---

SAY THANK YOU
Mikhail Aizenberg
From the Russian by J. Kates
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-88-7 (paper) $14.95
Buy Now From CCNow
5¼ x 8
136 pages [Bilingual Russian/English]

With this book, American readers are introduced to the work of an important contemporary Russian poet, whose world-view and aesthetic will seem at once welcome in its otherness and pertinently familiar. Aizenberg's poetry brings the surreal into the quotidian, is of the present moment while partaking of an urban world-view that would have been recognizable to Benjamin or Baudelaire. In J. Kates' translations, these poems have a new and discrete life in English.
—Marilyn Hacker

The young Mandelstam did not know what to do with his body. M. Aizenberg does not know what to do with his soul.
—Vladislav Kulakov

Fresh & marvelous … a philosophical innovator always pressing new thoughts out of language, each poem a repeated surprise … These poems and their skilled translations are our antennae through the darkness.
—F. D. Reeve

Mikhail Aizenberg has lived and breathed and had his being at the heart of the last generation of poets that came to maturity under the regime of the Soviet Union. He has been not only one of its most eloquent practitioners, but also its chronicler and interpreter.

In his own poetry he articulates the wildly erratic internal, personal climate of the political global warming that Russia has undergone. When the cultural history of Russia's turn from the twentieth to the twenty-first century is written, the epigraphs to the chapters will be drawn from Aizenberg's verses.

He has published four books of poems and two of criticism. In English translation his poems have appeared in Russia (Glas and Hungry Russian Winter) England (Novostroika), New Zealand (Takahe) the United States (Delos, Dirty Goat, Green Mountains Review, Harvard Review, International Quarterly, Kenyon Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Onthebus, Plum Review, River Styx, Mr. Cogito, Salamander) and Australia (Salt) as well as in the anthologies Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 1992), Crossing Centuries (Talisman, 2002), and In the Grip of Strange Thoughts (Zephyr Press, 1999) to which he also contributed an introduction.

***
Light rain falls as quietly
as the footfall of an Indian guide.
Nettles here, buckwheat there.
Who tends these? Not I, the mushroom-gatherer.

A cloud of spruce needles,
scales from a dragon,
but I see nothing, not I.
I hear nothing, not I.

I only hear, softer than a breath,
the wind blowing over me,
an alder-elder rustles
distantly beyond the stillness.

From the level pale blue sky
from a corner not so far away
an arrow has been fashioned
destined for anything alive.

Who will escape its barely
perceptible flight?
See how the invisible bird
sings like a bowstring.

***
A cicada saws the air thus
(Shakespeare reproaches it for that).
What is saying djiga-djiga—
the wind? The turn of a key?

Suddenly there is no sound.
Silk emerges from the ground.

The firmament has turned gray
pricked all over with pins.
The abyss of heaven, a passageway
Into weightless quicksilver cold.

J. Kates, poet and literary translator, lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, and in Brookline, Massachusetts. Alone and in collaboration, he has translated six books of poetry from French, Spanish and Russian, including poems by Tatiana Shcherbina, The Score of the Game (Zephyr, 2002) He also edited In the Grip of Strange Thoughts (Zephyr Press, 1999). His translations of Aizenberg's poetry are underwritten by an NEA translation grant for 2006.

---

FEELINGS ABOVE SEA LEVEL: PROSE POEMS
FROM THE CHINESE OF SHANG QIN
Shang Qin
From the Chinese by Steve Bradbury
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-89-5 (paper) $14.00
Buy Now From CCNow
5¼ x 9¼
88 pages [Bilingual Chinese/English]

Steve Bradbury's work has set a new standard for the translation of Chinese poetry, a development long overdue.
—Andrea Lingenfelter

Shang Qin is one of the most original and powerful Chinese poets, not only in our time but in the entire history of modern Chinese poetry.
—Michelle Yeh

Small in quantity but consummate in substance, Shang Qin's poetry epitomizes the doubts and values of the individual during an era of upheaval. In a poetic diction approaching that of speech, he exposed poetry's cutting edge and set the highest possible standard for subsequent poets. Even today we find his work an unflagging incentive to refresh our sensibilities and divest our language of artifice, which is poetry's true measure.
—Hung Hung

Shang Qin was born in Sichuan, China in 1930, but has lived in Taiwan since the late Forties. The author of four volumes of poetry, he is among the first poets in Taiwan to have expressed a significant interest in surrealism.

