Selected Poems Hardcover – November 2, 2021 by Ai Qing

Description

Author: Ai Qing

Color: White

Package Dimensions: 15x217x274

Number Of Pages: 128

Release Date: 02-11-2021

Details: Product Description
A timeless, visionary collection of poems from one of China’s most acclaimed poets—now available in English for the first time in a generation and featuring a foreword by his son, contemporary artist and activist Ai Weiwei

One of the most influential poets in Chinese history, Ai Qing is mostly unknown to American readers, but his work has shaped the nature of poetry in China for decades. Born between the fall of imperial Manchurian rule and the establishment of the Communist People’s Republic, Ai Qing was at one time an intimate of Mao Zedong. He would eventually fall out with the leader and be sentenced to hard labor during the Cultural Revolution, when he was exiled to the remote part of the country known as “Little Siberia” with his family, including his son, Ai Weiwei.

In his work, Ai Qing tells the story of a China convulsing with change, leaving behind a legacy of feudalism and imperialism but uncertain about what the future will hold. Breaking with traditional forms of Chinese poetry, Ai Qing innovatively adapted free verse, writing with a simple sincerity in clear lines that could be understood by everyday readers.
Selected Poems is an extraordinary collection that traces the powerful inner life of this influential poet who crafted poems of protest, who longed for a newer, happier age, and who wrote with a profound lyricism that reaches deep into the heart of the reader.
About the Author
Ai Qing (1910-1996) is regarded as one of the finest modern Chinese poets, and his free verse was influential in the development of new poetry in China.

Robert Dorsett, translator, studied Chinese at the Yale-in-China Program at the Chinese University in Hong Kong. He received an M.D. from the State University of New York. He translated Wen Yiduo’s
Stagnant Water & Other Poems and (with David Pollard) the memoirs of Gao Ertai,
In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labor Camp. Robert Dorsett has also published his own poetry in
The Literary
Review,
The Kenyon Review, Northwest Review, Poetry, and elsewhere.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ForewordIn the twenty-one years between my birth in 1957 and 1978, my father, the most prominent Chinese poet in modern history, was deprived of the right to write by his government. Writing poetry was the most precious part of his life, and when he was young, Ai Qing said, “If one day my life leaves poetry, it would soon end as well.” Unfortunately, it did not end there. He left poetry but did not end his life; the regime only deprived him of his writing, forcing him to withdraw from the reading public. For many years, he was forbidden to touch pen and paper, and was sent to the Gobi Desert in the remote province of Xinjiang, where he cleaned the communal toilets of a labor camp and underwent ideological reforms day after day. When I was growing up, my father was not engaged in writing. He tenaciously faced all kinds of misfortunes brought by fate. He was known to be tolerant, upright, and selfless. Misfortunes never shook his trust in justice, and he never lost his outspoken innocence; he remained optimistic and open-minded. In his work, Ai Qing tells the story of an ancient nation in the East over the past hundred years as it bid farewell to the heavy burden of feudalism and imperialism. This land was recovering from the violent revolution of the twentieth century to become a new country. In the process, a generation of people experienced an arduous struggle, only to exchange the past repression for a new totalitarian rule as China became the country with the harshest control over freedom of thought and speech in human history. Today its political system erases history and culture and has destroyed the language formed over generations, abusively transforming it into crude political propaganda, a cliché of mediocrity, leaving aesthetics and morals in ruins. In contrast to this, Ai Qing’s poems are characterized