WANG JIAXIN (1957)

 

Like so many of his generation, the Chinese Poet Wang Jiaxin, born in Danjiangkou, Hubei Province, was sent to the countryside for labor after high school during the Cultural Revolution. Two years after Mao Zedong's death, in 1978, he was able to study Chinese at Wuhan University. In 1985 he published his first collection of poems. He eventually became an editor, essayist, critic, literary translator and professor of Chinese literature at Renmin University Beijing. Since that first collection, he has continued to publish steadily, winning many national and international awards and participating in many poetry festivals around the world. Regarded as one of the most important post-misty poets, Wang is widely published and also known as an essayist and literary translator. He is renowned for his Chinese translations of, among others, Paul Celan, Marina Tsvetaeva, Federico García Lorca and Osip Mandelstam.

 

 Wang Jiaxin started writing poetry while in college and gained more recignition in the 1990s after moving to Beijing. He has been mostly known for his long narrative poems such as ‘Pasternak’, ‘London Notes’, ‘Eulogy’, which drew inspiration from long conversations with his literary relatives in Russia and England.  After a break from poetry writing and devoting to translation, he returned with a new poetic voice—more lyrical and condensed. In more recent years, he has shifted his focus to capturing small moments encountered in his travels and extending them to a more metaphorical sphere. 

 

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