Description: Shi Zhi has been a major force in Chinese poetry since 1968, when several of his poems were circulated as secret handwritten manuscripts in the midst of China's Cultural Revolution. He gave voice to the aspirations of dispirited youth, and although once relegated to obscurity, he is today celebrated as one of China's most important cultural influences, having spawned the modern Chinese poetry revolution of the 1980s. This bilingual collection of Shi Zhi's most significant poems, featuring an afterword by the poet himself, is the first book-length publication of his work in English. Masterfully translated by Jonathan Stalling, and with an introduction by leading poetry critic Zhang Qinqua, this landmark collection ensures that Shi Zhi's poetry--so important to Chinese readers during the most challenging of times--will engage the hearts and minds of new readers the world over for years to come.
Brief description: Jonathan Stalling is Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma where he also serves as the Curator of the Chinese Literature Translation Archive and Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Chinese Literature Today magazine.
Review Quotes: "To read Winter Sun from cover to cover is to travel on a journey that tests one's fiber, for this is a collection that exhibits a combination of innate talent and acquired skill, a work that reveals suffering and joy in an often incomprehensible world, a work that ultimately rewards the reader with the final, redemptive voice of a poet who has gone right to the edge of the abyss and returned to inscribe it with palpable skill."--Christopher Lupke, editor of Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry