This bilingual posthumous collection is a detailed, retrospective look at Zhang Zao, one of the more brilliant poetic minds from China of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He left China in 1986 and lived in Germany until his death at 47 in 2010.
 
The poems in this collection span Zhang Zao’s short career, beginning with “Mirror,” one of his earliest and best known works, and ending with “Lantern Town,” written less than two months before his death. As Bei Dao writes in his afterword, Zhang Zao “possessed both a thorough grasp of European literature and culture and an introspective understanding of the broad, profound Asian aesthetics: between the two philosophies, he sought a new tension and melting point.” Translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Mirror is Zhang Zao's first book to be translated into English and will be bilingual in Chinese and English on facing pages.
 
Mirror is the twelfth and final volume in Zephyr Press' Jintian Series of Contemporary Chinese Poetry, which was launched in 2011 and has been curated by Bei Dao, Lydia H. Liu, and Christopher Mattison. 
 
Zhang Zao 张枣 was a key literary figure of the “third generation” of Chinese contemporary poetry. Born in 1962 in Changsha, Hunan province, he rose to national fame as one of the “Five Sichuan Masters.” Greatly admired by his peers for championing a complex yet harmonizing fusion of traditional writing and avant-garde flair in his work, and for his versatility in many foreign languages, Zhang was a recognized literary critic, translator, and scholar. In 1986, he moved to Germany. For several years, he served as poetry editor for the literary magazine Jintian and taught at the University of Tübingen. He returned briefly to China in 2005 to lecture at Henan University and the Minzu University of China. Zhang Zao died in Tübingen in 2010 at the age of 47.
 
Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a writer, poet, translator, musician, and editor who writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese. She is the author of a novel Dear Chrysanthemums (Scribner, 2023), which was longlisted for the 2024 Carnegie Medal for Excellence. She has also published five poetry collections including Rain in Plural (Princeton, 2020) and The Ruined Elegance (Princeton, 2016), and fifteen books of translation, including Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm by Yu Xiuhua (Astra House, 2021). Sze-Lorrain's books have been finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the Best Translated Book Award. As a zheng harpist, she has performed around the world. She lives in Paris.