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URBAN POETRY FROM CHINA

Selected by Huang Fan & James Sherry
Translation editor Daniel Tay

Urban Poetry from China collects translations of 31 contemporary mainstream and avant-garde poets from across China, Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan selected by Huang Fan and James Sherry. Translation editor Daniel Tay encourages “readers to look at these translations as texts in their own right. This collection of Chinese urban poetry extends and distills the love and nature poetry of Chinese tradition into today’s tropes.”

“Every translator’s primary responsibility is to make good poetry.” – Huang Fan

Contributors:

An Qi / Chen Dongdong / Chen Li
Che Qianzi / Gao Xing
Huang Fan / Huang Lihai
Hu Mingming / Jiang Tao / Lan Lan
Li Shaojun / Ouyang Jianghe
Potato Brother / Shen Qi / Shu Yu
Sun Dong / Tian Yuan / Un Sio San
Wang Jiaxin / Wang Xiaoni
Wang Yin / Xiao Xiao / Yang Ke
Yao Feng / Yen Ai-lin / Yu Bang
Zang Di / Zhai Yongming
Zhang Zhihao / Zhao Si / Zhou Zan

“Urban poetry in China has served as a unique witness of this new millennium, reaching a depth and charm that other forms of writing have yet to attain…. At the beginning of the 1980s, cities were the most desirable place for any Chinese person to be. Forty years later, this psychological mainstay has transformed into a wariness mixed with suspicion, anxiety, and even mourning, since, situated in the whirlpool of ‘modernity,’ as it is called, cities don’t appear to have transformed into the New Great Wall of Resisting Solitude as once hoped.”
– from Huang Fan’s Introduction

“No one can persuade her to return home
The cement chimney is her despot father”
– from Wang Xiaoni’s “To the Chimney on the Outskirts of Beijing,”
tr. Daniel Tay