chinese by fiona sze-lorrain

The tenderness of Lan Lan’s poetry is steely and perfectly judged. She shows us a world of subtle adjustments and intelligent beauty—although the stakes she deals in could not be higher. As its title suggests, Canyon in the Body uncovers both existential and domestic meanings, writ both large and small in the human environment. Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s limpid, unforced translations do the poet, and her Anglophone readers, a great service.
—Fiona Sampson, Editor of Poem and Professor of Poetry,
Roehampton University

Lan Lan is discussing happiness with us. She cuts time, our faces, our dreams, our crystal gaze. So how does this happen: when we leave her, washed, new, mellow, happy that she conducted us, drowned us, left us hovering in this . . . what? nothing? Blessed be the day I discovered her writing.
—Tomaž Šalamun

Born in 1967 in Yantai, Shandong province, Lan Lan is considered one of today’s most influential Chinese lyrical poets. She is the bestselling author of several poetry titles including Life with a Smile (1990), Inner Life (1997), Dream, Dream (2003) and From Here, to Here (2010). Also a prolific prose and children’s fiction writer, her work has been translated into ten languages. Awarded the Liu Li’an Poetry Prize in 1996, she was voted the top writer of the “Best Ten Women Poets” in China. In 2009, she received four of China’s highest literary honors: the “Poetry & People” Award, the Yulong Poetry Prize, the “Best Ten Poets in China” Award, and the Bing Xin Children’s Literature New Work Award. A regular guest at international poetry festivals, she lives in Beijing. Canyon in the Body is her first poetry collection in English.



Fiona Sze-Lorrain is the author of two books of poetry, My Funeral Gondola (Mānoa Books/El León Literary Arts, 2013) and Water the Moon (Marick, 2010), as well as several translations of Chinese, French, and American contemporary poets. She also co-edited the Mānoa anthologies, Sky Lanterns: New Poetry from China, Formosa, and Beyond (2012) and On Freedom: Spirit, Art, and State (2013), both from the University of Hawai‘i Press. She lives in Paris, France and works as an editor and zheng harpist.