The sun once shone on me; in Chongqing, a dropof dew with clarity, images enfolding in petalsI go around the air, patch by patch; railwaysharm trains until they flee, sparing a light cuckoo’s songI say, Hello summit, wutong trees, pines and cypressesHigh or low, please let me love like in a secret rendezvousIn Hunan, sunlight kindles childhood eyesMy hands grow, the path they fondle is cut shortDust swirls around the city and dances round and roundLike a brother the trumpet wheels a kaleidoscopeTeething pain turns into a scar on the buttocksA fruit grabs me up a tree and harshlydrops me. Why, I still feel alive todayin a pseudo place made of paper; springcoos, the sun touches everywhere like a quacktouching this early or belatedera, touching this world’s utopiaAh, a hidden dragon waits for action, as futile as rotten ropeMarch 18, 1988—Trier University 早春二月太阳曾经照亮我；在重庆，一颗露珠的心清早含着图像朵朵我绕过一片又一片空气；铁道让列车疼得逃光，留杜鹃轻歌我说，顶峰你好，还有梧桐松柏无论上下，请让我幽会般爱着在湖南，阳光照亮童年的眼睛我的手长大，抚摸的道路变短尘埃绕城市袅袅地跳循环舞喇叭像弟弟，车轮就是万花筒换牙的疼变成屁股上的伤疤果实把我捉到树上，狠狠把我摔落。哎，我感到我今天还活着活在一个纸做的假地方；春天咕咕叫，太阳像庸医到处摸摸摸摸这个提前或是推迟了的时代，摸摸这个世界的乌托邦哎，潜龙勿用，好比一根烂绳索。1988. 3. 18 特里雅大学
Early Spring, February
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“Early Spring, February” from MIRROR: by Zhang Zao.
Published by Zephyr Press on September 23, 2025.
English Translation Copyright © 2025 by Fiona Sze-Lorrain.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Zhang Zao 张枣 is a key literary figure of the “third generation” of Chinese contemporary poetry. Born in 1962 in Changsha, Hunan province, he rose to national fame as one of the “Five Sichuan Masters.” Greatly admired by his peers for championing a complex yet harmonizing fusion of traditional writing and avant-garde flair in his work, and for his versatility in many foreign languages, Zhang was a recognized literary critic, translator, and scholar. In 1986, he moved to Germany. For several years, he served as poetry editor for the literary magazine Jintian and taught at the University of Tübingen. He returned briefly to China in 2004 and lectured at Henan University the next spring. In 2007, he began teaching in Beijing at the Minzu University of China. Zhang Zao died in 2010 in Tübingen, the town of Hölderlin. He was forty-seven.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a writer, poet, translator, musician, and editor who writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese. She is the author of a novel in stories Dear Chrysanthemums (Scribner, 2023), five poetry collections including Rain in Plural (Princeton, 2020) and The Ruined Elegance (Princeton, 2016), and twenty books of translation, most recently Mirror: Selected Poems by Zhang Zao (Zephyr, 2025) and Ocean, as Much as Rain: Stories, Lyrical Prose, and Poems from Tibet by Tsering Woeser (Duke, 2026; with Dechen Pemba). Longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, she was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the Best Translated Book Award. She is a judge for the 2025 International Dublin Literary Award. As a zheng harpist, she has performed around the world. She lives in Paris. www.fionasze.com
This bilingual posthumous collection is a detailed, retrospective look at Zhang Zao, one of the more brilliant poetic minds from China of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He left China in 1986 and lived in Germany until his death at 47 in 2010.
The poems in this collection span Zhang Zao’s short career, beginning with “Mirror,” one of his earliest and best known works, and ending with “Lantern Town,” written less than two months before his death. As Bei Dao writes in his afterword, Zhang Zao “possessed both a thorough grasp of European literature and culture and an introspective understanding of the broad, profound Asian aesthetics: between the two philosophies, he sought a new tension and melting point.” Translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Mirror is Zhang Zao's first book to be translated into English and will be bilingual in Chinese and English on facing pages.
Mirror is the twelfth and final volume in Zephyr Press' Jintian Series of Contemporary Chinese Poetry, which was launched in 2011 and has been curated by Bei Dao, Lydia H. Liu, and Christopher Mattison.
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