Reviews

So Translating Rivers and Cities by Timothy Liu, Leonard Schwartz, Er Zhang, Susan Schultz

jeeleongkoh's review

2.0

I picked up Zhang Er's book of poems Translating Rivers and Cities at the Brooklyn Book Festival in September. The book brings together a selection of poems from three earlier books. A modern Chinese poet, Zhang writes in free verse, with surrealistic imagery to depict some interior landscape. She has been living in New York City since 1986. The poems go on for too long, too loosely, to hold my attention. The translations, done by six different people, render the foreign in all-too-familiar English. I like best the poems in her first book The Autumn of GuYao. In those poems, she re-writes Chinese legends by inhabiting imaginatively the minds of female protagonists: NuChou (Ugly Girl) from The Legend of the Western Lands; NuWa Jing Wei (Baby Girl, Jing Wei) from The Legend of the Northern Mountains; Princess NuShi from The Legend of the Central Mountains; and XiHe, the wife of the Emperor Zun, from The Legend of the Great Beyond to the South.