Copper and Candy - Ni Zhange / 倪湛舸

Ni Zhange / 倪湛舸





Copper and Candy

I don’t love him anymore, I crumpled up the doodled paper
and threw it out of the window, if just then a wind happened to blow through,
the person who curled up would roll far out of nowhere,
the copper sky is sinking, and the sugar city southward slipping,
he didn’t say he would be back, anyway, there is no difference
between two years and twenty-eight years, I turned my hand to the light,
with nothing in it, supposing that the boomerang should have long gone,
now he is back, standing at the corner of the stairs, banging on the wall
with his knuckles, I have not yet decided whether to open my umbrella or not,
it is raining in the copper sky, and so festered the sugar city looks.

(Translated by Zhou Wenbiao)




铜与糖

我不再爱他了，我把涂抹过的纸
揉成团扔出窗外，如果正好有风吹过，
蜷缩的人会凭空滚得很远，
铜做的天空正下沉，糖做的城市向南蔓延，
他没有说过要回来，两年或是二十八年
并没有区别，我对着光旋转自己的手，
手里什么都没有，回旋镖像是早已离开，
他竟然这就回来了，站在楼梯拐角处
用指节敲打墙壁，我还没有想好是否要撑伞，
铜做的天空下着雨，糖做的城市溃烂如斯。




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Ni Zhange received her Ph.D. in Religion and Literature from the University of Chicago Divinity School (2009), and worked as a research associate and visiting assistant professor at the “Women’s Studies in Religion” Program at Harvard Divinity School (2010-2011). She was a research fellow at the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study in France from 2021 to 2022. She is currently an associate professor at the Department of Religion and Culture, Virginia Tech. Her first book The Pagan Writes Back: When World Religion Meets World Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2015) proposes “pagan criticism,” a new reading strategy that attends to the historical complexities and contin¬gencies in literary texts and challenges both Christian and secularist assumptions regarding aesthetics and hermeneutics. She has written articles on secularism and religion-making in twentieth-century China on the one hand, religion and contemporary popular literature in the Euro-American West on the other. Her second book is tentatively enti¬tled The Cult of Fiction in the Age of the Internet: Chinese Religions, Digital Capitalism, and the Fantasy Boom in Contemporary China. It studies how internet-based fantasy novels have fused ancient magic with contemporary technoscience to wrestle with the radical social, economic and political transformations caused by the rise of digital capitalism. In addition, Ni is a writer of creative works in China, hav¬ing published two novels, three essay collections, and four books of po¬etry: Homeland of Emptiness (Nanjing University Press, 2010), A Sea of Bare Blades (Henan University Press, 2015), Whose Lie Is the Snow (Shanghai Sanlianshudian, 2018), and The Sabbatical Animal (Shanghai Sanlianshudian, 2022).


倪湛舸, 获北京大学英语语言文学系学士学位、芝加哥大学宗教与文学博士学位，现任弗吉尼亚理工大学宗教与文化系副教授；曾经担任哈佛大学神学院“宗教中的女性研究”项目研究员（2010-2011 年）、法国南特高等研究院研究员（2021-2022 年）。研究领域包括世俗主义与世界文学、中国宗教与网络小说、数码资本主义时代的流行文化等。已发表中英文学术著作和论文若干。已出版长篇小说《异旅人》（上海文艺出版社2008 年，2018 年再版）、《莫须有》（上海人民出版社2022 年），散文集《黑暗中相逢》（上海三联书店2004 年）、《人间深河》（上海三联书店2006 年）、《夏与西伯利亚》（上海文艺2018 年），诗集《真空家乡》（南京大学出版社2010 年）、《白刃的海》（河南大学出版社2015 年）、《雪是谁说的谎》（上海三联书店2018 年）及诗选《安息吧动物》（上海三联书店2022 年）。