Champion of Chinese classics and the growth of the Chinese poetic tradition, Song Lin is one of China's most innovative poets. When the Tiananmen protest exploded in Beijing in June 1989, Song led student demonstrations in Shanghai and was imprisoned for almost a year before leaving China soon afterwards. This selection of poems, made by the translator Dong Li and the poet himself, spans four decades of poetic exploration, with a focus on poems written during the poet's long stay in France, Singapore, Argentina, and more recently, his return to China.
As a result of his wanderings, Song Lin may be thought of as an international poet, open to an unusual extent to influences - though informed by the classics and a thorough study of the Chinese language, his poetry weaves through American, French, and Latin-American traditions. His influences are the modernists, the surrealists, the romantics, the deep imagists and the objectivists--but what distinguishes Song is his ability to absorb them all, and make them his own. From the experience of displacement and exile, his poetry continues to open and expand its horizons.
About the Author: Song Lin is one of the most distinctive poets from the People's Republic of China. The author of numerous books of poetry, poetry anthologies and prose, his Sunday Sparrows was published in English translation by Zephyr Press in 2019 and two previous collections Fragments and Farewell Songs and City Walls and Sunset were published bilingually in France. He is the poetry editor of the journal Jintian [Today]. Among his honors are fellowships from the Nederlands, Romania, and Hong Kong as well as the Shanghai, Dong Dang Zi, Chang Yao Literature Prizes. He has held residencies at OMI Ledig House Translation Lab and Vermont Studio Centre.
Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French and German. He is the English translator of The Wild Great Wall (Phoneme Media, 2018) by the Chinese poet Zhu Zhu, the German co-translator (with Lea Schneider) of Gesellschaft für Flugversuche (Carl Hanser Verlag, 2019) by the Chinese poet Zang Di and the Chinese translator of 《相伴》Be With (East China Normal University Press, 2021) by the American poet Forrest Gander. For his own literary projects, he has received fellowships from Akademie Schloss Solitude, Camargo and Humboldt Foundations, and Yaddo. As a translator, he has received support from a PEN/Heim Translation Grant, Ledig House, Henry Luce Foundation/Vermont Studio Center, and The American Literary Translators Association.
