Study of Sorrow - (Paperback)

About the Book

"A collection of poems translated by Shangyang Fang"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

In Study of Sorrow, Shangyang Fang breathes contemporary life into the poems of twenty-nine Song Dynasty Ci poets.

For many years, Song Dynasty Ci poetry has seemed eclipsed by the incandescence of Tang Poetry in the English-speaking world. In Study of Sorrow, Shangyang Fang aims to bridge this gap, translating the works of twenty-nine Song Dynasty poets, many of whom are introduced to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Collated into seven parts, these poems move through grief, love, and longing, exploring the tension and connection between the material and immaterial world. Unlike traditional scholarly translations, these renditions represent the translator's endeavor to breathe contemporary life into ancient poems, including revisions of the original text, experimentations, and even rewrites. A beautiful conversation between these poets and their translator unfolds. Shangyang masterfully navigates the irregularity of the lines, the elusiveness of the descriptions, the indirect approach to subjects, the precise musicality, the twisting language, and the unspeakable tenderness. As investigated here, "sorrow" is transformed from a mere individual sadness to a collective experience that spans time, people, and place.

Review Quotes

Praise for Study of Sorrow

"We owe Shangyang Fang a debt for bringing the delicacy, obliqueness, and sheer tremulous beauty of these Chinese poems to English-speaking readers."--Laura Sheehan, Arts Fuse

"Study of Sorrow: Translations by Shangyang Fang brings various Song Dynasty poets into a wide and cohesive narrative that feels more like a gathering under the poet's admiring guardianship. His non-literal translations are agile and timeless, and his postscript discusses his choices with verb tense, story, and length (clear from this bilingual edition). The arresting essay also discusses memorialization or internalization in Chinese education and how the words recombine and appear to him as he writes and teaches primarily in English, as well as the many poems Fang did or could not translate."--Poetry Northwest, Favorites Autumn 2025"

"In their original form, these poems would have been put to music, and still today, students recite these pieces at the beginning of school days, as Fang did while growing up in Chengdu, China. The living aspect of this ancient tradition allows Fang to experiment with his English renderings, knowing that, while he certainly owes respect to the originals, they are also alive and well. The great success of these translations is Fang's ability to maintain this lived-with quality. He eschews footnotes and other signatures of the academy in order to bring the English versions to lovers of poetry rather than scholars of ancient China. These lively renditions remind us, as all great classics should, how much we have in common with those who lived thousands of years ago."--C. Francis Fisher, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Study of Sorrow: Translations offers a needed window into twenty-nine poets from the Song Dynasty (960-1279). These poets led fascinating lives and generated a prolific literary canon, but they are often neglected by American readers of Classical Chinese poetry in favor of their Tang Dynasty predecessors; as such, many of the poems in Study of Sorrow have been translated into English for the first time."--Mathew Weitman, Rain Taxi

Praise for Shangyang Fang

"There's a music and lyricism to his poetry and he has something to say."--Joy Harjo, Boston Globe

"The poems in Burying the Mountain are characterized by a wild ekphrastic stream of consciousness, with Shangyang Fang narrating under the influence of classical music, opera, and Baroque and avant-garde painting, while reinventing myths and fairy tales."--Megan Fernandes, Harriet Books at the Poetry Foundation

"This collection is all about transformation, almost anthropomorphism. Loneliness becomes the vulnerable openness of language. Absence turns into fire and snow. Eros, grief, and intimacy are the connecting threads between these poems, written in English while always keeping lyricism and musicality of Chinese poetry."--Book Riot

"Shangyang Fang has proceeded to craft a poetry collection of startling passion and exquisite sensitivity, leveraging a deep well of artistic knowledge and an ear for striking sonic arrangements to do so. Though he never quite arrives at sought-for resolutions to these inner and outer conflicts, it's in the search that Fang locates his most fruitful materials, and from which he emerges as one of the strongest new voices in contemporary poetry."--Landon Porter, Cleveland Review of Books

About the Author

Shangyang Fang grew up in Chengdu, China, and writes in both English and Chinese. A graduate from Michener Center for Writers, he is a recipient of the Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Award and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. His works have appeared in The Nation, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Forward Book of Poetry Anthology (UK). The author of the poetry collection Burying the Mountain (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), he is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.