In the late morning light of June 20, 2025, the Beijing National Convention Center became a confluence of continents, languages, and poetic dreams. At Hall E4D04, time unfolded not in minutes but in verses, as an audience of seekers gathered for a ceremony unlike any other—where stories take flight, and languages find one another across borders.
Under the banner of a renowned literary publisher, the first notes of celebration rose with the debut of a golden-winged bird soaring through the sun—an emblem of East and West, and a poetic offering from the soul of one land to another. A voice appeared on screen from afar, speaking of friendship and shared destinies, while two writers, rooted in Chinese soil, exchanged thoughts on the global horizon awaiting their nation’s literary future. The screen flickered once more, this time with the fading hues of autumn, painted not with brush but with syllables, followed by a brief tribute to the power of visual poetry. A moment of cross-cultural honor closed this first act: a certificate carried from a poetic voyage through space, offered in recognition of terrestrial brilliance.
What followed was a procession of translations, each a bridge drawn in ink and spirit. From the epic heart of Eurasia emerged a new version—now in Italian—a song to echo through the hills of Tuscany and the alleyways of Rome. Words from across the sea hailed it as a modern answer to the ancient fire of Dante, a luminous force carrying love across continents.
Then, from the sunlit sands and ancient rivers of the Arab world, another voice sang the praise of a modern epic: a scroll unfolding from Mesopotamia to Canaan, from Egypt to Greece, onward to India, Persia, and the poetic vastness of China. Here, civilizations were not divided by walls, but united by rhyme.
From the heart of Istanbul came footsteps carved in verse—a tender hymn from a city suspended between two continents. Another cinematic introduction danced across the screen, an echo of the Bosphorus in lines of longing and remembrance.
Soon after, a knight’s tale thundered in from the West. A warrior’s ballad born anew, reclaiming myth and legend, and breathing them back into the Western canon with reverence and defiance.
The final word belonged not to one, but to many. An epic of humanity—a chorus of 86 voices gathered from every corner of the earth, speaking not for countries or creeds, but for the singular dream of human dignity. Its verses had now begun their journey in Chinese, entering the soul of a new readership.
Thus ended the poetic hour—no longer measured by hands of a clock but by the heartbeat of shared imagination. In the great book fair of Beijing, poetry stood tall, a bridge across the ancient and the present, the local and the universal, whispering: “Here, we meet—not as strangers, but as storytellers in the same eternal tale.”
