Trees Grow Lively on Snowy Fields

This bilingual anthology (Mandarin face-to-face with English translations) includes work from nearly 50 years of mainland Chinese poetry, from the 1970s to the first decades of the twenty-first century. Without attempting to represent the range of any one school or period of Chinese poetry, the 99 poems in this volume include such Chinese Misty poets as Duo Duo, Mang Ke, and Gu Cheng, and span well beyond the Misty School to one poet-Zheng Min-of an earlier generation, and to many poets of later generations, including Mo Fei, Wang Jiaxin, Lan Lan, Yu Nu, Tang Danhong, Tong Wei, Li Yongyi, and Yang Jian. This book has its genesis in life-long friendships between the four translators of this volume, Stephen Haven, Jin Zhong, Li Yongyi, and Wang Shouyi-friendships first forged in the 1990s during Haven’s two Fulbright years in Beijing, when a group of Beijing poets began to invite him to their gatherings. During Li Yongyi’s and Wang Shouyi’s own Fulbright years in the United States, during Haven’s later travels to China, and finally via the web, these translations, many of which appeared in such journals as American Poetry Review, World Literature Today, North American Review, The Common, Manoa, and Consequence Magazine, came into being over a period of 30 years.