Lucas Klein

Translator from the Chinese

Lucas Klein

Lucas Klein — radio DJ, union organizer, writer, translator, and editor — graduated Middlebury College (BA) and Yale University (PhD), and is Assistant Professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. Klein recently translated Xi Chuan’s Notes On the Mosquito: Selected Poems.

cover image of the book Bloom & Other Poems

Bloom & Other Poems

by Xi Chuan

Translated by Lucas Klein

“Bloom and change your way of living,” Xi Chuan exhorts us. “Bloom / unleash a deep underground spring with your rhizome.” In his wildly roving new collection, Bloom & Other Poems, Xi Chuan, like a modern-day master of the fu-rhapsody, delves into the incongruities of daily existence, its contradictions and echoes of ancient history, with sensuous exaltations and humorous observations. Problems of mourning and reading, thoughts on loquaciousness, Manhattan, the Luxor Temple, and socks are scrutinized, while in other poems we encounter dead friends on a visit to a small village and fakes in an antique market. At one moment we follow the river’s flow through the history of Nanjing, in another we follow an exquisite meditation on the meaning of the golden. Brimming with lyrical beauty and philosophical intensity, the collection ends with a transcript of a conversation between Xi Chuan and the journalist Xu Zhiyuan that earned seventy million views when broadcast online. Award-winning translator Lucas Klein demonstrates in this remarkable bilingual edition that Xi Chuan is one of the most electrifying international poets writing today.

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cover image of the book Notes on the Mosquito

Notes on the Mosquito

by Xi Chuan

Translated by Lucas Klein

Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems introduces English readers to one of the most celebrated poets of contemporary China. Gaining recognition as a post-Misty poet in the late ’80s, Xi Chuan was famous for his condensed, numinous lyricism, and for radiating classical Chinese influences as much as Western modernist traditions. After the crushing failure of Tiananmen Square and the death of two of his closest friends, he stopped writing for three years. He re-emerged transformed: he began writing meditative, expansive prose poems that dismantled the aestheticism and musicality of his previous self.

Divided into two sections that hinge around this formal break, Notes on the Mosquito offers the greatest hits of a deeply engaging poet whose poems intertwine the mountains and roads of Xinjiang with insects and mythical beasts, ghosts, sacred spirits, and a Sanskrit brick.

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