Mirror is the first book by Zhang Zao (1962–2010) to be translated into English—which means that when his Chinese poems look at the facing pages, they are seeing themselves in English for the first time. This reflection marks a seminal moment in the legacy of a poet known for his cross-cultural writing—rare for a Chinese poet of his generation—a polyglot who, according to poet Bei Dao, “sought a new tension and melting point” between Eastern and Western sensibilities.
As writer and poet Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s translation elucidates, this melting point causes neither culture to dissolve into an amalgamation of the two. Rather, it is a dynamic interplay of Chinese, American, and European elements whose unique cultural and linguistic origins endure. Zhang’s poems become flexible fields of meaning; spaces that invite and invent dialogue between different aesthetics and traditions—and Sze-Lorrain’s English translations add yet another linguistic dimension into the capacious mix.
The poem “Earth Song,” for example, is an English translation of a Chinese translation of a German translation of a series of Chinese poems written more than two thousand years before. This may sound like a hall of mirrors, but stay with me: in 1908, Gustav Mahler wrote a six-part song cycle titled Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth) in which he adapted a German translation of “Die chinesische Flöte” (“The Chinese Flute”). Zhang used elements of Mahler’s German translation to then write “Earth Song,” and finally, Sze-Lorrain translated Zhang’s resulting Chinese poem into English.
This multilingualism is reflected throughout Mirror, but the thread of Chinese poetic tradition never gets lost: if anything, it proliferates with every different poetic tradition and experimental form Zhang entwines with it. There is often a symbol, setting, or other allusion through which classicism makes its presence known through this expansive multilingual lens. In “Earth Song,” one such instance is the crane, iconic symbol of health and longevity in classical Chinese poetry and art. We can almost see the bird reinventing itself with every flap of its wings as it flies through a sky filled with music it’s never heard before:
Crane,
not just here and there, but
everything has something to do with everything;
musical motifs swayed by minor thirds. Stubborn oboes import a new motif.
Mahler adds, Yes, Huangpu Park is also a reality,
but without illusory counterpoint we cannot grasp it.
Zhang’s relationship to classical Chinese poetry is a complicated one—and something he never seemed interested in explaining. His poetry suggests that, like other poets of the post-Misty generation—the generation of poets following the movement of “misty,” i.e., obscure, poetry in the late seventies to early eighties, which emerged after the official repression during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76)—he eschewed its sentimentalism; and that, unlike his peers, he also took inspiration from aspects of it that have traditionally been used to express this sentimentalism. His touch is always light: in “Mirror,” the book’s title poem, he employs no more than the image of falling plum blossoms, references to South Mountain and the Emperor, and a reflective tone to evoke classical poetry:
Why not watch her return on horseback
cheeks warm
with shame. Head bowed, she answers the Emperor
A mirror awaits her forever
Let her take her usual place in the mirror
Looking out the window, once regrets come to mind
plum blossoms fall over the southern mountain.
At the same time, and with the same delicate brush, Zhang juxtaposes this classicism with a musicality that reveals a contemporary Western poetic sensibility. As the lines above demonstrate, he employs no more than an instance of enjambment and a mix of short and long lines to create his distinctive weaving together of East and West, ancient and contemporary, interior and exterior.
Since his death in 2010, Zhang’s work has experienced a renaissance in mainland China, as noted in Sze-Lorrain’s introduction, especially among young readers—and listeners. His 1984 poem, “Mirror,” written when he too was a young man, was recently adapted by several popular Chinese musicians and even the celebrity Hu Ge in videos that have collectively garnered thousands of views. This should perhaps come as no surprise at a time when tensions between nationalism and transnationalism—and between the impulse to cling to one’s native monoculture and the urge to engage with diverse cultures—are running high. Zhang, who himself left China after the Tiananmen Square massacre and spent most of the rest of his life as a professor in Germany, leaves a body of work that invites us to explore these pressing matters for ourselves. Central to this exploration is language—and translation is what holds the key.
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Mirror. By Zhang Zao, translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain. Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 2025. 248 pp. $19.00.
