Impossible Paradise - Yuhong Chen

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Résumé :
A Selected Poems introducing this award-winning Taiwanese poet in English for the first time. Chen's ardent vision spans our world, ancient and present, resonant to the core, blending Eastern and Western sensibilities in a brilliant tapestry....

Biographie:

Diana Shi, co-recipient of two US National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowships, has collaborated since 2006 with George O' Connell in translating many prominent western and Chinese-speaking poets. In 2012 they launched Pangolin House, pangolinhouse.com, an international journal of poetry and art. Ms. Shi's extensive selections from American poet Arthur Sze's The Glass Constellation appeared in Chinese under the same title in 2023. Her volume of translations of Jane Hirshfield, I Wanted Only a Little, was published in 2024.

George O' Connell, editor and translator with Diana Shi, has received numerous honors for his poetry, including Atlanta Review's International Grand Prize and the Pablo Neruda Award, as well as two US National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowships. He has also served as Fulbright professor to Peking University and National Taiwan University. Among his translations with Ms. Shi are Darkening Mirror by Wang Jiaxin...

Sommaire:

The Poetry Book Society Translation Choice Spring 2026

' May the stone steps and the deep-sleeping door summon
the camellia's impossible paradise
and your face the impossible key
May the window shudder
May the notes be blue
and the candleflame shake unequivocally'
(from ' May the Rain' )

One of Taiwan's most celebrated poets, Chen Yuhong draws on both Western and Asian literary traditions, inflected by her work as a translator of contemporary English-language women poets (Gl? ck, Oswald, Duffy). This selection makes her art widely available in English for the first time.

Her award-winning translators, George O' Connell and Diana Shi, carry across the richly metaphorical lexicon of her poems and their uncanny inhabitation of places both real and imagined, conjuring mood, angles of thought or light, animal presence, and the tides of the seasons.

In a world where much that seemed united has frayed, Chen Yuhong's finely balanced poems bring us news of other imagined worlds, and acknowledge the unexpected, its capacity to terrify or astonish.