May the stone steps and the deep-sleeping door summon
the camellias impossible paradise
and your face the impossible key
May the window shudder
May the notes be blue
and the candleflame shake unequivocally
(from May the Rain)
One of Taiwans most celebrated poets, Chen Yuhong draws on both Western and Asian literary traditions, inflected by her work as a translator of contemporary English-language women poets (Gluck, Oswald, Duffy). This selection makes her art widely available in English for the first time.
Her award-winning translators, George OConnell and Diana Shi, carry across the richly metaphorical lexicon of her poems and their uncanny inhabitation of places both real and imagined, conjuring mood, angles of thought or light, animal presence, and the tides of the seasons.
In a world where much that seemed united has frayed, Chen Yuhongs finely balanced poems bring us news of other imagined worlds, and acknowledge the unexpected, its capacity to terrify or astonish.
Chen Yuhong was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and graduated from the Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages. After a decade in Canada, she returned to Taiwan, settling in Taipei. For her 2004 collection Annotations, the editors of the annual Best Poetry of Taiwan named her Poet of the Year. Her collection Bewitched (2007) received Taiwans Chinese Writers & Artists Associations Poetry Award. Her most recent poetry collection, Half-light, appeared in 2022 for which the Swedish Institute awarded Chen its International Cikada Prize in poetry. George OConnell, co-translator/co-editor with Diana Shi, has received numerous honors for his poetry, including Atlanta Reviews International Grand Prize and the Pablo Neruda Award, as well as two US National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowships. He has also served as Fulbright professor to Peking University and National Taiwan University. Among his translations with Ms. Shi are Darkening Mirror by Wang Jiaxin; Crossing the Harbour: Ten Contemporary Hong Kong Poets; Passages: Thirteen Contemporary Taiwan Poets; Capriccio on the Way to Buy Salt, poems by Han Dong; and the forthcoming From Here to Here, poems by Lan Lan. Diana Shi, co-recipient of two US National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowships, has collaborated since 2006 with George OConnell in translating many prominent western and Chinese-speaking poets. In 2012 they launched Pangolin House, pangolinhouse.com, an international journal of poetry and art. Ms. Shis extensive selections from American poet Arthur Szes The Glass Constellation appeared in Chinese under the same title in 2023. Her translations from American poet Jane Hirshfield, I Wanted Only a Little, were published in 2024.
