Description
Poetry. The New World Translation Series Number 4. Translated by Diana Shi and George O'Connell. "Wang Jiaxin's DARKENING MIRROR, edited and translated by Diana Shi and George O'Connell, belongs to this moment, and reading it, one is aware again that poetry is not a matter of movements and historical moments, but of individual voices, in this case stunningly alert and interior. Wang is the Chinese translator of Paul Celan, and reading him one feels something like the presence of the great voices of an intense inwardness in twentieth century European poetry..."—Robert Hass
"In Wang Jiaxin's extraordinary poems, a tender, lyrical sensibility meets the bitter world. In these gorgeous translations, the poems shimmer with dreamlike images—gaps in the roof tiles filling with moans, slurred lights, the wind's weight finding your bones and pushing you towards transformation or surrender. But beneath are intimate threats of knives glinting in darkness...deep images that emerge from the unconscious and name the shadow self, and the world behind the world..."—Dr. Tony Barnstone
"Thanks to these masterful translations by O'Connell and Shi, we can follow Wang Jiaxin's journey through lyrical, intellectual shadowlands of meaning, memory, and existence. The collection is a milestone in English-language rendering of contemporary Chinese poetry."—John A. Crespi
Author Bio
Wang Jiaxin was born in Hubei Province, China in 1957. Jiaxin was "sent down" after high school to labor in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Later he studied literature at Wuhan University, becoming a teacher and Beijing literary editor. Eminent among contemporary Chinese poets and essayists, his work has received numerous awards, and been translated into both European and Asian languages. Former Luce Poet-in-Residence at Colgate University, and 2013 resident in the University of Iowa International Writing Program, he is the author of many poetry and essay collections, as well as a prolific anthologist. A distinguished translator of Yeats, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, and particularly Paul Celan, he is currently Professor of Literature at Beijing's Renmin University. DARKENING MIRROR is his first full-length volume of poetry in English.
Author City: BEIJING CHI