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In the Same Light200 Tang Poems for Our CenturyEdited by Wong MayTranslated by Wong May![]() 10% off all versions
Categories: 21st Century, Ancient, Anthologies, BAME, China, Chinese, Irish, Taoism, Translation, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Classics Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (360 pages) (Pub. Jan 2022) 9781800172128 £19.99 £17.99 eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Jan 2022) 9781800172135 £15.99 £14.39 To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
The Poetry Book Society Spring 2022 Translation Choice Chinese poetry is unique in world literature in that it was written for the best part of 3,000 years by exiles, and Chinese history can be read as a matter of course in the words of poets. In this collection from the Tang Dynasty are poems of war and peace, flight and refuge but above all they are plain-spoken, everyday poems; classics that are everyday timeless, a poetry conceived "to teach the least and the most, the literacy of the heart in a barbarous world," says the translator. C.D. Wright has written of Wong May's work that it is "quirky, unaffectedly well-informed, capacious, and unpredictable in [its] concerns and procedures," qualities which are evident too in every page of her new book, a translation of Du Fu and Li Bai and Wang Wei, and many others whose work is less well known in English. In a vividly picaresque afterword, Wong May dwells on the defining characteristics of these poets, and how they lived and wrote in dark times. This translator's journal is accompanied and prompted by a further marginal voice, who is figured as the rhino: "The Rhino 通天犀 in Tang China held a special place," she writes, "much like the unicorn in medieval Europe — not as conventional as the phoenix or the dragon but a magical being; an original spirit", a fitting guide to China's murky, tumultuous Middle Ages, that were also its Golden Age of Poetry, and to this truly original book of encounters, whose every turn is illuminating and revelatory.
Awards won by Wong May
Joint winner, 2022 A Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry
Commended, 2022 The Poetry Book Society Spring Translation Choice (In the Same Light)
'[An] extraordinary Afterword, titled 'The Numbered Passages of a Rhinoceros in the China Shop', is a magnificent, peculiar tour de force that spans nearly a hundred pages, and the book is transformed by its existence [...] entrancing, and entirely sincere.'
Daryl Lim Wei Jie, Asian Books Blog 'A book very contemporary in its human closeness.... Wong May offers an extensive Afterword on the poetry and its interpreters. No mere translator's note, this capacious essay is historical, critical, comical, personal, structural and mystical by turns, exploring the Tang context of the original poets and the poetry's echoes over the last millennium or so, up through Pound and Mao and Dharma Bums. Wong May hopes "to return the text to the body of world literature" through her investigations as a translator and critic. Her work deserves this hope, which is better than any reparative aim for poetry, always complicit in and resistant to the politics of its times.' Harry Josephine Giles, Poetry Book Society Translation Selector |
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