Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems

The internationally renowned Chinese poet’s first collection to appear in English.

“In the crevices of history, mosquitoes are everywhere,” Xi Chuan writes. Notes on the Mosquito introduces English readers to one of the most revered 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 work intertwines the mountains and roads of Xinjiang with insects and mythical beasts, ghosts and sacred spirits with chess and a Sanskrit inscription.

XI CHUAN, born in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province in 1963 and raised in Beijing, is one of China’s most celebrated poets, essayists, and literary translators. Among the numerous prizes and honors he has received are the national Lu Xun Prize for Literature, the Cikada Prize for poetry in Sweden, and the Tokyo Poetry Prize in Japan. He is a professor at the International Writing Center at Beijing Normal University.

LUCAS KLEINis a father, writer, and translator, and an associate professor of Chinese at Arizona State University. In addition to Xi Chuan he has translated contemporary Chinese poets Mang Ke and Duo Duo as well as medieval Chinese poet Li Shangyin.