Mirror

Dark and dazzling experiments from a poet who died too young, but who wrote to ＂transform one’s self and life.＂

This bilingual posthumous collection in Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s inspired translation is a detailed, retrospective look at Zhang Zao, one of the more brilliant poetic minds from China of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He moved to Germany in 1986. After returning briefly to China in 2004, he taught in Beijing as of 2007. These poems span Zhang Zao’s short career, beginning with ＂Mirror,＂ one of his earliest and best known works, and ending with ＂Lantern Town,＂ written less than two months before his death in Germany at 47 in 2010. As Bei Dao writes in his afterword, Zhang ＂possessed both a thorough grasp of European literature and culture and an introspective understanding of the broad, profound Asian aesthetics: between the two philosophies, he sought a new tension and melting point.＂ Mirror is his first book translated into English, bilingual in Chinese and English on facing pages.

Bei Dao is considered one of China’s most important and influential writers, and has authored several books of poetry, essays, short fiction, and a memoir. His poems have been translated into more than 30 languages. He was a leading member of the avant-garde movement ＂Ménglóng Shi Rén,＂ or ＂Misty Poets＂ in the 1970s and ’80s, and much of his work appeared in the underground journal, Jintian, which he co-founded in 1978. After the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and massacre in 1989, Bei Dao was exiled from China and spent many years living abroad. He now lives in Hong Kong.