He began publishing poetry in the mid-Fifties in various modernist journals such as Modern Poetry Quarterly while still employed as a soldier. He was not discharged from the military until 1968 and spent the next two years attending the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa before returning to Taiwan, where he tried his hand at a host of trades from street vendor and gardener to bookstore clerk and editor. He eventually became associate chief-editor of the China Times Weekly and retired in 1992.

Shang Qin's reputation as a prose poet was slow in maturing and did not really take wing until the appearance of his first volume of poetry Dream or the Dawn, which he published the year he left for Iowa. In the mid-Thirties, when the island was still under Japanese colonial rule and Taiwan's poets looked to Japan rather than to China for poetic inspiration, a few aspiring modernists who had studied in the “Empire of the Sun” and wrote in the Japanese language, briefly experimented with prose poetry, which had been in vogue in Japan since the early Twenties. In the Forties and early Fifties, after Taiwan once again came under Chinese political and cultural influence, a handful of poets began writing prose poems in Chinese.

Although most critics describe Shang Qin as a surrealist poet, this attribution is somewhat problematic. To be sure, surrealism has had considerable influence on the poet's work. Much of his early poetry has that eerie “dream logic” associated with surrealism, and several of his poems were clearly inspired by seminal works in the European surrealist tradition, as seen in the poem “My Amoeba Kid Brother,” which directly alludes to and plays off of Joan Miró's celebrated 1926 painting “Dog Barking at the Moon,” and the more recent “Moonlight,” which is awash with allusions to Max Jacob's prose poem “The Truly Miraculous.” At the same time, one cannot help noting that, in the mid-Eighties, when the Nationalist Government began relaxing its surveillance of the nation's writers in anticipation of the end of martial law, much of Shang Qin's surrealism falls from the bone, so to speak. Which suggests that surrealism may have been a political cover for a poet of compassion and social justice.

The purpose of the present volume is to showcase the quality of the poet's work in this particular genre rather than to present a comprehensive survey of his oeuvre.

Jupiter

Near the stove by the window over there, on the far side of the tumbling earth, the sky is the eye of a forlorn mother. The clouds have become inflamed. A garden hoe breaks into dance with the sound of a startled bird bolting from a hot skillet. Likewise, a child experiences a growth spurt. And the creature that just awoke from the dream of an afternoon and is now twirling in circles in the fruitless effort to bite its own tail is both a yellow dog and the planet Jupiter.

My Amoeba Kid Brother

After Joan Miró's “Dog Barking at the Moon”

The angry little fellow plucking at my khaki shirttail as I barrel down the stairs is my amoeba kid-brother, whose invitation I only managed to put off after endless hemming and hawing. The boy is an absolute beast, a dog barking at the moon. The scruff of his neck whines, “How come you never wanna come up to my place? You saw the ladder, look how long and narrow it is. You got a nest of your own in town like this, with stars?”

Weird how anyone could have a kid brother like that, “clean and dirty at the same time.” Like a hand or the paw of a raccoon. I bet the underside of that paw is the spitting image of a pangolin's front footpad. So a guy has an amoeba kid-brother who simultaneously resembles a raccoon and a pangolin, while I throw scores of shadows on the midnight streets.

Steve Bradbury teaches at National Central University in Taipei, Taiwan. Besides Fusion Kitsch (Zephyr 2001), he is the translator of The Prison Diary of Ho Chi Minh (Tinfish Press 2003).

