This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a sonnet from the award-winning Hong Kong poet Yam Gong, translated by Dorothy Tse and James Shea. Rows of dried salted fish dangle in Hong Kong’s streets but, here, Yam Gong’s woefully romantic working-class speaker singles out one as an object of his adoration. First appearing in his 1997 collection, And So You Look at Festival Lights along the Street, this poem shows Yam Gong—himself a former mechanical technician—as a shrewd voice of labour and the everyday.
The Salted Fish Shop (A Sonnet)
It hung there for a long time, that salted fish
On the first day of work I used a pole
to hang it up and I started thinking
this salted fish is so handsome
surely someone is going to pick it
but day after day it hung there upright
and not a single grain of salt fell
Today someone should pick it
Looking at it every morning I think every day
this same thing every day I look at it
and slowly it became my hope each day
until my boss came to me today and said
You look as dumb as a salted fish
Don’t bother coming back tomorrow
Translated from the Chinese by James Shea and Dorothy Tse
Moving a Stone: Selected Poems of Yam Gong is forthcoming from Zephyr Press in Spring 2022.
Yam Gong, the pen name of Lau Yee-ching, 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). He later published an extended edition of this collection titled And So Moving a Stone You Look at Festival Lights along the Street (2010).
James Shea is the author of two books of poetry, The Lost Novel and Star in the Eye, both from Fence Books. He is a recipient of grants from the Fulbright Scholar Program, Hong Kong Arts Development Council, National Endowment for the Arts, and Vermont Arts Council.
Dorothy Tse is a fiction writer whose books include Snow and Shadow (translated by Nicky Harman) and Owlish (translated by Natascha Bruce, forthcoming). A co-founder of Hong Kong’s leading literary magazine, Fleurs des Lettres, she teaches at Hong Kong Baptist University.
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