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An Interview with Shangyang Fang
Li Zhuang
Study of Sorrow: Translations (Copper Canyon Press, 2025)
In Study of Sorrows, 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 Sorrows, 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.
-Copper Canyon Press
Li Zhuang: Shangyang, your name itself tells the readers a story: it originates from the mythological bird that, as Confucius said, “dances when heaven brings great rain.” In previous interviews, you mentioned that your grandfather helped you memorize those beautiful lines of classical Chinese poetry. Your debut collection Burying the Mountain is structured around Tang Dynasty poet, Du Fu’s “Deep Winter” quatrain, and now you have a book of translations of Song dynasty Ci poetry coming out! Could you share with us how Chinese classical tradition influenced your work as both a poet and translator?
Shangyang Fang: Those ancient poems are where my love for poetry began. Before I could even read, my grandfather would have me memorize them: he’d read a line, and I would repeat it after him. At the time, the poems were complete mysteries to me—but I was captivated by their lilting cadence, their ceremonious parallelism, their melodious rhyme and tonal patterns.
From those early experiences, I learned that music often comes before meaning, and mystery often precedes understanding.
The regularity of the verses, the strict prosody, the arresting image—these became something I tried to imitate in my early work. And now, looking back, I see that they also gave me a framework to push against, to break, and ultimately to explore the opposite in my own writing.
LZ: When you first told me about your new book of translations from twenty-nine Ci poets, I assumed it would be arranged by poet. But looking at the table of contents, I realized how wrong I was. Your book is organized into six fascinating themes: Departures (离别), Lovesickness (相思), Wartime (战乱), Unbridled (清狂), Nostalgia (怀古), and Passing Years (流年). Reading through it feels like an immersive journey into the Song Dynasty. How did you decide to structure it like this?
SF: I did consider arranging the book alphabetically by poet, but that felt lifeless. There would be no conversation between the poets; the poems would read more like an aftermath—or even an obituary—of their names. I wasn’t trying to make a scholarly reference—I was making a book of poems. So, I chose a thematic structure: beginning with Departures, moving through the insufferable ache of Lovesickness, enduring Wartime, where homeland is ruined and people are dead, confronting the solitude of desolate landscapes that mirror the inner heart. Out of such despair bursts the Unbridled, a mind roaming freely among taverns and banquets and mountains and rivers with nonchalance, only to pause in quiet night, drifting into Nostalgia—both personal and historical, a longing for another dynasty, another time. In this dreaming, without noticing the hours slip by, we arrive at the poems of age, the Passing Years. By organizing the book this way—without grouping poems by author—I wanted the collection to feel fluid, many-voiced, like a chorus rather than a catalog, alive in force and motion rather than fixed on names.
LZ: In your postscript, you point out that Chinese classical poetry has “no explicit differentiation among past, present, and future,” thus creating a sense of “all-timeness”. When you translate a tenseless language into English, which often demands temporal and spatial specificity, how do you navigate these differences?
SF: Well, that’s a feature of the Chinese language: the sense of time is not marked explicitly but intuited from context. To carry that directly into English would look like a grammatical mistake—producing confusion rather than invention.
But the deeper point is that the very nature of lyrical poetry, in any language, is to resist the passage of time. It arrests time, largely through its two great elements: image and music. An image lives outside narrative sequence or cause-and-effect; it is always present at the moment of its being—that girl in Lorca’s poem is forever “held up above the water by icicles of moon.” Music, meanwhile—rhythm, rhyme, cadence—is a reservoir of memory.
In China, where we memorize and recite hundreds of poems in school to pass the exams, these mnemonic patterns are deeply ingrained. So, there is this opposition: image detains time, while music unfolds in time. That’s a long way of saying that my task as a translator was simple but demanding: to make sure the image is sharp and the music is fine.
LZ: Chinese classical poetry like Song Ci often omits pronouns, the "I"s and "you"s, but English translation sometimes requires the translator to restore them. How do you handle this shift, especially when adding those pronouns can make a poem feel more personal?
