Shearsman Books | Authors in Translation (Chinese)

Translations from Chinese

Du Fu  Spring in the Ruined City — Selected Poems

Translated from Chinese by Jonathan Waley. Bilingual edition, with Chinese text in calligraphy. 

Published 2008. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848610002 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


The Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD) is celebrated as the greatest moment in Chinese poetry, a time when poetry was highly rated, and some of China's most famous poets were writing. Du Fu (712–770 AD) is widely regarded as the greatest of these. He himself wrote that he aimed to startle his readers, and in some of his more avant-garde poems he combines and contrasts images in a way that has an almost modernist feel to it. On the other hand, he also enjoyed and celebrated the simple pleasures in life, and his (apparently) lighter poems about friendship and his natural surroundings show this clearly.



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Du Fu Spring in the Ruined City — Selected Poems

W.N. Herbert & Yang Lian (eds.)  The Third Shore

Chinese and English-language poets in mutual translation. Bilingual.

Published 2013. Paperback, 232pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848613096 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here .]




Walter Benjamin called translation "The Third Language", because a translation is neither the same as the original, nor the same as the normal foreign-language of other texts, for it is something unique, something set apart from either, just as bronze forged from copper and tin overcomes the brittleness of copper and the softness of tin to become both hard and pliable, as if it has become a new element. In this volume, Chinese poets and English-language poets come together to translate each other's work.


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Fernando de Herrera Selected Poems

Brian Holton  Staunin Ma Lane

Translated from Chinese, into Scots and English. Trilingual.
Published 2016. Paperback, 146pp, 8 x 8ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848614666 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

“Staunin Ma Lane isn’t intended to be a comprehensive tour of classical [Chinese] poetry, though it does contain specimens of many of the major genres and styles, and it may serve as a first primer. Note that the poetry is in the Scots: the English versions are there to help the non-Scots speaker. It has been my aim to make poems in Scots: if you expect to find dictionary definitions of Chinese words in my translations, you will be disappointed. That sort of drably mechanical ‘accuracy’ does not make poetry, and a poem that doesn’t move the reader is like a joke that isn’t funny. In the translation of poetry, there are many, many more ways of being wrong than of being right, and I do not claim that my versions are in any way definitive or better than anyone else’s: I do, however, want to say to the reader, “Deek whit the Mither Tongue can dae: gin it can dae this, whit’ll it no can dae?” (Look what our mother tongue can do: if it can do this, what will it not do?), and I would urge readers inclined toward translation to do it for themselves, whatever their mother tongue might be.” —Brian Holton
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Brian Holton Staunin Ma Lane

Mai Cheng  Selected Poems

Translated from Chinese by Denis Mair. Bilingual edition.
Published 2008. Paperback, 140pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700882 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]


A bilingual collection by Dalian-based poet-editor, Mai Cheng. This is his first collection to be made available in translation.

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Mai Cheng: Selected Poems

Yang Lian  Anniversary Snow

Winner of the 2020 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation
Translated from Chinese by Brian Holton, 
with additional translations by W.N. Herbert, George Szirtes, Pascale Petit, Fiona Sampson & others
Published 2019. Paperback, 156pp, 8 x 8ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848616707 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.] English language only.

"If Yang Lian is new to you, I hope it spurs you on to read more of this extraordinary poet. If you have read him before, then you will find familiar themes here: the search for a mature wisdom, the need to readjust the balance between modernism and the classical heritage, the impossibility of giving easy solutions to the problem of evil and suffering in this world. There is also a new sense of his coming to terms with the devastating loss of his mother when he was a teenager, which is when he began writing poetry, as well as intimate and tenderly-voiced declarations of the power of love in its many forms. There is, too, a growing sense of poetry as a weapon in the fight to heal this planet of ours, so wounded by greed, war, exploitation and plunder.
     This is large poetry, deep poetry, poetry that concerns itself with the great human themes. This is poetry that can change your life." —Brian Holton, from the Afterword to this volume
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Harriet Tarlo - Gathering Grounds

Yang Lian (editor)  A Massively Single Number — An Anthology

Translated from Chinese by Brian Holton. Bilingual.

Published 2015. Paperback, 218pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23   

ISBN 9781848613768 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


In 2012, Yang Lian and others started an online poetry competition in China. They expected a good response, but were astounded to receive more than 85,000 entries, with unknown poets—earning their living as migrant workers—delivering up fine works in classical forms. This anthology offers some of the winning poems from the first two years of the competition, together with comments by the judges and essays by several of the people involved. 

 

The cover features a design by Ai Weiwei.

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Yang Lian (editor) A Massively Single Number — An Anthology

W.N. Herbert & Yang Lian (eds.)  The Third Shore

Chinese and English-language poets in mutual translation. Bilingual.

Published 2013. Paperback, 232pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848613096 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here .]


Walter Benjamin called translation "The Third Language", because a translation is neither the same as the original, nor the same as the normal foreign-language of other texts, for it is something unique, something set apart from either, just as bronze forged from copper and tin overcomes the brittleness of copper and the softness of tin to become both hard and pliable, as if it has become a new element. In this volume, Chinese poets and English-language poets come together to translate each other's work.

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Yang Lian  Riding Pisces — Poems from Five Collections

Translated from Chinese by Brian Holton. Bilingual.

Published 2008. Paperback, 216pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $22

ISBN 9781905700912 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Riding Pisces brings together a number of hard-to-find and uncollected texts from almost the full extent of Yang Lian's career: from Masks and Crocodiles (Sydney, 1990 — although the translations here are new), from the out-of-print collection Non-Person Singular (London, 1994), from Notes of a Blissful Ghost, published in Hong Kong in 2002, from the Sailor's Home six-handed anthology (Shearsman Books, 2005), and from the as-yet uncollected Dark Blue Verses .


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Yang Lian (ed.)  Sailor's Home

Published 2005. Paperback, 132pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9780907562863


A Sailor's Home suggests many years of travel, cross-cultural contacts, a place of rest after too much time spent on the high seas. This particular Sailor's Home is a record of a private poetry festival held in London in October 2005 at which six poets came together with a group of invited guests to read and discuss one other's work. This miscellany of the work written for the occasion is presented in the original languages and in English translation.



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Yang Lian (ed.): Sailor's Home
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