folds of the dark night;
I encounter the stormy waters of the past
In the moment before waking from dreams;
Our worlds alternate between light and shadow,
Yet we flow on the same river.
Each wave of the tide is a greeting,
Each dawn and dusk shares a light,
You are night, I am morning,
East and West, on each other’s faces,
Recognizing ancient signals and a shared horizon.
(February 15, 2025)
Response Poetry by Ma Yongbo
Response Poetry Translated by Ma Yongbo
Walking through night and day simultaneously
The night spider is spinning the dreamers
Until they are stretched like elastic.
Their tiny black feet reach each corner.
Her dark body spins a thread for the dreamers.
They can walk around the earth
And be within seconds of each other,
Meeting a dawn that never becomes blue,
Or an orange line that never disappears.
Meeting a day, whilst walking in night;
Sleeping in the head of a unit of light,
On a keystroke, or on the stroke of midnight
(28th January, early evening 2025)
Response Poetry by Helen Pletts
Response Poetry translated by Ma Yongbo
Walking through night and day simultaneously
If they really are night spiders,
They can spin one line together,
The line of light; he leads with the thread in the east,
She holds the tail of the line in the west,
Stretching it, like pulling apart the twisted joints of a snake.
They want to use this thread with a crimson head and azure tail
To wrap the earth into a cocoon, spin it,
Speed it up to the sun; let the sun illuminate its whole body.
Inside the cocoon, sleeps a gradually transparent dream;
A poetry baby who doesn’t need time
(28th January 2025)
Response Poetry by Ma Yongbo
Response Poetry translated by Ma Yongbo
“Are you home? It is deep night”
—WhatsApp message to Helen Pletts from Ma Yongbo
The point of the black bow is scuttled on the rocks
And the blackest sea is a tempest.
The stars don’t care for darkness;
Only that it holds silver in forever,
And what is distance to a star
Means a dark gap elsewhere
When the star is no more.
When I left, earlier, the circles of light were steady
Comfortable rings around the sun,
Now the wooden bar is as high as my ears
And my head spins with conversation.
The darkness is a coaxing drive along
Black in an empty headlight. Nothing
Moving in silver on earth; nothing moving
Above me in silver that I will remember
No soft white owl dances
No pines stirring. A spring darkness halting
Without frost, is a surprise of warmth,
And the message in the phone says this
(26th March 2025)
Response Poetry by Helen Pletts
Response Poetry translated by Ma Yongbo
A Spring Darkness Halting
—for Helen Pletts
Darkness descends on every road, the dark rustles
Like someone flipping through a vast invisible book.
He must find that long-forgotten silver word in time,
His body blackens segment by segment, turning to ash
Yet remains stubbornly upright.
Midnight frost has transformed grey tiles to silver scales,
The rooftop as a great fish arches its spine toward endless stars
Ready to depart for an interstellar colony.
Darkness is acceleration, trees along the path lean accordingly.
Even the darkest matter, reaching certain velocity,
Becomes a sphere of silver light, nothing can obstruct
Fear and joy turning transparent with speed.
Yet he still searches the book for an ancient spell
To make a spring darkness halt its course.
Like one who stops midway driving home through deep night,
Listening to the silver breath of surrounding trees,
Listening to the suddenly vast silence.
(27 March 2025, noon)
___________
HELEN PLETTS is a British poet based in Cambridge, whose work has been translated into Chinese, Bangla, Greek, Vietnamese, Serbian, Korean and Italian. She is the English co-translator of Chinese poet Ma Yongbo.
Helen’s poetry has garnered significant recognition, including five shortlistings for the Bridport Poetry Prize (2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024), two longlistings for The Rialto Nature & Place Prize (2018, 2022), a longlisting for the Ginkgo Prize (2019), a longlisting for the National Poetry Competition (2022), 2nd Prize in the Plaza Prose Poetry Competition (2022-23), and a shortlisting for the Plaza Prose Poetry Competition (2023-24).
Her three collections include the illustrated ‘your eye protects the soft-toed snow drop’, with Romit Berger (2022, ISBN 978-9-657-68177-0, Gama Poetry) and two early collections ‘Bottle bank’ (2008 ISBN 978-1-84923-119-0), and ‘For the chiding dove’ (2009, ISBN 978-1-84923-485-6) published by YWO/Legend Press with Arts Council support. Her prizewinning prose poetry features in The Plaza Prizes anthologies, and her eco-poetry appears in anthologies from Open Shutter Press and Fly on the Wall Press. Her work is widely published in journals such as International Times, Vox Populi, Ink Sweat and Tears, Aesthetica, Orbis, The Mackinaw, Cambridge Poetry, The Fenland Reed, Poetry on the Lake, Polismagazino.gr, europeanpoetry.com, Verse-Virtual.org, Magique Publishing, Primelore.com, Deshusa.com, Verseum Literary, Stigmalogou.gr, Area Felix, New World Poetry (Chinese)—four of her prose poems, translated by Ma Yongbo, opened the 35th Anniversary Edition dedicated to prose poetry, December 2024.
Publisher Kate Birch describes her work: “Helen’s very personal poetry reveals her strong connection to the natural world while also laying herself open emotionally. She writes with a thoughtful, mesmerizing delicacy on love and death, on joy and need, illness and exhaustion.”
“I enjoy this collection of poems—Helen has restored her individuality into different animals, plants, and even more tranquil scenes, and this process is neither passive nor deliberately planned. Clearly, this new type of relationship between humans and nature not only opens up a new world for us but also places us in the most fitting position within it. The translator’s non-subjective handling of language style, along with the retention of structures like post-positioned adverbs, allows Helen (who can also be seen as the modern human subject) to faithfully present her sense of restoration within the concise framework of Chinese. Their joint effort gives readers the trinitarian nature of the medium, that precious power which expands through the natural, spiritual, and linguistic ecologies—clear, silent, and growing.” (Yan Rong, poet, PhD, professor)
_____
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, Williams and Ashbery. He recently 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.
His work is widely published in international journals such as New American Writing Livemag, Cafe Review, International Times, Vox Populi, Ink Sweat and Tears, Orbis, Cambridge Poetry, Polismagazino.gr, europeanpoetry.com, Verse-Virtual.org, Magique Publishing, Primelore.com, Verseum Literary, Area Felix Masticadoresusa Feed the Holy ONE, Sindhcourier Lingo Lexicon Worldinkers，Avantappalachia，Masticadorescanada，Madswirl，Collaborature，Allyourpoems，Homouniversalisgr，100subtextsmagazine，Pandemoniumjournal，Cultural Reverence Rochford Street Review Synchchaos Ezra Autumn Sky Poetry Daily Nuthatchmag Posit Yumpu Our Poetry Archive All Your Poems Subliminal. Surgery Atunis Insightmagazine Lothlorien Poetry Journal Acheron Gorkogazette A Too Powerful Word Chiron Review Gas Chewers Medusaskitchen Beatnikcowboy Dear O Deer! New Black Bart Poetry Society, Edge of Humanity Liveencounters Big Other etc.
_____________________
Read: Chinese Scholar Ma Yongbo Says: Global Trends Dominate Chinese Literature
