On Translating David Stones’ “Zippers”

David Stones is an accomplished performance poet. I have watched him perform his one-man show, Infinite Sequels at stage several times, and I am always struck by his confidence, easy pace, and deep emotional presence. He brings his poetry to life through captivating narration, exploring the complexities of human experience while blending spoken word with music. I often find myself thinking how wonderful it would be if I could perform my own poems this way—if not in English, then perhaps in Chinese.

Yet performing poetry, in any language, is no easy task. Even in our mother tongue, it requires much more than knowing the words: recitation, rhythm, timing, voice, gesture, and acting all become part of the poem. It is a lifetime of skills to develop and refine.

This realization influenced my choices for the Borderless Poetry Translation project, a bilingual poetry translation project that I continue to develop, building on the success of the bilingual anthology Mirrors and Windows (Guernica Editions, 2021). I hope the new project will bring together Chinese- and English-speaking poets, translators, and readers from Canada and China to explore how poetry and translation can bridge linguistic and cultural divides in our increasingly divided world.

I chose two of David’s poems to expand the range of voices and styles represented in the project, while also challenging myself to translate poetry deeply rooted in performance, rhythm, and spoken language.

“Zippers” immediately attracted me because of its powerful extended metaphor. The poem begins with the simple physical action of zipping:

We zipper in zipper out

From there, the zipper becomes a metaphor for the ways human beings divide and organize the world: borders, walls, railings, moats, red lines, barbed wire, and territorial claims. The poem moves outward from the human heart to jurisdictional seas, national borders, and a planet divided into “endless islands / of fortified ownership.” Yet it eventually returns to something intimate and ordinary: two neighbours leaning across a garden fence, an image that brings to mind Robert Frost’s Mending Wall and its meditation on the boundaries we create between ourselves, as well as on the profound loneliness of being walled in or walled out.

Another aspect that struck me is the poem’s structure and visual form. It is long and slim, resembling a zipper on the page, and this shape also mirrors the speaker’s urgency and authority. I felt that this visual quality was an integral part of the poem and needed to be preserved in translation.

I am not sure how other translators approach titling poems, and I believe the best translation of a title depends on the individual poem.

For this poem, I chose “链” rather than the more literal “拉链.” Although “拉链” accurately names the physical object, the poem extends far beyond the zipper, moving through physical borders, legal systems, territorial divisions, psychological partitions, and ultimately the distance between human beings. I wanted the Chinese title to remain open enough to carry these layers of meaning.

“链” offers both sonic economy and conceptual openness. As a single syllable, it is short, punchy, and well suited to spoken-word performance. In Chinese, “链” can also mean “chain” or “link,” adding another layer of meaning. More importantly, it shifts the focus from the everyday object to the larger idea of something that can both connect and separate.

The choice also follows the poem’s progression:

physical borders → legal systems → psychological partitions → existential separation

In this sense, I am not simply translating the object; I am translating the poem’s underlying logic of connection and separation.

The poem also presented an interesting translation challenge because of its compressed language and accumulation of images. Stones moves rapidly through words such as “stanchions,” “bollards,” “hedgerows,” “blockades,” “barriers,” and “jurisdictional seas.” Each carries a slightly different physical or political meaning. Translating them requires more than finding dictionary equivalents; I had to consider their sound, rhythm, weight, and position within the poem.

Because “Zippers” is a performance poem, its spatial breaks on the page are also important. They establish pacing, breath, and vocal emphasis. These visual spaces are part of its sonic architecture. In my Chinese version, I adapted these pauses through spacing, comma or dashes, while also using internal rhyme, repetition, and end rhyme where possible to preserve its spoken energy.

For example:

We zipper in zipper out

divide bisect rule in rule out

borders and stanchions

the moats and railings

of the human heart

becomes:

我们链入， 链出——

分割 平分 纳入 排除

人心的

边界和隔离柱

护城河与栏杆

The multilingual elements add another layer. Mare liberum—the “free sea” (自由公海)—and the German Eintritt verboten—“entry forbidden” (禁止入内)—interrupt the English and reinforce the poem’s concerns with jurisdiction, exclusion, and restricted movement. Rather than smoothing these foreign phrases into Chinese, I chose to preserve their visual and linguistic difference:

Restrict forbid segment

we rope off even

the water the mare liberum

with its scars

of jurisdictional seas

and laneways

Eintritt verboten

we float

above the hash marks

seeking friendly skies

and a place to take us in

限制，禁止，区隔

我们甚至圈起

水域，the Mare liberum

布满伤痕的

管辖海域与航道：

Eintritt verboten

我们漂浮

在标记之上

寻找友善的天空

和一个容纳之所

This allows the translation itself to retain a sense of crossing languages—an echo of the poem’s larger concern with borders and exclusion.