SF: One challenge in translation was indeed the omission of pronouns, especially in the longer ci poems, where scenes shift and addresses blur. It’s easy to misread—I once thought the speaker of a poem was addressing his beloved, only to realize he was speaking of a bamboo mat the whole time. The poet really loved his bamboo mat! This absence is not a lack but an openness: without pronouns, the poems seem to dissolve the boundaries of self: there may be no human subject on the page, yet unmoored human feeling saturates the poem, entangled with objects, drifting like morning mist inseparable from its bank of blossoms. And in English, the presence of “I” doesn’t necessarily make a poem confessional. As Stevens said, “The poem is the cry of its occasion.” What matters is not the cry alone, or who’s crying, but how the cry is situated—its relation to the occasion and the way it speaks about it. In these ancient Chinese poems, the “I” functions as a translucent medium through which we see the poets’ world: their histories, banquets, landscapes, joy, and heartbreaks. The self becomes less a fixed subject than a prism, refracting the world into language.
LZ: My next question is something I struggle a lot with as a translator myself, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this. Reading Song Ci often requires a sophisticated cultural understanding because of its intricate historical allusions, symbolic systems, and rhyme schemes like词牌 (tune patterns). When you introduce them to an audience who come from very different literary traditions, how much cultural context do you include in your translations, and how much research do you expect your readers to do outside the poem itself?
SF: I tend to refrain from using footnotes—partly out of laziness, but more importantly because I don’t want the poems to read like instant noodle packages with ingredient lists, or like artworks that rely on wall text to make sense. For me, the poem itself must be the experience; it doesn’t need external justification to be valid or beautiful. So, when I encounter historical allusions—say, in Xin Qiji’s poems—I often retell the allusions within the poem, shifting it slightly from the purely lyric toward the narrative. Symbolic systems, meanwhile, can surface through the curation of the book as a whole, resonating across poems through repetition and variation.
But perhaps most importantly, I believe we have to accept the inevitability of loss. It’s impossible to preserve everything—the cultural, the rhythmic, the linguistic, etc. To aim for total preservation is to never begin at all, because the task immediately paralyzes you with its impossibility. Preservation belongs to archaeology, not poetry. A poem is an act of creation, and translation should echo that. The untranslatable—the gaps, the things lost—are often where the most interesting discoveries happen. Poetry, for me, is about surrendering oneself to the search for the unspeakable, which reveals itself only in the act of being lost. In that surrender, something new can emerge.
I don’t expect readers to do any homework beyond reading the poems themselves. But if the work leads them to seek out other translations, histories, or literature, that is a gift, and I would be delighted.
LZ: Song Ci is such a fascinating form since it is composed to match pre-set tune patterns, and they are meant to be sung. In your postscript, you mention that ci poetry has “a distinctly androgynous and queer quality” because many male poets adopted female voices in their poems, which were often performed by singing courtesans. How do you preserve this queer/gender-fluid quality in your English translations?
SF: I hesitate to use the word “queer” in its contemporary sense, because applying it directly risks turning a modern lens onto a very different historical moment. What might appear “queer” to us today was, in its original context, often bound up with the male gaze within a patriarchal society. Still, these poems—so often written in a female voice and sung by courtesans—lend themselves to strikingly layered readings. I don’t feel the need to deliberately “preserve” this quality in translation; it emerges on its own through tone, diction, and sensibility. In ci poetry, the male sensibility feels unusually dilated, open to vulnerability, empathy, and tenderness—just look at how many heartbreaks are precipitated by the fall of a single petal; twisted syntax mirrors the knots of feeling—qualities rarely found in the more austere shi tradition.
