A luminous new translation of the greatest woman poet in Chinese history, highlighting Li Qingzhao's iconoclastic verse and showcasing her visionary portrait of the inner workings of the artist's mind.

The Magpie at Night is a lyrical and searching portrait of the inner life of Li Qingzhao, one of the greatest poets in Chinese literary history. These spare and arresting poems evoke with rare immediacy the quiet and haunting beauty of country life during the Song dynasty; the unseen, restive labor of the poet; and Li Qingzhao's bracing and complex take on what it means to create art as a woman in the shadow of exile, war, imprisonment, and an unwelcoming literary establishment.

In Wendy Chen's splendid new translation, each of Li Qingzhao's ci--lyrics that were originally set to music--is as sharp and fresh as the edge of a new spring leaf. These richly textured bolts of melody tell a story that will resonate with scholars eager to restore this iconic figure to the canon of classical Chinese poetry, as well as with contemporary readers who will relate to the strikingly modern mode in which she delivers her wry, unsentimental, and bracing thoughts on art and posterity.

The best of Hanshan's beloved poems--among the earliest of Zen-style Buddhist poetry, beloved by the Beat Generation--here newly translated and organized thematically in a beautiful Pocket Poets hardcover

Often ranked among the most inspiring works of world literature, the poems of Hanshan (whose name means Cold Mountain), were traditionally thought to have been written at least twelve centuries ago on rock walls by a Buddhist monk living in the mountains of southeastern China. The best of his poems, collected here and organized by theme, reflect the sense of humor, deep love of solitude, and vivid descriptions of nature that have endeared these poems to generations of readers.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF 2024

A 2024 NPR BOOK WE LOVE

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024

Sidetracks, Bei Dao's first new collection in almost fifteen years, is also the poet's first long poem and his magnum opus--the artistic culmination of a lifetime devoted to the renewal and reinvention of language. As a poet, I am always lost, Bei Dao once said. Opening with a prologue of heavenly questions and followed by thirty-four cantos, Sidetracks travels forward and backward along the divergent paths of the poet's wandering life--from his time as a Young Pioneer in Beijing, through the years of exile living in six countries, back to the rural construction site where he worked during the Cultural Revolution, to the sunshine tablecloth in his kitchen in Davis, California, and his emotional visit home after a thirteen-year separation (the mother tongue has deepened my foreignness). All the various currents of our times rush into his lifelines, reconfigured through the vortex of experience and the poet's encounters with friends and strangers, artists and ghosts, as he moves from place to place, unable to return home. As the poet Michael Palmer has noted, Bei Dao's work, in its rapid transitions, abrupt juxtapositions, and frequent recurrence to open syntax evokes the un-speakability of the exile's condition. It is a poetry of explosive convergences, of submersions and unfixed boundaries, 'amid languages.'

the lantern light seems to have written a poem;
they feel lonesome since i won't read them.
--lantern by Fei Ming

The work of Tang Dynasty Classical Chinese poets such as Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei has long been celebrated in both China and internationally, and various English translations and mistranslations of their work played a pivotal yet often unacknowledged role in shaping the emergence and evolution of modern Anglophone poetry.

In The Lantern and the Night Moths, Chinese diaspora poet-translator Yilin Wang has selected and translated poems by five of China's most innovative modern and contemporary poets: Qiu Jin, Fei Ming, Dai Wangshu, Zhang Qiaohui, and Xiao Xi. Expanding on and subverting the long lineage of Classical Chinese poetry that precedes them, their work can be read collectively as a series of ars poeticas for modern Sinophone poetry.

Wang's translations are featured alongside the original Chinese texts, and accompanied by Wang's personal essays reflecting on the art, craft, and labour of poetry translation. Together, these poems and essays chart the development of a myriad of modernist poetry traditions in China that parallel, diverge from, and sometimes intersect with their Anglophone and Western counterparts.

An essential collection from the leading figure of Chinese poetry translation, presenting work of insight, humor, and musicality that continues to resonates across thousands of years.

Red Pine is one of the world's finest translators of Chinese poetic and religious texts. His new anthology, Dancing with the Dead: The Essential Red Pine, gathers over thirty voices from the ancient Chinese past--including Buddhist poets Cold Mountain (Hanshan) and Stonehouse (Shiwu), as well as Tang-dynasty luminaries Wei Yingwu and Liu Zongyuan.

Dancing with the Dead also includes translations from such religious texts as Puming's Oxherding Pictures and Verses and Lao-Tzu's Daodejing, as well as poems and woodblock illustrations from Su Po-Jen's Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom, one of the world's first printed books of art. 

