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Highlights
- In Study of Sorrows, 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.
- About the Author: Shangyang Fang grew up in Chengdu, China, and writes in both English and Chinese.
- 144 Pages
- Poetry, Asian
Description
Book Synopsis
In Study of Sorrows, 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 Sorrows, 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
"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.