Reading - Cao Huishuang

Cao Huishuang writes in a rough, unpolished style. Her poems rarely rely on rhyme or regular rhythm. Instead, they use plain statements, repetition, and images drawn from physical labor. In Raking Leaves to See Us Through Winter, autumn leaves are beautiful, but they are also fuel for the stove. Standing before her basket of leaves, she wonders when writing might change her fate. She writes about hardship without trying to make it beautiful.

For more than twenty years, Cao Huishuang worked in a world of iron and ore. To survive, she had to grow tough. Her writing feels like a long conversation with herself—and a quiet resistance to the hardness of that world. In Against the Light, she writes of being mocked and worn down while pursuing a literary dream. She is no hero, only an ordinary woman at the mine who keeps her head down and writes.

The mine has also given her a language of her own. In My Father's Mine, her father's life becomes a mine of experience, and listening and thinking become stages of processing ore. In Books Are a Workbench for the Disheartened, books offer a place where a weary spirit can rest and work. These images come directly from her experience of labor. In This Mine, This Ground I Love, the mine becomes the ground her writing stands on. The place that has tested her has also become the foundation of her writing.

In translating Cao Huishuang, one challenge is preserving the industrial texture that runs through her poetry. In My Father's Mine, “我用聆听的生产流程一级级破碎后” becomes “I fed the ore through / the production line of listening / and crushed it / stage after stage.” The metaphor may sound unusual in English, but it reflects how she thinks: even listening to her father becomes a kind of work at the mine. Rather than replacing it with a more familiar image, the translation preserves the language of the mine.