The 60th World Newspaper Congress started yesterday in Cape Town, South Africa. During the opening ceremony earlier today, the World Association of Newspapers Golden Pen of Freedom award was presented. Shi Tao’s mother, Gao Qinsheng accepted the award on his son’s behalf. Gao gave an acceptance speech and read one of Shi Tao’s poem, titled “June” which was specially written to express his sorrows about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
June
Shi TaoMy whole life
Will never get past “June”
June, when my heart died
When my poetry died
When my lover
Died in an abandoned pool of bloodJune, the scorching sun burns open my skin
Revealing the true nature of my wound
June, the fish swims out of the blood-red sea
Toward another place to hibernate
June, the earth shifts, the rivers fall silent
Piled up letters unable to be delivered to the deadJune 9, 2004
(translated by Chip Rolley)
(copied from the Sydney PEN website, www.pen.org.au)
3 comments
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June 5, 2007 at 10:25 am
Amrita Walia
How touching……
March 12, 2008 at 11:41 pm
Forget It
PEN Australia is keeping up this initiative.
http://www.pen.org.au/archive.php
There’s a more poetic English variant of June
now up on YouTube:
May 10, 2008 at 4:48 pm
K.T. Schnider
Hello,
I thought this might be of interest to you:
there are more than 90 translations of “June” to be found and a lot of them to be listened to on the special website
http://www.penpoemrelay.org
designed to raise awareness about the suppression of freedom of expression in China, and calling for the release not only of Shi Tao but all imprisoned writers… sending the message of his poem around the world following the trail of the “real” Olympic torch relay as a reminder…