Throughout the book, poems are accompanied by footnotes providing historical context, and each section includes a new and illuminating introduction chronicling Red Pine's relationship to the poet--discovery, travel, scholarship. Dancing With The Dead is more than a book, it is a journey: part travel essay, part road map, part guided meditation. It is a history translated in poem.

For Red Pine, translating the words in a Chinese poem isn't that hard, but finding the spirit that inspired those words, the music of the heart, and asking it to inspire [his heart], that is how, and why, [he] translates.

our luggage is full of river travel poems 

may we ride forth together again.

- Wei Yingwu

As an award-winning video artist and queer community organizer, Hong Kong poet Yau Ching brings crisp imagery and a socially-engaged outlook to her work.

Simultaneously erudite and earthy, her poetry is shaped by Hong Kong's cultural position on the margins of mainland China and at the center of the Cantonese-speaking world. But her time spent in New York, London, Michigan, Taiwan, and elsewhere also informs her work, as do a breast cancer diagnosis in 2009, and her long-time work advocating for sexual minorities.

Yau's oeuvre explores gender, aesthetics, colonialism, relationships, and illness with a wide range of emotions and registers, and frequently employs wordplay. This bilingual collection includes astute political poems, understated love poems, urban anti-eclogues, and prose poems.

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What People Are Saying

Chengru He's wonderful and entirely original poems have one foot in a Chinese poetic sensibility (its spareness, erasure of self, and reliance on image) and the other in an American going-outness and commitment to play. Her work crosses alphabets and disparate poetics, landscapes half a world away from each other, and diverse personal and cultural histories with openness, wit, and immense charm. Out of these, she creates a welcome intervention in and addition to an emergent, newly inclusive American poetry. -Katharine Coles

From its very title, with the Chinese character for moon interposed into the English word Moon, this collection offers rare and intimate access to what linguistic and poetic-as well as physical-exile feels like. The speaker of these poems refuses to choose between Chinese and English, between Tang Dynasty and twenty-first-century poetry, between memories of a vanished China and walks down contemporary American streets. Almost every poem in this collection demonstrates how the lost part of me/ sneaks back/ to remind the rest of me/ how I used to hold a pen tight/ one stroke/ after another. Particularly moving are the variations on Li Bai's Moon -a poem about longing for home-which appear throughout the collection: first in Chinese characters, then in pinyin, then in English, then in various combinations and then expanding to make room for the stuff of twenty-first-century America life: LED 3 color temp/erature lamp; 4K Screen; identity politics; Social Security number, as well as images from He's other poems in the collection, working to break down the distinctions between Chengru He's mostly English-language contemporary poems and the great ancient Chinese poetic tradition from which they come. -Jackqueline Osherow

M O月 N is English word is Chinese character is sometimes a character inside of a word is in the sky as light and on the ground as shadow and on the body is time is marker of home, when homes are so far away from each other (Shanghai to Alabama and Utah). M O月 N is still a point between a language/culture that has no tenses, and one that is tense with worry about categories and places: how to invite the non-self from its nonexistence to a / land of identity politics how to introduce the non-self who controls the verbs with no rules. Chengru He charts her own geographies according to these moons, the approximate moan of a word with a character inside it. This is a beautiful book about dispersions of many kinds, a map to the scattered world. -Susan M. Schultz

About the Author

Chengru He 何琤茹 is a Chinese poet and translator currently based in Salt Lake City, where she is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah. She is the author of a hybrid collection I Would Vanish into Its Stronger Existence and the Chinese translator of two books from English.

A primer for those with no previous knowledge of Chinese, this book introduces readers to the fundamentals of classical Chinese poetry through twenty-nine ways of understanding a single poem. Seeing Off a Friend, by the great Tang poet Li Bai (701-762) has long been praised for its vividness, subtlety, and poignancy. Anthologizing twenty-nine translations of the poem, Timothy Billings not only introduces the poem's richness and depth but also the nuanced art of translating Chinese poetry into European languages.

A famous exemplar of seeing off poetry, which was common in an empire whose literati were continually on the move, Li's poem has continued to fascinate readers far removed from its moment of composition, from the Victorians, to Ezra Pound, to contemporary translators from around the world. In talking us through these linguistic crossings, Billings unpacks the intricacies of the lüshi or regulated verse poem, a form as pivotal to Chinese literature as the sonnet is to European tradition.

This book promises to transform its readers, step-by-step, into adept interpreters of one of the most significant verse forms in Chinese literary history. Billings's engaging teaching style, backed by a lightly worn but deep scholarly engagement with Chinese poetry, makes this work an indispensable guide for anyone interested in poetry, translation, or the cultural heritage of China.

