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 Mays 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 translators 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 Chinas 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.
New York Times Top Poetry List 2022
Wong May was born in Chongqing, China, grew up in Singapore and has lived in Dublin since the 1970s. Wong May received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature, from the University of Singapore in 1965. In 1966 she went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1968. Her fourth book of poems, Picasso’s Tears, included work from 1978–2013 and was published by Octopus Books in 2014.
* Translates the great poets of the Tang Dynasty and makes them at home in 21st-centuryEnglish. * Includes an accessible, explanatory essay placing these poems the larger Tang tradition. * Focuses on the ‘migrants’ and ‘exiles’ of the Tang Dynasty (618 to 906 A.D.), a period considered to be a golden age of Chinese arts and culture. * Includes translations of Du Fu and Li Bai, famous in English for their landscapes and wit. * A poet and painter herself, Wong May now lives and works in Dublin.
Sadness, exile, homesickness, grief, rhinos - whatever you might presume you know of these subjects, this collection offers new ways of seeing them... the afterword would be worthy of publication as an independent essay. Such an innovative and expansive work deserves latitude. Sabina Knight, Mekong Review
Wongs quirky, individual voice, her own original spirit in translation and commentary, accompanies us on an unmissable journey through her Tang poetry; we can only be grateful for that queasy moment in a Beijing hotel room when the project began slowly but inexorably to announce itself and gradually take hold. Peter Sirr, Dublin Review of Books
[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 translators note, this capacious essay is historical, critical, comical, personal, structural and mystical by turns, exploring the Tang context of the original poets and the poetrys 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
