by Wang Jiaxin
tr. by John Balcom

Wang Jiaxin is a major voice in contemporary world poetry. Intimate, historical, and ruminative, the poems in his latest collection, At the Same Time, invite readers into a space of multiple cultural convergences as East and West engage in a luminous poetic dialogue. Weaving together themes of memory and exile, Wang’s meditations find solace in the company of such disparate literary figures as Du Fu and Anna Akhmatova, carrying readers to far flung places, from Santorini to Long Island. Nuanced and attentive to the weight of history, they celebrate the heroism of lyric resistance while marking the transient beauty of the mundane. Impeccably rendered by John Balcom, the poems both valorize and question the literary enterprise. Writing about the American poet Hart Crane, Wang asks: “But in the end, what did you save?”

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Nidia Hernández

Wang Jiaxin is a Chinese poet, essayist, and translator and has published more than forty books. His work has had an important influence on Chinese poetry and has been translated into many languages. His collection of poems in English is Darkening Mirror (Tebot Bach, 2017), translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell, with a foreword by former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass. His poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, Words Without Borders, American Poets and The Kenyon Review, and he has been a poet-in-residence at the Dutch Literary Foundation (Amsterdam, 2022) and at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa (2013). An esteemed translator of Yeats, Mandelstam, and especially of Paul Celan, he has won many domestic and international awards. John Crespi, Director of Asian Studies at Colgate University, has extolled his work: “Wang Jiaxin has exerted a far-reaching influence over contemporary Chinese poetry not just as a poet but also for his role as a critic and translator. Wang’s poetic voice stands out for the gravity, clarity, and resolve with which it explores the individual’s relation to history, destiny, cultural inheritance, and humanity.” Wang Jiaxin was born in Hubei province and graduated from Wuhan University. He was a professor at Renmin University.

Translator:

John Balcom is Professor Emeritus at the Monterey Institute of International Studies at Monterey. He is an award-winning translator of poetry, fiction, memoir, philosophy, and children’s writing. Among his translations are individual collections of poetry by Lo Fu, Ya Hsien, Shang Qin, Wu Sheng, Xiang Yang, and Lin Hengtai. In addition to regularly teaching literary translation at Middlebury, he has also taught at the British Centre for Literary Translation Summer School and the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. He is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.

“In these compressed lyric poems, in poem after poem, I felt that flash of perception, that transformation of the literal into the revealed, even the metaphysical. And the startlement of recognizing, oh! Here’s evidence of intelligent life on earth.”

— Rosanna Warren

“Wang Jiaxin’s many dialogs with the great poets and philosophers carry his own distinctive vision, perspective, compassion, and authority: a bedrock looking and saying. A world poet comes into English in these powerful poems’ translations.”

— Jane Hirshfield