Song of Shadows

By Xiao Hai

With delicacy and precision, the major Chinese poet Xiao Hai conjures shadows to explore philosophical questions of illusion and reality, history and time, art and language. Composed of several hundred interconnected poems, Xiao’s collection is, in his words, “a dynamic, creative, and open system of experience.” Deftly translated by Zhu Yu, Song of Shadows brings Wordsworth and Whitman into artful conversation with classical Chinese culture.

Available as a bilingual eBook with text in Mandarin and English, this edition is a must-read for lovers of international literature, Chinese speakers learning English, and English speakers learning Mandarin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Restless Books
• Release date: Jan 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9780989983280

Xiao Hai

Xiao Hai (1965-) was born in Hai'an, in China's Jiangsu Province. At the prestigious Nanjing University, he co-founded and edited with other young poets the poetry magazine They, a publication that has fostered a number of important figures in contemporary Chinese literature such as Han Dong, Yu Jian, and Su Tong. He has authored over a dozen works of Chinese history and poetry collections, including Bending to Weed until Afternoon (2003), Villages and Fields (2006), Bei Ling River (2010), The Great Kingdom of Qin (2010), and Song of Shadows (2013). He has published widely in such influential poetry magazines as Shi Kan, Xing Xing, Qing Chun, Hua Cheng, Zhong Shan, Zuo Jia, and Jintian (edited by Bei Dao). Known as a humble poet of discrete sensibilities, he has earned widespread recognition in his home country. His prizes include the Writer's Poetry Award and two Zi Jin Mountain Literature Awards, and he was the Tian Wen Poet of 2012. Beijing Literature included his poetry on their list of the best contemporary Chinese writing in 1998. His poetry has been translated into English, French, Japanese, Spanish, and Romanian. He lives in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province.

Book preview

影子之歌 （节选）

小海 （朱玉 译）

Song of Shadows:

A Selection

Xiao Hai

Translated from the Chinese by Zhu Yu

Preface to the English Edition: Life and Shadow

—Xiao Hai

A long poem is the true test of a poet’s talent; it requires great planning, control, and balance—like running a marathon. Rather than a flash of inspiration, the poet needs a steady flow of creativity. For my own long poem Song of Shadows, selections of which are rendered into English by Zhu Yu, I found the necessary energy in the subject itself.

A shadow is like a centipede. When, as a child, I cut off their feet for fun, they would keep looking for what they had lost. This pursuit of relations resembles the strange and mysterious pursuit of creating poetry. My intention in writing Song of Shadows was to make a dynamic, creative, and open-ended system of experience, a combination of connections. The collection’s structure is both loose and close; one can start anywhere, and a single detail can stand in for the whole work.

Of course, poetry’s visible framework, stanzas, and syntax make up its external form, but there is also an inner rhythm that comes from a poet’s spiritual temperament. For me in these poems, shadows provide that underlying structure.

I might trace my obsession with shadows back to several verses by canonical Chinese poets: Li Bai (701-762), who gave us the illustrious lines I raise my cup and invite the moon, / becoming triple with my shadows, and Zhang Ruoxu (660-720), to whom we owe "A Moonlit