---

DARKNESS SPOKEN: COLLECTED POEMS OF INGEBORG BACHMANN
Ingeborg Bachmann
From the German by Peter Filkins
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-84-4 (paper) $24.95
Buy Now From CCNow
5½ x 8¼
688 pages [bilingual German/English]

Darkness Spoken gathers together Bachmann's two celebrated books of poetry, as well as the early and late poems not collected in book form. This new, expanded edition contains 129 poems recently released from Bachmann's archives and which have never before been translated. Twenty-five of these also appear in German in this bilingual edition for the first time anywhere. The addition of these new poems will help expand awareness of Bachmann's development as a writer, as well as the fact that she continued to write poetry throughout her career, even while developing the ideas for her groundbreaking novels. Just as Bachmann's Malina sought to expand the possibilities of the novel, Darkness Spoken contains the bedrock of a vision as far reaching as it is indelible, and as uncompromising as it is bound to hope. Through translation of the poems, scholarly notes, and a critical introduction, this volume will supply the foundation necessary to draw attention to Bachmann's achievement on the part of readers and critics alike.

Ingeborg Bachmann was born in 1926 in Klagenfurt, Austria. She studied philosophy at the universities of Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna, where she wrote her dissertation on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In 1953 she received the poetry prize from Gruppe 47 for her first volume, Borrowed Time (Die gestundete Zeit), after which there followed her second collection, Invocation of the Great Bear (Anrufung des großen Bären), in 1956. Bachmann also went on to write short stories, essays, opera libretti, and novels, including The Thirtieth Year, Malina, and The Book of Franza. At the time of her death in a fire in Rome in 1973, Bachmann was at work on a cycle of novels titled Todesarten (Ways of Dying), of which Malina was the first published volume.

Along with her close friend Paul Celan, Bachmann was considered the premiere German language poet of her generation. Her various awards include the Georg Büchner Prize, the Berlin Critics Prize, the Bremen Award, and the Austrian State Prize for literature. Her work remains highly influential to this day, and she is now regarded as a pioneer of European feminism and postwar literature. Influencing numerous writers from Thomas Bernhard to Christa Wolf, Bachmann's poetic investigation into the nature and limits of language in the face of history remains unmatched in its ability to combine philosophical insight with haunting lyricism.

Peter Filkins has published two volumes of poetry, What She Knew (1998) and After Homer (2002), and has translated Bachmann's The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann. He is the recipient of an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association, and the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches at Simon's Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

---

THE FORGOTTEN KEYS
Tomasz Różycki
From the Polish by Mira Rosenthal
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-92-5 (paper) $14.95
Buy Now From CCNow
6 x 8
128 pages [bilingual Polish/English]

“Personal” for Różycki means also transpersonal; the persona of his poetry holds the memory of an entire family or tribe, or perhaps even of society in general. And there's no mockery here. Różycki's poetry is serious, a private response to the historic moment. Without a doubt, a vital new poet has emerged from the Polish language.
—Adam Zagajewski

Tomasz Różycki belongs to a group of outstanding younger poets from Silesia, a region in Poland that bears the mark of a distinct mixture of cultures. Many families were relocated to the region in a forced migration after World War II, and shifting borders have likewise added influences from Germany and other neighboring countries. Through translations of a selection of poems from Różycki's five collections of poetry in Polish, as well as a critical introduction, The Forgotten Keys acquaints readers with a distinctive and formidable Polish writer. Unlike other contemporary Polish poets who clearly reject the heavy historicism of Czesław Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert, Różycki claims such influence, exploring both personal and collective memory.

The translator Mira Rosenthal is a poet and founding editor of Lyric Poetry Review. She has been a Fulbright Fellow to Poland and selected and edited a special issue of Lyric on new Polish poetry in translation. Her work has appeared in the journals Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Notre Dame Review, among others.

---

SO TRANSLATING RIVERS AND CITIES
Zhang Er
From the Chinese by Bob Holman, Arpine Konyalian Grenier, Timothy Liu, Bill Ransom, Susan Schultz and Leonard Schwartz
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-93-3 (paper) $14.00
Buy Now From CCNow
6 1/8 x 8
152 pages [bilingual Chinese/English]

In So Translating Rivers and Cities, Zhang Er offers a glorious scroll or map of transformations. Everywhere in these poems, the image of enchantment becomes luminous fact of enlightenment. Wisdom proceeds through the enchanted eye into pure mind, finding no obstacle, broaching no impediment. The effect is of a sudden, entirely true transparency.
—Donald Revel

