Phases of the Quotidian

C. Francis Fisher interviews Shangyang Fang about his new book “Study of Sorrow: Translations.”

By C. Francis FisherNovember 24, 2025

• Poetry

• Cultural Studies

I FIRST LEARNED that Shangyang Fang was working on a new collection of translations, Study of Sorrow, at his apartment in Boston. We had both recently moved to the city and were each other’s only local friend. Luckily for me, Fang is an incredible cook, and our dinners generally involved four to six different dishes crowding his small coffee table: head-on shrimp bathed in minced garlic eyed me from their black-and-white pan while braised pork ribs fell apart before feeling the fork.

One such night, I asked Fang what he was working on since his debut poetry book, Burying the Mountain, had come out in 2021. He said he’d been having trouble writing. As multilingual writers often do when faced with that beast known as writer’s block, he turned to translation. But the work wasn’t going well; in fact, he was finding the ancient poems repetitive. “It’s always the moon,” he said. “They didn’t have other things to write about like hand lotion or Coca-Cola, so it is always the moon, oh god, the moon.”

Published by Copper Canyon Press in October 2025, Study of Sorrow brings Song dynasty ci poetry to the forefront. This anthology translates 29 poets, many of whom appear in English here for the first time. In their original form, these poems would have been put to music, and still today, students recite these pieces at the beginning of school days, as Fang did while growing up in Chengdu, China. The living aspect of this ancient tradition allows Fang to experiment with his English renderings, knowing that, while he certainly owes respect to the originals, they are also alive and well.

The great success of these translations is Fang’s ability to maintain this lived-with quality. He eschews footnotes and other signatures of the academy in order to bring the English versions to lovers of poetry rather than scholars of ancient China. These lively renditions remind us, as all great classics should, how much we have in common with those who lived thousands of years ago. His colloquial translations allow a reader into the world with minimal intervention, as in a Xin Qiji poem that ends with “Last night I drank beside a pine tree. / I asked the pine tree, Guess / how drunk I am. It swayed in the wind / as if coming to hold me. / I pushed it away and said, Piss off!”

As I write this, a white orb hangs outside my window. It is the moon, forever changed by the experience of reading these poets who, with nothing else to write about, allowed it to mean almost anything. With this collection of translations, Fang succeeds in doing what artists strive for: changing how we see our quotidian world.

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C. FRANCIS FISHER: I’ve heard you say that English speakers will think you don’t know Chinese and Chinese speakers will think you don’t speak English. Can you tell me more about that? What’s your relationship to fidelity as a translator?

SHANGYANG FANG: It began as a joke. I just spent three months in China without speaking a word of English. My friends there corrected my pronunciation in local dialects and teased me for misusing half-remembered idioms. Then, two days ago, landing at San Francisco International Airport, when the customs officer asked my purpose of travel, I felt like I was taking an English oral exam. I stammered, feeling the return of peculiar English consonants whetting my rusted tongue. There, I was reminded how translation lives in that liminal space, in the slippage between the native and the foreign. It’s there that an openness occurs, a sovereign space that belongs to the translator, where both languages become ductile and estranged.

That joke also discloses my deeper anxiety when I began these translations. I didn’t translate verbatim; at times, I revised, restructured, even added or removed lines. In that sense, I was an “infidel.” For example, in Li Qingzhao’s “To the Tune ‘Lin Jiang Xian: Riverside Immortals,’” there’s a line that literally reads: “The willow trees and plum blossoms are budding.” But after translating endless willows and plums, I was weary of them—just as Li herself, in that poem, expresses weariness with life, ending with “I have no desire to hang up the lanterns. / No desire to walk in the last snow.” So I rendered the line instead as: “Some trees / budding—the usual patterns of spring.” Between the source word and the translated word lies a distance charged with possibilities. What bridges them, I believe, is the same human feeling that persists across time, culture, and language. That is where I hope my fidelity lies.

In relationship to fidelity, I noticed that the Chinese is often much shorter than the English translation. Can you speak to why that happens?

Ancient Chinese is both dense and ambiguous. Each monosyllabic character can carry multiple meanings, which crystallize only in combination with others. They’re assembled like toy bricks, often forming compact adjective-noun or verb-noun compounds. I love the English word sunset for a similar reason: it fuses a noun and a verb into something at once active and still, like a moored boat moving gently with the water. That duality is common in Chinese phrases. The language also omits articles, linking verbs, and many prepositions. Nouns, verbs, and adjectives often slide into each other’s roles. Pronouns are rarely used; without “I,” “you,” or “we,” the boundary between observer and observed dissolves, leaving images and emotions unmoored. Classical Chinese poetry also avoids tense. Time isn’t marked as past, present, or future but is suggested through imagery—seasonal shifts, historical events—or through form: stanza breaks, repetitions, narrative sequencing.

