After posting about my Yu Xuanji translations of Yu Xuanji 魚玄機 (840–868) in the new issue of Ancient Exchanges, I realized that I had neglected to announce my Yu Xuanji translation in the “Make it Old” issue of Poetry Magazine, last May (2022)! Chewing ice and eating bark, wishes unfulfilled, Jin River and Hu Pass in my dreams, I want to crack this Qin mirror in half. Sorrow is a fallen magpie. Let Shun play his zither. I grieve at the flight of geese … 飲冰食檗志無功 晉水壺關在夢中 秦鏡欲分愁墮鵲 舜琴將弄怨飛鴻 And my bio of Yu, as well, here. Click on the image for the poem in full ..read more

The new issue of Ancient Exchanges, “Threads,” is now live, and with it three translations of mine of poetry by Yu Xuanji 魚玄機 (840–868). The shape of water conforms to its container: we know it is indeterminate. Clouds drift with no intent. Will they ever come back? Despondent spring winds over the Chu river tonight, one mandarin duck flies away from its flock. 水柔逐器知難定 雲出無心肯再歸 惆悵春風楚江暮 鴛鴦一隻失群飛 And a shot across the bow in my “Translator’s Note,” too: In my eyes, contemporary English translations of classical Chinese poetry tend to fall between two extremes—with scholarly translators prizing ..read more

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation, edited by Cosima Bruno, Lucas Klein, and Chris Song. Available now for pre-order ..read more

At Cha, Nadine Willems reviews Xi Chuan’s Bloom & Other Poems: Xi Chuan states that he sees himself as an artist whose medium happens to be language. To me, he is a poet of lucidity, whose experimentation with words regenerates the swirling everydayness of the world in its complexity and power of astonishment. In Bloom & Other Poems, the language often takes the dislocated and jagged form of the reality that inspires it—for example bringing in breaks, repetitions, parallelisms, and fragmented sentences as a reflection of the jagged rhythms of life in China. And about the translation ..read more

Writing for The Poetry Project, Simon Schuchat has reviewed two books of contemporary Chinese poetry in English translation that came out last year, Duo Duo’ 多多 Words as Grain: New and Selected Poems, translated by Lucas Klein, and by Wang Yin’s 王寅 Ghosts City Sea, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter. He writes: Here are two new translations of important and wonderful Chinese poets, by two of the finest contemporary translators of Chinese literature. A northerner and a southerner. One was already adolescent during the Cultural Revolution, the other a primary school student … These two poets sp ..read more

Xi Chuan’s newest, his second book in English, Bloom and Other Poems, has only been out for a matter of days, but already it’s received its first review! Heather Green at the Poetry Foundation writes: [Xi] Chuan’s poetry speaks, in Lucas Klein’s translation, in a vital, brash, and, at times, comic voice, paradoxically both cynical and idealistic. The collection opens with the long title poem, “Bloom,” a lush meditation that exhorts the addressee to: bloom barbaric blossoms bloom unbearable blossoms bloom the deviant the unreasonable the illogical The poem’s “bloom” describes both a sexual un ..read more

Bloom & and Other Poems, by Xi Chuan, translated by Lucas Klein A rhapsodic meditation on the dreams and defeats, disparities and excesses, mythologies and absurdities of contemporary life Available now ..read more

Watch Maghiel van Crevel of Leiden University speak on Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼 and the hypertranslatability of migrant worker – or what he calls “battler” – poetry ..read more

Steve Bradbury at the University of Oklahoma’s Chinese Literature Translation Archive, talking about contemporary poetry from Taiwan in the context of its visual culture. Specific mention of Hsia Yü 夏宇, Hung Hung 鴻鴻, Shang Qin 商禽, Ye Mimi 葉覓覓, and Amang ..read more