So Translating Rivers and Cities (Chinese Edition) by Er Zhang


So Translating Rivers and Cities (Chinese Edition)
Title : So Translating Rivers and Cities (Chinese Edition)
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0939010933
ISBN-10 : 9780939010936
Language : Chinese
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 144
Publication : First published April 1, 2007

“Zhang Er’s poems lead us to another world, dive into the blank of writing and shriek in despair. The eloquence in her poems is a voice debating our time.” — Bei Dao Zephyr’s second collection of Zhang Er’s poetry, this bilingual edition includes a selection of work from three of her most recent Chinese collections ranging from the late 1990s to the present day. Zhang Er was born in Beijing, China, and moved to the United States in 1986. She is the author of multiple books in Chinese and English, including Verses On Bird (Zephyr Press, 2004). Er teaches at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

So Translating Rivers and Cities (Chinese Edition) Reviews

  • Jee Koh

    I picked up Zhang Er's book of poems Translating Rivers and Cities at the Brooklyn Book Festival in September. The book brings together a selection of poems from three earlier books. A modern Chinese poet, Zhang writes in free verse, with surrealistic imagery to depict some interior landscape. She has been living in New York City since 1986. The poems go on for too long, too loosely, to hold my attention. The translations, done by six different people, render the foreign in all-too-familiar English. I like best the poems in her first book The Autumn of GuYao. In those poems, she re-writes Chinese legends by inhabiting imaginatively the minds of female protagonists: NuChou (Ugly Girl) from The Legend of the Western Lands; NuWa Jing Wei (Baby Girl, Jing Wei) from The Legend of the Northern Mountains; Princess NuShi from The Legend of the Central Mountains; and XiHe, the wife of the Emperor Zun, from The Legend of the Great Beyond to the South.