Most challenging of all was the poem’s voice. “Zippers” is written to be heard. Its short phrases, repetitions, lists, abrupt shifts, and accumulating images create a rhythm that gathers force as the poem progresses. When translating it into Chinese, I wanted the translation to remain speakable—to retain something of the energy David creates when he performs it.

Alongside the previous examples, here is another:

red lines and rhetoric

marked our territory

with the cat piss

of arrogance

and blinkered ambition

becomes:

红线和说辞

以猫尿般的傲慢

与短视的野心

标记我们的领地

Here, I tried to preserve the poem’s abruptness and provocative imagery, especially the foul, unsettling image of “cat piss.” I rendered “blinkered” as “短视,” bringing out its sense of narrow-mindedness and limited vision.

From “链” back to “拉链”

Near the end of the poem, the image of the zipper returns:

all the whirring

inside these microscopic

weeping worlds that

zipper us together yet

keep us so far apart.

Here, I deliberately use “拉链” rather than “链”:

所有嗡鸣

在这些微观的

泣泪空间内部——

拉链般将我们相连

却又让我们远远相隔

The two choices serve different purposes. “链” in the title remains deliberately abstract and open, while “拉链” in the final image returns to the concrete physical object. This creates a circular movement: the poem begins with the idea of zipping in and out and ends with the paradox that the same mechanism can join us together while keeping us far apart.

That contradiction is the heart of the poem. A zipper joins two sides precisely by keeping them separate. In the same way, borders may define where one person, country, or piece of land ends and another begins, but they also remind us of our relationship to what lies on the other side.

Translating “Zippers” made me think again about what it means to translate poetry across borders. A translation crosses one boundary while trying not to erase the difference between the two sides. It connects languages without pretending they are the same.

Perhaps that is the spirit of Borderless Poetry Translation: not to eliminate borders, but to create a space where we can lean across them, listen to one another, and discover what still connects us.

Anna Yin, 2026/09/01

David Stones is a poet and performer with some 600 poems in print throughout Canada and internationally, and close to 40 poetry awards to his credit. Major collections include Infinite Sequels, sfumato, and Essays of Light, while audiences delight in David’s poetry-based stage performances and musical adaptations of his work. Crow Sits on Boxcar – 81 haiku variations of exactly the same thing hits bookstores this fall. Among many memberships and professional affiliations, David is most proud to be appointed a Honourary Lifetime Member of The Ontario Poetry Society, and Stratford’s first ever Poet Laureate for the 2025-2028 term.

David Stones’ Zippers in Asemana Magazine

Full Translation

链

我们链入， 链出——

分割 平分 纳入 排除

人心的

边界与隔离柱
护城河与栏杆

限制，禁止，区隔

我们甚至圈起

水域，the Mare liberum

布满伤痕的

管辖海域与航道：

Eintritt verboten

我们漂浮

在标记之上

寻找友善的天空

和一个容纳之所

路桩和树篱

封锁和屏障

我们已精通

围墙的艺术，

用设防边界

的铁丝网

灼伤这片

被割裂的天堂

以猫尿般的傲慢

与短视的野心

红线和说辞

标记我们的领地

“这是我的，

那是你的”

星球像素化

成为无数为所属权

设防的岛屿

我们珍视它们

胜过人的生命

我将这些

说给邻居听

我们探身斜靠

花园的篱笆

恪守着

彼此界线

他者之地

所有微小的生命

蜷在各自微小居所里

所有嗡鸣

在这些微观的

泣泪空间内部——

拉链般将我们相连

却又让我们远远相隔

Notes: Mare liberum 拉丁语 意为 “自由公海”

Eintritt verboten 德语意为“禁止入内”