Then there’s allusion. Some poems rely so heavily on historical and literary references that translation multiplies their length many times over. Xin Qiji was one of my favorite Song poets until I began translating him; in English, a poem of his can become 20 times longer. In “Sending Off My Cousin Mao Jia”—just 12 lines—he folds in seven different allusions, each of which could expand into a short story.

Here are two lines in literal translation:

马上琵琶关塞黑, 更长门, 翠辇辞金阙。看燕燕, 送归妾。
将军百战身名裂。向河梁, 回头万里, 故人长绝。

On horseback, [ ] pipa—borderland darkens.
At Long Gate, [ ] jade palanquin leaves the golden palace.
Swallows send back wife.
General, after a hundred battles, ruins his fame.
On the riverbank, [ ] turns back:
ten thousand miles—farewell to an old friend.

Notice the empty brackets—subjects are omitted. Who plays the pipa on horseback? What happens at the border? Who rides in the palanquin? Who is the wife? Which general turns back, and for whom? For Chinese readers, these gaps activate a whole web of stories and references. In English, though, such shorthand doesn’t survive. I chose not to push these explanations into footnotes—like ingredient lists on the back of canned food—but instead to weave the allusions into the body of the poem itself, reshaping a lyric into something closer to narrative.

I’m really interested in this reshaping, especially as it relates to temporality. What’s the translation’s relationship to time? Are you updating the language?

I’m glad you asked about time rather than timelessness—the latter would be much harder to answer. I believe all translations are bound to their moment, because language itself keeps changing. I don’t think of my work as “updating” the language so much as letting these ancient voices be heard in English that feels as immediate, lucid, and urgent today as those poems did in their own time.

This became clear on a recent road trip with a friend, a native Chinese speaker. I read her the original poems, and she immediately asked for the English translation—she couldn’t follow the old Chinese. It was like reading Beowulf aloud to an American friend, who would naturally ask for a modern rendering. Sometimes my versions veer into the vernacular, and in doing so, they inevitably lose some of the elegance, indirection, and beauty of the originals. Well, beauty is almost always intensified by the distance—between viewer and object, or poet and reader—and in translation, that distance is time: the millennium between their moment and ours.

Take Li Qingzhao, one of the greatest poets of the Song dynasty—and, famously, an alcoholic. She wrote about getting drunk: “I finished a new poem / with risky rhymes and a hangover. […] Spring chill is unbearable. / I put down curtains and don’t even go on the balcony. / The coals burn out, so I must get up.” This translation might seem less elegant and stylized than the original, but I feel this rendering is truer to her voice. She was a cool girl in the Song dynasty; she’d be a cool girl today. My task as a translator is to preserve the poem’s heartbeat and transport it alive across a thousand-year distance.

I think this heartbeat has a lot to do with music—in the collection, the tunes are listed along with titles at the top of every poem. What’s the role of music as it relates to the original poems?

The “ci” poems of the Song dynasty were literally “song lyrics.” They were meant to be sung by hired performers, accompanied by instruments at banquets and private gatherings. The poem’s title often has nothing to do with its subject; instead, it points to the melody or formal pattern for which the poem was written.

Whereas Tang “shi” is defined by its strict symmetry—four or eight lines of fixed length, five or seven characters per line, tightly governed by tonal parallelism—the Song ci distinguishes itself through irregular line lengths and flexible rhyme. This variability gave the form its alternate name: “long-and-short sentences.” That fluidity not only made ci an ideal vessel for layered and extended emotions but also aligned it with the phrasing and movement of melodies.

Yet for all its apparent freedom, ci was bound by an even stricter system. Those shifting line lengths were not arbitrary—they followed precise patterns of syllable counts, rhymes, tempo, and tonal arrangement that had to fit existing tunes. The process was so meticulous and even mechanical that, in the Song dynasty, one did not speak of “writing” ci but of “filling in” ci—meaning to fit lyrics to an existing melody or structural framework. That’s the irony: by submitting completely to music’s constraints, language produced the illusion of freedom.

How did you deal with this formalism when you were translating into English, a language so different from Chinese? In what ways do you attend to the musicality of the original?

