Where the Sea Stands Still (Paperback, Bilingual 'facing page' edition)

Yang Lian is perhaps the foremost of the new generation of Chinese poets whose forcible exile from their native land has had the happy, if unintended, effect of bringing them to the attention of more Western readers than they could ever have reached from home. Forbidden to publish in China after 1983, Yang Lian was expelled in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre and now lives in London. Holton's edition is laid out in facing-page translations that will be much appreciated by scholars while also giving the impression of a samizdat (which, in a sense, it is). The omnipresent gloom of the poems themselves ("your standstill is as full as the ocean's madness / the fullness of solitude makes an ear think long / in every dry shell predators have been drained of fresh blood") never descends into rant or bitterness, and there their harsh fortitude ("see this joy / a dog tricked into running madly away") owes as much to Chinese tradition as to politics. Holton's afterword provides a good insight into Yang Lian and his work. (Kirkus Reviews)

Unlike his contemporaries from the heady days of the Beijing Spring in the late 1970s - most of whom have either retreated into a very private poetry or stopped writing altogether - Yang Lian has gone on to forge a mature and complex poetry whose themes are the search for a Yeatsian mature wisdom, the accommodation of modernity within the ancient and book-haunted Chinese tradition, and a rapprochement between the literatures of East and West. His poems can be disturbing and strange, haunted as they are by the eerie ordinariness of life and death. But in the end it is a triumphant poetry, wholly engaged with the struggle to be alert to life, wholly engaged in the daily renewal, the search for that 'shore / where we see ourselves set sail'. All the poems are presented in English and Chinese. Brian Holton also includes a fascinating memoir on translating Yang Lian as well as one sequence translated into Scots. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

General

Imprint:	Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	June 2023
First published:	September 1999
Authors:	Yang Lian
Translators:	Brian Holton
Dimensions:	234 x 156 x 15mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	192
Edition:	Bilingual 'facing page' edition
ISBN-13:	978-1-85224-471-2
Languages:	English
Subtitles:	Chinese
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > Poetry texts & anthologies > General Promotions
LSN:	1-85224-471-2
Barcode:	9781852244712

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