New Publication:
Mirror: Selected Poems by Zhang Zao, Translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Zephyr Press, 2025
Bilingual, with an introduction by Fiona Sze-Lorrain and an afterword by Bei Dao
To purchase: Zephyr Press or Amazon
This bilingual posthumous collection 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 left China in 1986 and lived in Germany until his death at 47 in 2010.
The poems in this collection span Zhang Zao’s short career, beginning with “Mirror,” one of his earliest and best known works, and ending with “Lantern Town,” written less than two months before his death. As Bei Dao writes in his afterword, Zhang Zao “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.” Translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Mirror is Zhang Zao’s first book to be translated into English and will be bilingual in Chinese and English on facing pages.
Mirror is the twelfth and final volume in Zephyr Press’s Jintian Series of Contemporary Chinese Poetry, which was launched in 2011 and has been curated by Bei Dao, Lydia H. Liu, and Christopher Mattison. It is also Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s fourth translation title (after Wind Says by Bai Hua, I Can Almost See the Clouds of Dust by Yu Xiang, and Canyon in the Body by Lan Lan) in the series.
Zhang Zao 张枣 was a key literary figure of the “third generation” of Chinese contemporary poetry. Born in 1962 in Changsha, Hunan province, he rose to national fame as one of the “Five Sichuan Masters.” Greatly admired by his peers for championing a complex yet harmonizing fusion of traditional writing and avant-garde flair in his work, and for his versatility in many foreign languages, Zhang was a recognized literary critic, translator, and scholar. In 1986, he moved to Germany. For several years, he served as poetry editor for the literary magazine Jintian and taught at the University of Tübingen. He returned briefly to China in 2005 to lecture at Henan University and the Minzu University of China. Zhang Zao died in Tübingen in 2010 at the age of 47.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a writer, poet, translator, musician, and editor who writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese. She is the author of a novel in stories Dear Chrysanthemums (Scribner, 2023), five poetry collections including Rain in Plural (Princeton, 2020) and The Ruined Elegance (Princeton, 2016), and eighteen books of translation. Longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, she was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Best Translated Book Award, among other honors. She is a judge for the 2025 International Dublin Literary Award. She lives in Paris.
Zhang Zao is a leading figure in contemporary world literature, a poet who uniquely integrated Chinese and Western traditions. Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s elegant, thoughtful translations—and her quite brilliant introduction—offer indispensable access to this complex yet beautiful writer. Mirror is both lucid and complex, meditative, yet full of shifting surprises. It has a kind of miraculous inexhaustibility. —Fiona Sampson
With poems brilliant and “vigorous as lobsters,” Zhang Zao’s Mirror, in masterful translation by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, bewitches with its attunement to the equally vigorous world and its electricity, its images, from butterflies quivering on a slogan to a “fawn practicing its glow.” Beguiling sequences in conversation with Keats, Kafka, and Tsvetaeva reveal anew the complex possibilities of the form, and everywhere lines animated by surprise intoxicate. Zhang’s visions feel essential and enduring, those of a life too brief but which saw that “the earth is full of patterns beyond words.” —Paula Bohince
“Beauty exists in danger,” writes Zhang Zao, and it’s not clear whether this is an admission or an endorsement, or simply a recognition. Zhang’s careful lyrics in Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s translation are perfused with the “language trials” through which beauty and danger communicate—to the beloved, certainly, but even more powerfully to strangers, with accents reminiscent of both Éluard and Hölderlin. This volume adds an essential element to the growing body of contemporary Chinese poetry in English. —G.C. Waldrep