Shuttle, ferry, transport, transfer, transformation, translate. And so this book goes, these are its qualities and actions as it performs our world—many landscapes. Strange tales of our tribe, like dangerous tangled scarlet kisses and fire-red slippers, are caught in these wending lines. We are shuttled between periphery and center, exploring all that might lie there—smooth ovum at center, lying in wait, reproductive; at the outskirts, the mind, a restless wind. The poems move us back and forth from past to future, future to past, always fingering an unstable and gripping present.
—Eleni Sikelianos

So Translating Rivers and Cities is a bilingual selection of work from Zhang Er's three most recent Chinese manuscripts. As with her previous Zephyr book, Verses on Bird, an intriguing aspect of this project is the list of translators involved in the project—among them Bob Holman, Timothy Liu, Susan Schultz and Leonard Schwartz—all well-known poets and critics. Their participation is necessary in capturing the multiple layers of Er's work throughout her varied poetic sequences.

Zhang Er was born in Beijing, China and moved to New York City in 1986. Her writings of poetry, non-fiction, and essays have appeared in publications in Taiwan, China, the American émigré community and in a number of American journals. She is the author of multiple books in Chinese and in English translation. She has read from her work at international festivals, conferences, reading series and universities in China, France, Portugal, Russia, Peru, Singapore, Hong Kong as well as in the U.S. She currently teaches at The Evergreen State College in Washington.

Bob Holman's eighth book, A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, a collaboration with Chuck Close, was published in 2003. He was a founder of Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, the first major label devoted to poetry. He is Chief Curator of the People's Poetry Gathering, Poetry Guide at About.com, and Proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club (bowerypoetry.com). He was recently appointed Visiting Professor of Writing at Columbia University, and received the 2003 Barnes & Noble “Writers for Writers” Award.

Arpine Konyalian Grenier, author of St. Gregory's Daughter and Whores of Samarkand, is a graduate of the American University of Beirut and the MFA Program at Bard College, New York. Her work has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Phoebe, and Kiosk.

Timothy Liu's first book of poems, Vox Angelica (Alice James Books, 1992), received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His subsequent books of poems are Burnt Offerings (Copper Canyon Press, 1995) Say Goodnight (Copper Canyon Press, 1998), and Hard Evidence (Talisman House, 2001). Tenured at William Paterson University, Liu lives in Manhattan.

Bill Ransom has published six novels and six collections of poems, including Finding True North from Copper Canyon Press, which was nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His novel Jaguar was recently re-released by Wildside Press. He is a member of the faculty at The Evergreen State College.

Susan M. Schultz is the author of multiple poetry and essay collections, most recently And Then Something Happened (Salt, 2004) and A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (Alabama, 2005). She edited The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (Alabama, 1995). She founded Tinfish Press, which publishes a journal and chapbooks featuring experimental work from the Pacific. Schultz is Professor of English at the University f Hawai`i-Manoa.

Leonard Schwartz is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Ear and Ethos and The Tower of Diverse Shores (Talisman House). He is also the author of a collection of essays A Flicker At The Edge Of Things: Essays on Poetics 1987-1997 (Spuyten Duyvil) and co-editor of two anthologies of contemporary American poetry: Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and An Anthology of New(American) Poets ( both from Talisman House). He teaches at The Evergreen State College in Washington.

---

ANXIETY OF WORDS: CONTEMPORARY POETRY
BY KOREAN WOMEN
Ch'oe Sung-ja, Kim Hyesoon, Yi Yon-ju
From the Korean by Don Mee Choi
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-87-9 (paper) $16.00
Buy Now From CCNow
6 x 9
200 pages [Bilingual Korean/English]

Don Mee Choi, a fine poet herself, has translated both the spirit and words of these outsiders and experimenters into poetry that is just as striking to English-speakers as it was to Koreans under the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee when it was first written. Anxiety of Words has widened the conversation of Korean poetry to include the voice of Korean women—a voice that needs to be heard.
—American Poet, Spring 2007

Anxiety of Words is the first anthology of Korean women's poetry that challenges one of Korea's most enduring literary traditions: that “yoryu” (female) poetry must be gentle and subservient. By using innovative language, and vividly depicting women's lives and struggles within an often repressive society, these three contemporary poets defiantly insist that poetry can be part of social change—indeed, that it must be. Ch'oe Sung-ja, Kim Hyesoon, and Yi Yon-ju have written unforgettable poems that now, thanks to Don Mee Choi's translations, are available to English-speaking readers for the first time. With a lengthy introduction on the history of women's poetry in Korea, and biographical notes on the three poets, this volume is an eye-opening exploration for any reader interested in Korea, poetry, and contemporary women's literature.

