Chen Zihong 陈子弘

Chen Zihong is a poet and translator born in Chengdu in 1966, and he continues to call the city home. He is the author of three chapbooks: By the Riverside (2001, Tin Ma Book, Hong Kong), Mirrored Moments Haiku (a Chinese-English bilingual edition, 2023), and Just A Means Of (2024, Studio of Awakening). His translations include the works of several contemporary foreign poets, as well as English renderings of contemporary Chinese poets like Bai Hua and others. He was awarded the Mi Shi Zi Literary Prize for Poetry in 2024.

On his practice of writing and translating poetry, Chen Zihong writes:

For me, lines of poetry always come into being in the cracks between memory and language. My experience as a translator has shown me that every language is a unique darkroom, and the images developed inside them have different tonal colours. I’ve elevated the Vietnamese poet Vu Hoang’s Chuong’s ‘drunkenness’ to a metaphor for spiritual transcendence, and written in Chinese of the limpid clarity of a pot of white tea. This kind of reconstitution has taught me that poetry shouldn’t stop at loyalty to past language; it is about seeking a new linguistic vessel. Poetry shouldn’t be a closed system of symbols, but a contract that invites the reader to fill the gaps.