Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems

by Chuan Xi, Lucas Klein (Translator)

Overview

The internationally renowned Chinese poet’s first collection to appear in English.

“In the crevices of history, mosquitoes are everywhere,” Xi Chuan writes. Notes on the Mosquito introduces English readers to one of the most revered poets of contemporary China. Gaining recognition as a post-Misty poet in the late ’80s, Xi Chuan was famous for his condensed, numinous lyricism, and for radiating classical Chinese influences as much as Western modernist traditions. After the crushing failure of Tiananmen Square and the death of two of his closest friends, he stopped writing for three years. He re-emerged transformed: he began writing meditative, expansive prose poems that dismantled the aestheticism and musicality of his previous self. Divided into two sections that hinge around this formal break, Notes on the Mosquito offers the greatest hits of a deeply engaging poet, whose work intertwines the mountains and roads of Xinjiang with insects and mythical beasts, ghosts and sacred spirits with chess and a Sanskrit inscription.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811219877
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	04/12/2012
Edition description:	Bilingual
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

XI CHUAN, born in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province in 1963 and raised in Beijing, is one of China’s most celebrated poets, essayists, and literary translators. Among the numerous prizes and honors he has received are the national Lu Xun Prize for Literature, the Cikada Prize for poetry in Sweden, and the Tokyo Poetry Prize in Japan. He is a professor at the International Writing Center at Beijing Normal University.

LUCAS KLEIN is a father, writer, and translator, and an associate professor of Chinese at Arizona State University. In addition to Xi Chuan he has translated contemporary Chinese poets Mang Ke and Duo Duo as well as medieval Chinese poet Li Shangyin.

 

Editorial Reviews

"What unites his lyric poems and his essay-poems is that they all carry a sense of the world’s plenitude — evoked so gorgeously in a poem like “South Xinjiang Notes” — and of the world’s puzzlement. The plenitude is itself bewildering (what to make of the Turkic Muslims he runs into in beautiful South Xinjiang?) and the bewilderment has a certain beauty."

Bookslut

"In 1988, when he was twenty-five, Xi Chuan and some friends launched an unofficial literary journal, Tendency. At the time, he was translating Ezra Pound and Tomas Tranströmer, Czeslaw Milosz and Jorge Luis Borges, and his own writing suggests a corresponding sophistication and aesthetic range."

The Believer - Robert Hass

"Xi Chuan is one of the most influential poets in contemporary China."

Poetry International Web