New Translations from Fiona Sze-Lorrain

World Poetry Books has just published a new volume of translations by 2019-2020 Fellow Fiona Sze-Lorrain of the works of contemporary Chinese poet Ye Lijun.

In this remarkable English debut, award-winning Chinese contemporary poet Ye Lijun offers readers a lyrical diorama of nature and the inner world. By turns intimate and profound, Ye’s poems in Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s masterful translations make music of everyday silences, and illuminate the invisible openings in our lives. In this vital collection by one of China’s essential literary voices, each encounter is an invitation, wherein a village, a nest, a telescope, or a book proves to be a transient guide to the unknown.

The book features a long essay by Sze-Lorrain on the poet and her poems, as well as a foreword by Christopher Merrill, Director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Martha Kapos has praised the translator, stating that: “Fiona Sze-Lorrain brings her sense of immediacy, and her lucid control of tone, to these inspired translations of Ye Lijun which capture, with unerring musicality, the rhythms of the original Chinese.”