River Merchant’s Wife by Ming Di and translated by Tony Barnstone, Neil Aitken, Afaa Weaver, Katie Farris, Sylvia Burn

This is poetry from China.

River Merchant’s Wife by Ming Di translated by Tony Barnstone, Neil Aitken, Afaa Weaver, Katie Farris, Sylvia Burn is published by Marick Press. This is a Book originally written in Chinese. This was published in 2012.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781934851432E12.

River Merchant’s Wife, by Ming Di and translated by Tony Barnstone, Neil Aitken, Afaa Weaver, Katie Farris, Sylvia Burn from Chinese, brings Chinese-language poetry from China into English through Ming Di’s river-merchant echo, Chinese classical afterlife, and a woman speaker returned through contemporary collaboration. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem starts making its own weather. I would read it for river, wife, echo, and the way old poems can be reopened by new hands, not as a fixed lesson about China. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. River Merchant’s Wife belongs in the translated poetry library because it connects Chinese tradition, translation history, and contemporary poetic response.

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.