I’ve been asked that question often, not just about translation but also about my own poems. There’s an assumption that if you write in a second language, you automatically carry over the forms and music of your first. But the truth is, the music doesn’t transfer—the formal elements are lost.

That sense of loss is often viewed with suspicion. The cliché “lost in translation” suggests that translations are failed copies, inauthentic adaptations that deserve dismissal. I like Robert Frost’s definition of poetry: “It is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.” I read that line a little differently—as an invitation to surrender. Poetry is about surrendering oneself to the [process] of finding the unspeakable that surrenders itself to being lost. In that surrender, something unexpected can be created in the act of losing.

There’s no single perfect word for the cream-colored round rock that hangs in the sky, so 7,000 languages invent their own symbols and sounds for it. That, to me, is beautiful. What disappears in one language reappears in another as new music, new form, a different life that reaches different readers. Sometimes I imagine Liu Yong as a failed American pop lyricist haunting a casino in Las Vegas. It’s a bit absurd, but that’s where translation gets interesting for me—where loss becomes invention.

As you are someone with backgrounds in both China and the United States, I’m curious who your readers for this project were. People who speak English and Chinese?

I’m lucky to have close friends who aren’t poets or artists—because of my engineering background, most of them now work in finance or tech in the US, though we all grew up in China. I forced them to read my early drafts, insisting it was “cultivation of the soul,” a small antidote to all the moneymaking. Since we all memorized and recited some of these poems in school, I was fascinated to find that when I asked them to recall certain lines in Chinese, they couldn’t always reproduce the exact wording, but they remembered the music: the syllable counts, the intonations, the rhyme. They could hum along with the rhythm and tonal patterns without pronouncing the words. Later, when the manuscript took fuller shape, I shared it with my poet friends, most of whom don’t read Chinese. I wanted to test whether the poems worked in English on their own terms. I told them: “Don’t treat these as translations, just read them as poems. Tell me if they hold up—or if they should be thrown away.”

I want to ask now about the collection in a broader sense. How did you select these poems? How did you decide the organizational methods of the volume?

I began with the poems I loved as a child, the ones I could still recite from memory. From there, I moved into the poets’ lesser-known works. What struck me was how often they wrote about one another—poems for friends who were also poets. Following these threads, I found myself immersed in their world, discovering a vast web of relationships: teacher and student, father and son, civil servant and emperor, political rivals, lovers, enemies, prisoners, exiles. They helped and betrayed one another, shat on one other’s poems, raised toasts, boarded boats, disappeared forever. I translated while following these intertwined stories. At one point, I considered arranging the book alphabetically by poet, but that felt lifeless. I wasn’t making a scholarly reference; I was making a book of poems, and I wanted the poems to breathe in the present. So I chose to arrange them thematically: beginning with “departure,” moving through “lovesickness,” enduring “wartime,” facing the “solitude” of ruined nations and families, drifting into “nostalgia” and bursts of being “unbridled,” and finally arriving at the poems of age and the “passing years.” By organizing the book this way—without grouping poems by author—I hope the collection feels fluid and many-voiced, a chorus rather than a catalog.

Leaving this book behind and looking forward, can you tell me how working on these translations changed your own poetry writing practice?

I’m not entirely sure. I began translating because I was struggling in my own writing. After publishing my first book, I fell into silence. I wanted to find a new language but couldn’t. So I turned back to these ancient poems, inhabiting their voices through translation, as a way of escaping my own impasse, my inability to speak.

I don’t know that the poems themselves have directly influenced my writing, but the act of translating them has. At times, translating feels like an attempt to understand a poem across the labyrinth of words, figures, and ornament. Before translating, I felt I never tried to attend to a poem so completely. This process of understanding is difficult. There are times I need to peel off the flesh and clothing of language to see the bones of the poem—and then seeing the disappearance of the bones, the lasting emptiness. Readers once described the language of my first book, Burying the Mountain, as ornate, sensual, figurative, gorgeous. I am grateful for that. But, perhaps in reaction or perhaps because of translation, I now find myself drawn to the opposite.

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Shangyang Fang grew up in Chengdu, China, and writes in both English and Chinese. A graduate from Michener Center for Writers, he is a recipient of the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry award and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. His works have appeared in The Nation, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review, among other venues. Author of the poetry collection Burying the Mountain (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), he is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

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Featured image: Photo of Shangyang Fang by Shilin Sun.