by Lanhao Zheng
When I first encountered the poetry of Malika Booker, I felt I was reading the spiritual record of the Caribbean diaspora. In poems such as "Libation" and 'Nine Nights", death and ritual intertwine to form a resilient web — where grief becomes remembrance, and tenderness bears the weight of ancestral memory. Her poems evoke whispering ancestors over poured rum, mourning mothers in candlelit vigils, and grandmothers at Brixton Market choosing food with care. Through the cadence of dialect and everyday speech, Booker constructs a living sanctuary where colonial wounds, diasporic longing, and daily dignity converge and resonate.
Translating her work into Chinese has been both an honour and a delicate contest with language. The intensity of Caribbean vernacular, the syncopated musical pulse — these demanded that I listen as much as I wrote, striving to let her rhythm survive the crossing. If my translation manages to convey even a portion of the spirit of her originals, then the long poetic journey across languages and seas will have been worthwhile.
For me, translation is not merely a craft, but a gesture of humility — an act of listening, allowing one language to breathe through another. Booker writes in "Libation":
In the land of our ancestors, there is no language
to answer all this dying.
May our bodies — and our languages — continue to move to the rhythm of freedom.
About the author
Lanhao Zheng (born 2002) holds an M.A. in Philosophy from University College London. He is a Chinese poet and literary translator whose work focuses on contemporary poetry and cross-cultural exchange.
