In Their Own Words
Fiona Sze-Lorrain on “The Prince of Chu Dreams of Rain” and Translating Zhang Zao
The Prince of Chu Dreams of Rain
I want to connect to the dream of someone from the past—
an idle cloud shared by endless raindrops.
My heart wants to leap into bewilderment,
a palace appears like spring leaves, frothing wine leaps like fish.
Let the one who drinks opposite me lift and drop my hand.
My hand pulses, an empty pavilion exhales clouds and mist.
My dream is dreaming another dream.
Reishi mushrooms on a withered tree, silk around its waist.
Moths from the west probe the sunset;
barely away from their love nest, they must have seen
the one whispering my name.
The address of no one might thunder and soar, open and fall,
bestowing jade, raising doubts.
She might keep her appointment, dripping wet.
How odd, on the eve of raindrops
my body already feels wet:
water wrung from crisp green bamboo shoots,
wind from the canyon blows into their hearts.
Yet my ears seem to fly into midair,
or stand and burn, burning the petty
woman who feigns sleep inside them.
And burning her ears into ashes,
so she can never eavesdrop into my starving heart.
Look, this self-indulgent world is full of wine.
Even bamboos are tinged with dawns and years.
How painful their bleak voices, how painful.
The more pain the more I yearn to peel them into seven holes.
My pain is also the world’s pain.
Nameless one, please don’t listen to me.
I know you are somewhere playing in the wind.
A blank dream of a dream, a fake lotus leaf,
the address leading me to insomnia.
Am I not the flame if you live in each drop of rain?
Gods and men on different paths reach the same end.
I want, I want to love your godly, hot tears.
June 12, 1987—University of Würzburg
Translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain.
Reprinted from Mirror: Poems by Zhang Zao, translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain (Zephyr Press, 2025) with the permission of the translator. All rights reserved.
On “The Prince of Chu Dreams of Rain” and Translating Zhang Zao
British poet and writer Fiona Sampson describes Zhang Zao as “a leading figure in contemporary world literature, a poet who uniquely integrated Chinese and Western traditions.” I couldn't agree more: Zhang Zao is very much an intercultural poet; although he writes in Chinese, his imaginative world transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries. Ahead of his own time, he might have painted a self-portrait in this poem: “My dream is dreaming another dream.”
Zhang is known for his sophisticated verses and scholarship. He is one of the few poets of his generation who works on long and sequenced poems, often with an impressive range of literary sources, blending traditions with apparent ease. “The Prince of Chu Dreams of Rain” is one of my favorites of Zhang Zao’s poetry. It also happens to be one of my earliest translations of his writings. (I started working on this project in 2011.) In terms of historical context, the Prince of Chu may refer either to King Huai, the sovereign of Chu who reigned from 328 to 299 BCE, or King Qingxiang, who ruled the state of Chu from 298 to 263 BCE. This dramatic monologue is an example of how the poet boldly experiments with the form and content. In it lies a reservoir of scenes, narratives, and extrapolations beyond the metaphorical. I can hear the epic voice that Zhang likes to create or embody. Readers will recognize the self-mythology and philosophical take on (im)mortality: “Gods and men on different paths reach the same end.”
Zhang Zao’s untimely death is a great loss to the international poetry scene. It seems fitting that Mirror: Poems by Zhang Zao is the twelfth and concluding volume of the bilingual Jintian series of contemporary Chinese poetry. I’m grateful for this opportunity to live with Zhang’s work in another language, from another culture, for fourteen years and hopefully more.
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Zhang Zao 张枣 is 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 2004 and lectured at Henan University the next spring. In 2007, he began teaching in Beijing at the Minzu University of China. Zhang Zao died in 2010 in Tübingen, the town of Hölderlin. He was forty-seven.
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 in stories Dear Chrysanthemums (Scribner, 2023), five poetry collections, including Rain in Plural (Princeton, 2020) and The Ruined Elegance (Princeton, 2016), and eighteen books of translation, most recently Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm by Yu Xiuhua (Astra House, 2021). Longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, she was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the Best Translated Book Award. She is a judge for the 2025 International Dublin Literary Award. As a zheng harpist, she has performed around the world. She lives in Paris.
