Mirror by Zhang Zao

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, andending 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.