Urban Poetry from China selected by Huang Fan

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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