In Study of Sorrow, Shangyang Fang breathes contemporary life into the poems of twenty-nine Song Dynasty Ci poets.
For many years, Song Dynasty Ci poetry has seemed eclipsed by the incandescence of Tang Poetry in the English-speaking world. In Study of Sorrow, Shangyang Fang aims to bridge this gap, translating the works of twenty-nine Song Dynasty poets, many of whom are introduced to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Collated into seven parts, these poems move through grief, love, and longing, exploring the tension and connection between the material and immaterial world. Unlike traditional scholarly translations, these renditions represent the translator’s endeavor to breathe contemporary life into ancient poems, including revisions of the original text, experimentations, and even rewrites. A beautiful conversation between these poets and their translator unfolds. Shangyang masterfully navigates the irregularity of the lines, the elusiveness of the descriptions, the indirect approach to subjects, the precise musicality, the twisting language, and the unspeakable tenderness. As investigated here, “sorrow” is transformed from a mere individual sadness to a collective experience that spans time, people, and place.
ISBN: 9781556597176
Format: Paperback
Reviews
“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.”—C. Francis Fisher, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Study of Sorrow: Translations by Shangyang Fang brings various Song Dynasty poets into a wide and cohesive narrative that feels more like a gathering under the poet’s admiring guardianship. His non-literal translations are agile and timeless, and his postscript discusses his choices with verb tense, story, and length (clear from this bilingual edition). The arresting essay also discusses memorialization or internalization in Chinese education and how the words recombine and appear to him as he writes and teaches primarily in English, as well as the many poems Fang did or could not translate.”—Poetry Northwest, Favorites Autumn 2025
“We owe Shangyang Fang a debt for bringing the delicacy, obliqueness, and sheer tremulous beauty of these Chinese poems to English-speaking readers.”—Laura Sheehan, Arts Fuse