First Mountain by Er Zhang and translated by Joseph Donahue

This is poetry from China.

First Mountain by Er Zhang translated by Joseph Donahue is published by Zephyr Press. This is a Book originally written in Chinese. This was published in 2018.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781938890932E12.

First Mountain, by Er Zhang, is a Chinese poetry collection from China, translated from Chinese by Joseph Donahue, published by Zephyr Press in 2018. It is a Chinese collection by Zhang Er that gives the mountain not only height, but origin, encounter, and first perception. The poems invite a reader to think of ascent as a form of attention, where difficulty is not a barrier but the shape of the path. 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.