What fascinates me most, though, is how these poems stage an estrangement of the self. As I wrote in the postscript: “the male speaker, longing for his beloved, had to step outside his masculine identity, adopting the persona of his female partner to address himself—‘I’ pretend to be ‘you’ so ‘I’ can speak to ‘me’; the ‘I’ must first be abandoned to speak and be heard.” That abandonment feels to me like a kind of translation—the self dissolving into another voice in order to return changed. And that, I think, is profoundly moving.
LZ: Ci poetry is nicknamed “long and short lines,” since its lines are not uniform in length like Tang Poetry. In your translations, we see this reflected in your ever-changing forms: tercets, quatrains, single long stanzas, prose poems, etc. I’m curious about how you make formal choices in your translation.
For example, in Li Qingzhao’s “Dian Jiang Chun: Rouged lips”, the short and regular couplets work really well to bring out the rhythm.
点绛唇
李清照
蹴罢秋千，起来慵整纤纤手。
露浓花瘦，薄汗轻衣透。
见客入来，袜刬金钗溜。
和羞走，倚门回首，却把青梅嗅。
To the Tune “Dian Jiang Chun: Rouged Lips”
Li Qingzhao
Getting off the swing,
she rubs her hands
mindlessly. Dew heavy
on the desiccated
petals. Light sweat
dampens her diaphanous
lapel. When a guest enters
the yard, she hurries
to hide—her silk sock
slips off, along with a gold
hairpin. She leans
behind a pillar, blushing,
pretending to sniff
a twig of green plums.
SF: Talking about form can be tricky because the term itself means different things to different people. Some think of rhyme and meter, others of traditional structures, others still of the visual layout on the page. I love Robert Hass’s definition: “[Form is] the way the poem embodies the energy of the gesture of its own making.” To me, this means that the poem’s emotion must move in tandem with its formal motion. In the example you brought up, because the poem is dense with small actions and close-up images, I felt it was important to slow down the reader’s observation and senses, to let the sensorial details register fully. But it’s hard to generalize for the whole book—each poem demands a different body, a different rhythm, a different form.
LZ: Which Ci poet do you like the most and why?
SF: I always say Xi Qijin was one of my favorites before I started translating him. He’s such a challenge—dense with allusions, a real puzzle. But now my favorite is Li Qingzhao—you just mentioned her. For me, she’s the easiest to translate, and that’s simply because her poems are so good. As I’ve translated, I’ve noticed that other male poets’ gestures can feel imposing or resplendent on the surface: the language is exquisite, beautiful—but when translated, it sometimes feels empty. Li Qingzhao is different. She is rooted in life experience, observing the quiet undercurrents of lived moments with sharp attention. Her poems are intimate and moving, and she ties her feelings to the world effortlessly. For example:
“Sorrow stretches
like new grass.
To love is to step on this grass.”
Or the startling juxtaposition:
“Don’t tell me that the soul
won’t be abraded by this dense scent
of lovesickness. The west wind
rolling up the curtain, I am thinner
than a yellow chrysanthemum.”
Her poems feel lived, felt, and fully human, which makes translating them a pleasure.
LZ: Could you tell us a bit about any exciting new project you’re working on next?
SF: Honestly, I’d prefer to lie flat and do nothing. But I do have another manuscript of poems in progress, and it’s nearly finished. I think it will be very different from my first book, Burying the Mountain, if not stylistically, then at least in spirit. I can only hope it survives the process without being a complete disaster.
Shangyang Fang is the author of Burying the Mountain (2021) and Study of Sorrow: Translations (2025). His new collection of poems Bastard of Elsewhere is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2027.
Li Zhuang holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University. In 2019, Li graduated with an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia University. Li is a finalist for the 2025 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize and a runner up for Grist’s ProForma contest. Her poetry chapbook But Octopi Don’t Sing, published in March 2026, was selected as the runner-up for the Purple Ink Press’s Chapbook Contest by Chen Chen. Li is working on her debut novel about Chinese lesbian romantic relationships in a futuristic New York City, where memories can be altered through mnemonic navigation machines.