National Book Award-winner Arthur Sze presents a one-of-a-kind anthology that vividly traces Chinese poetry from its centuries-old lyrical traditions up to the present day.In The Silk Dragon II, National Book Award-winning poet Arthur Sze presents a sophisticated vision of the vitality, diversity, and power of the Chinese poetic tradition. Traveling over one and a half millennia, Sze guides readers through a luminous history of verse, from the contemplative insights of fifth century poet Tao Qian, through Tang dynasty poets such as Wang Wei and Du Fu, and into subsequent centuries in which lived such innovative artists as Li Qingzhao and Bada Shanren, among many others.

Extending the work from the original 2001 volume, The Silk Dragon II then traces classical Chinese poetry's eruption into the free verse of the modern and contemporary eras, introducing groundbreaking poems by the Chinese Modernist master Wen Yiduo, as well as those from major living poets such as Wang Jiaxin, Zhai Yongming, and Xi Chuan. Through this remarkable journey--deepened by Sze's personal introduction--we see that the impossible task of translation is yet rich with encounter, as both long-lost voices and those still speaking enter the same conversation, with the same vivacity.

We find timeless expressions of human experience in the poems of Su Dongpo (1037-1101), translated with grace and power by Lin and Young. We follow Dongpo through his life of multiple political exiles. From early in his life he ponders the transitory nature of reality with beauty and a sober lightness:

back to those earlier scenes / and the clouds of yellow dust along the roads
I lean on the railing, / my spirit flies away, / and I can't call it back
The red-skirted beauty / turns into a fairy // the long flute carries / a lasting note of sadness
our only worries? / Moonset / and empty cups (Poems 1, 7, 34, & 45)

Past mid-life a new perspective grows with energy, laughter, and tears:

Chilly spring air / for ten days / I haven't stepped out of the house // and so I didn't notice / how the willows have turned green / stroking the whole village // ... // This day one year ago / I walked a long way / through mountain roads and passes // the plum blossoms / shining in the drizzle / nearly broke my heart. (Poem 50)

Su Dongpo's sigh of older age carries a tender resolve laced with measured sorrow:

I'm like a little boat / sensing an expanse / of endless water // here under groves of trees / face to face in the bedroom / listening all night to the rain (Poem 83)

With this groundbreaking collection Classical Chinese Poetry, translated and edited by the renowned poet and translator David Hinton, a new generation will be introduced to the work that riveted Ezra Pound and transformed modern poetry.

The Chinese poetic tradition is the largest and longest continuous tradition in world literature, and this rich and far-reaching anthology of nearly five hundred poems provides a comprehensive account of its first three millennia (1500 BCE to 1200 CE), the period during which virtually all its landmark developments took place. Unlike earlier anthologies of Chinese poetry, Hinton's book focuses on a relatively small number of poets, providing selections that are large enough to re-create each as a fully realized and unique voice. New introductions to each poet's work provide a readable history, told for the first time as a series of poetic innovations forged by a series of master poets.

From the classic texts of Chinese philosophy to intensely personal lyrics, from love poems to startling and strange perspectives on nature, Hinton has collected an entire world of beauty and insight. And in his eye-opening translations, these ancient poems feel remarkably fresh and contemporary, presenting a literature both radically new and entirely resonant, in Classical Chinese Poetry.

Youth, ideals, and life of the sent-down (rusticated) youth during the cultural revolution.

Journal of the Cultural Revolution is a collection of poems depicting the lives of educated youth during the cultural revolution. The author uses poetry to reminisce about many friends and memorable experiences during their time as educated youth, reflecting how the era influenced individual destinies. The language is poetic and with bursts of unexpected insights with strong emotions and rhythms. At once a work of narrative lyricism and an act of personal courage, this memoir in verse documents the human cost of a period of political turmoil in China's recent past.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution marked a critical passage on China's road to modernity, as momentous for the world as it was for one boy caught up in its throes. In poetry that juxtaposes the political and the personal, the social and the individual, Luo Ying depicts a time when ultra-leftist mass movements and factional struggles penetrated the deepest level of private daily life. In bleak yet vivid portraits he reveals how the period indelibly marred him. I am a red guard just as I always was, he writes.

Giving voice to the inner life of a man haunted by his experiences, Journal of the Cultural Revolution bears witness to a traumatic time when ideology threatened to crush individuality. Luo Ying's poetry stands as eloquent testimony to the power of the individual voice to endure in the face of dire social and historical circumstances.

