The Magpie at Night by Li Qingzhao and translated by Wendy Chen

This is poetry from China.

The Magpie at Night by Li Qingzhao translated by Wendy Chen is published by Tavern Books. This is a Book originally written in Chinese. This was published in 2019.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781935635857E12.

The Magpie at Night, by Li Qingzhao, is a Chinese poetry collection from China, translated from Chinese by Wendy Chen, published by Tavern Books in 2019. It is a Chinese collection by Li Qingzhao, translated by Wendy Chen, that brings one of the major voices of Chinese lyric into a compact English form. The night magpie feels like a perfect emblem for poems of alertness, separation, delicacy, and the small sounds grief makes after dark. 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.