Derangements of My Contemporaries by Li Shangyin and translated by Chloe Garcia-Roberts

This is poetry from China.

Derangements of My Contemporaries by Li Shangyin translated by Chloe Garcia-Roberts is published by New Directions. This is a Book originally written in Chinese. This was published in 2014.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780811221962E12.

Derangements of My Contemporaries, by Li Shangyin, is a Chinese poetry collection from China, translated from Chinese by Chloe Garcia-Roberts, published by New Directions in 2014. It is a Chinese collection by Li Shangyin, brought into English through Chloe Garcia-Roberts’s formally attentive translation. The pleasure here is in derangement itself: how an older lyric intelligence can arrive in English feeling oblique, jeweled, and still difficult to domesticate. I would not approach it as a book that needs to be solved before it can begin working. Start with the title, the pressure of the translated line, and the feeling of a voice making room for itself in English. The value here is not just metadata or representation. It is the chance to let a particular book create its own weather, its own difficulty, and its own way of asking the reader to listen.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.