After a failed push for political reform, the T'ang era's greatest prose-writer, Liu Tsung-yuan, was exiled to the southern reaches of China. Thousands of miles from home and freed from the strictures of court bureaucracy, he turned his gaze inward and chronicled his estrangement in poems. Liu's fame as a prose writer, however, overshadowed his accomplishment as a poet. Three hundred years after Liu died, the poet Su Tung-p'o ranked him as one of the greatest poets of the T'ang, along with Tu Fu, Li Pai, and Wei Ying-wu. And yet Liu is unknown in the West, with fewer than a dozen poems published in English translation. The renowned translator Red Pine discovered Liu's poetry during his travels throughout China and was compelled to translate 140 of the 146 poems attributed to Liu. As Red Pine writes, I was captivated by the man and by how he came to write what he did. Appended with thoroughly researched notes, an in-depth introduction, and the Chinese originals, Written in Exile presents the long-overdue introduction of a legendary T'ang poet.

A Treatise on Stars extends Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's intensely phenomenological poetics to the fiery bodies in a field of heaven...outside spacetime. Long, lyrical lines map a geography of interconnected, interdimensional intelligence that exists in all places and sentient beings. These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought a form of organized light. All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge's radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.

First published in 1915, Cathay, Ezra Pound's early monumental work, originally contained fourteen translations from the Chinese and a translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer. Over time, these poems have been widely read and loved as both translations and original poetry. In 1916, Cathay was reprinted in the book Lustra without The Seafarer and with four more Chinese poems. Cathay is greatly indebted to the notes of a Harvard-trained scholar Ernest Fenollosa. In Fenollosa's Chinese poetry materials, Pound scholar Zhaoming Qian writes, Pound discovered a new model that at once mirrored and challenged his developing poetics. Edited by Qian, this centennial edition reproduces for the first time the text of the original publication plus the poems from Lustra and transcripts of all the relevant Fenollosa notes and Chinese texts. Also included is a new foreword by Ezra Pound's daughter Mary de Rachewiltz, providing an appreciation and fascinating background material on this pivotal work of Pound's oeuvre.

Derek Chung's poems capture the East-meets-West synergy of Hong Kong's cosmopolitan culture, while tracking the city's myriad transformations over the past two decades. Though his poems bear the influence of Anglophone poets such as Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney, Hong Kong is at the heart of his work. Writing through the lens of a father, restaurant-goer, dreamer, flaneur, protester, and more, Chung captures a city in motion--and the joy, loss, and heartbreak that comes with loving Hong Kong.

in the mirror there is always this moment
this moment leads to the door of rebirth
the door opens to the sea
the rose of time
--Bei Dao

The Rose of Time: New & Selected Poems presents a glowing selection of poetry by contemporary China's most celebrated poet, Bei Dao. From his earliest work, Bei Dao developed a wholly original poetic language composed of mysterious and arresting images tuned to a distinctive musical key. This collection spans Bei Dao's entire writing life, from his first book to appear in English, The August Sleepwalker, published a year after the Tiananmen tragedy, to the increasingly interior and complex poems of Landscape Over Zero and Unlock, to new never-before-published work. This bilingual edition also includes a prefatory note by the poet, and a brief afterword by the editor Eliot Weinberger. A must-read book from a seminal poet who has been translated into over thirty languages.

A fast-paced travelogue to modern China with Red Pine, who searches for poets' graves and pays homage with Kentucky bourbon.

Iron Moon is a monumental achievement. It redraws the boundaries of working-class poetry for the new millennium by incorporating at its center issues like migration, globalization, and rank-and-file resistance. We hear in these poems what Zheng Xiaoqiong calls a language of callouses. This isn't a book about the lost industrial past; it's a fervent testimony to the horrific, hidden histories of the 21st century's working-class and a clarion call for a more cooperative and humane future.--Mark Nowak, author of Coal Mountain Elementary

Eleanor Goodman is a writer and translator. Her translation of work by Wang Xiaoni, Something Crosses My Mind, won the Lucien Stryk Translation Prize. Her first poetry collection is Nine Dragon Island.

Xi Xi's work details the constantly shifting urban space of Hong Kong--between tradition and modernity--as well as the multilingual zones created by its Mandarin and Cantonese speakers. Best known for her short stories, essays, and screenplays, this is the first major collection of Xi Xi's poetry in English translation. Her writing displays a childlike wonder and keen ear for the constantly evolving space of Hong Kong and southern China. The haunting, often morbid lyricism that marks her work has won her many awards, a devoted following in Hong Kong and Taiwan and a growing audience across the globe. The book is bilingual (facing pages).