These are pioneering translations of three women who are themselves pioneers in a patriarchal literary culture. In bringing these remarkable poems to life in English, Don Mee Choi is breaking down lingering barriers to writing women in Korea. This poetry has long cried out for an audience within and without Korea, and now it will finally receive the hearing it deserves.
—Bruce Fulton, Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation, University of British Columbia

In Anxiety of Words Don Mee Choi shatters the barrier between West and East to bring us the defiant, vulnerable and intellectually fierce collective voice of Korean women poets. In this historic anthology of work heretofore unavailable in English, Choi gives us access to dynamic and unforgettable poems. This book is a must-read for lovers of literature and for anyone who wants to hear complex truths from women in struggle with their globalizing world.
—Minnie Bruce Pratt

Ch'oe Sung-ja (b. 1952) is one of the most highly regarded contemporary women poets of South Korea. Ch'oe studied German literature at Korea University at a time when there were only two hundred women enrolled in the entire university. She began writing poetry while in college and became the first woman editor of Korea University's literary journal. In 1979, Ch'oe became the first woman poet to be published in a literary journal, Literature and Intellect. Ch'oe's poetry, which violated the criteria of decorum that had been long imposed on women poets, caused a stir in South Korea's predominantly male literary establishment. Ch'oe is part of the new wave of feminist poets of Korea to merge after the early pioneering women poets of the 1920s and 30s, who explored and gave voice to women's lives under the oppressive patriarchy. Ch'oe published four collections of poetry between 1981 and 1993. In 1994, she participated in the Iowa International Writers' Program. She now works as a literary translator in Seoul, and is translating a collection of short stories by J.D. Salinger.

Kim Hyesoon's (b. 1955) poetry first appeared in Literature and Intellect, the same journal in which Ch'oe's work also made its debut. Kim majored in Korean literature for her undergraduate and graduate degrees. She is a member of Another Culture, an organization which emerged in the 1980s and has played a critical role in feminist literary research and publication, including the development of women's studies in South Korea. Kim teaches creative writing and Korean poetry at Seoul College of Arts. In 2001, Kim received the So-wol Poetry Award. Her book of poetry, Seoul, My Upanishad (Munhak kwa jisongsa, 1994) was awarded the Kim Su-yong Contemporary Poetry Award in 2000. Kim is the first woman to receive this coveted award. In her work she explores women's multiple and simultaneous existence as grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and lovers. Kim Hyesoon has published seven collections of poetry; her most recent publication is a collection of critical essays about women and writing.

Yi Yon-ju made her literary debut in a journal called World of Writers (1991). The same year, Yi's first book of poetry, A Night Market Where There Are Prostitutes, was published by Sekyesa, a well-known literary press in South Korea. Yi's second collection of poems was published in 1993 after her death. According to the renowned feminist critic Kim Chong-nan, Yi's poetry has a critical place in the poetry of the 1980s. Yi depicts in her poetry women who live on the fringes of South Korean society, marginalized by the rapid industrialization of the 1970s and 80s, which, in part, was made possible by the exploitation of young women from poor rural areas. Not much is known about Yi's life. According to her brother, Yi Yong-ju, the night Yi committed suicide she had asked him not to reveal anything about her life except for her date and place of birth.

Don Mee Choi is a translator and scholar of Korean literature. Her literary focus is on the exploration of the cultural, historical, and political roles of contemporary Korean women's poetry and the critical examination of literary translation in the context of South Korea's post-coloniality. She currently lives in Seattle, Washington.