Mirror
by Zhang Zao
Translated from Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
49 Poems ~ 248 pages
Price: $19.00 USA ~ $21.00 CANADA
Publisher: Zephyr Press
ISBN: 978-1938890-35-2
To Order: www.zephyrpress.org or Amazon
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In the words of poet-translator Fiona Sze-Lorain: “There is an epic voice in his verses. But rather than imitating the greats, our poet has created a polyphonic texture with an innovative feel and esoteric imagery. There is jazz. There is traditional opera. Then the folk music. And the electric. Although his style is eclectic, flamboyant, at times unpredictable, Zhang’s writing is rooted in formal structure. Every poem is an experimentation with the form and line–not one is alike. And its lyricism fuels Zhang Zao’s ambition for the narrative to embed speculative allegory, literary sources, and historical references within the experience of a contemporary exile.”
ADVANCE PRAISE:
Zhang Zao is a leading figure in contemporary world literature, a poet who uniquely integrated Chinese and Western traditions. Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s elegant, thoughtful translations–and her quite brilliant introduction–offer indispensable access to this complex yet beautiful writer. Mirror is both lucid and complex, meditative, yet full of shifting surprises. It has a kind of miraculous inexhaustibility.
–Fiona Sampson
With poems brilliant and “vigorous as lobsters,” Zhang Zao’s Mirror, in masterful translation by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, bewitches with its attunement to the equally vigorous world and its electricity, its images, from butterflies quivering on a slogan to a “fawn practicing its glow.” Beguiling sequences in conversation with Keats, Kafka, and Tsvetaeva reveal anew the complex possibilities of the form, and everywhere lines animated by surprise intoxicate. Zhang’s visions feel essential and enduring, those of a life too brief but which saw that “the earth is full of patterns beyond words.”
–Paula Bohince
“Beauty exists in danger,” writes Zhang Zao, and it’s not clear whether this is an admission or an endorsement, or simply a recognition. Zhang’s careful lyrics in Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s translation are perfused with the “language trials” through which beauty and danger communicate–to the beloved, certainly, but even more powerfully to strangers, with accents reminiscent of both Éluard and Hölderlin. This volume adds an essential element to the growing body of contemporary Chinese poetry in English.
–G.C. Waldrep
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR:
Zhang Zao (张枣) is a key literary figure of the “third generation” of Chinese contemporary poetry. Born in 1962 in Changsha, Hunan province, he rose to national fame as one of the “Five Sichuan Masters.” Greatly admired by his peers for championing a complex yet harmonizing fusion of traditional writing and avant-garde flair in his work, and for his versatility in many foreign languages, Zhang was a recognized literary critic, translator, and scholar. In 1986, he moved to Germany. For several years, he served as poetry editor for the literary magazine Jintian and taught at the University of Tübingen. He returned briefly to China in 2004 and lectured at Henan University the next spring. In 2007, he began teaching in Beijing at the Minzu University of China. Zhang Zao died in 2010 in Tübingen, the town of Hölderlin. He was forty-seven.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a writer, poet, translator, musician, and editor who writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese. She is the author of a novel in stories Dear Chrysanthemums (Scribner, 2023), five poetry collections including Rain in Plural (Princeton, 2020) and The Ruined Elegance (Princeton, 2016), and fifteen books of translation, most recently Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm by Yu Xiuhua (Astra House, 2021). Longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, she was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the Best Translated Book Award. She is a judge for the 2025 International Dublin Literary Award. As a zheng harpist, she has performed around the world. She lives in Paris.
FROM THE BOOK:
镜中
只要想起一生中后悔的事
梅花便落了下来
比如看她游泳到河的另一岸
比如登上一株松木梯子
危险的事固然美丽
不如看她骑马归来
面颊温暖
羞惭。低下头，回答着皇帝
一面镜子永远等候她
让她坐到镜中常坐的地方
望着窗外，只要想起一生中后悔的事
梅花便落满了南山
Mirror
by Zhang Zao
Tr. Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Once regrets come to mind
plum blossoms fall
Like watching her swim to the other shore
Like climbing a pine ladder
Beauty exists in danger
Why not watch her return on horseback
cheeks warm
with shame. Head bowed, she answers the Emperor
A mirror awaits her forever
Let her take her usual place in the mirror
looking out the window, once regrets come to mind
plum blossoms fall over the southern mountain
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