A Conversation with poet Zang Di and translator Eleanor Goodman on their book “The Roots of Wisdom”

A Conversation with poet Zang Di and translator Eleanor Goodman on their book “The Roots of Wisdom"

Zang Di - Poet | Eleanor Goodman - Research Associate, Harvard University

Monday, October 9, 2017 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm
Room 203, Henry R. Luce Hall See map
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511

Zang Di, who has been honored three times as one of China’s top ten poets, is a featured poet at the Princeton Poetry Festival on October 5-6, 2017. His new collection, The Roots of Wisdom, translated by award-winning translator Eleanor Goodman, will be published at the same time by Zephyr Press. In this bilingual book, Zang Di uses rich, emotional language to explore the natural world, including his beloved Weiming Lake at Peking University — his “Walden.” Zang Di will also give readings at Harvard University’s Yenching Library on September 27, and at Yale University on October 9, during his visit to the U.S.


Zang Di 臧棣, a poet, critic, translator, and editor, was born in Beijing in 1964. He was educated at Peking University, where he received his Ph.D. in literature in 1997 and where he now teaches. Widely acknowledged as one of the leading poets and literary critics of his generation, he has won numerous honors and awards, including the Contemporary China’s Top Ten Prominent Young Poets Award (2005), China’s Top Ten Rising Poetry Critics Award (2007), the Chinese Poetry Biennial Top Ten Poets Award (2008), and the Poet of the Year Award (2008). Zang has published many collections of poetry, including The Universe Is Flat (2008) and No-Name Lake (2010), and edited several major anthologies of modern and contemporary Chinese poetry, as well as a collection of Chinese translations of Rilke’s poetry. He is the editor of the journal New Poetry Criticism.


Translator and poet Eleanor Goodman is a Research Associate at the Fairbank Center at Harvard University. Her translation of the book of poems, Something Crosses My Mind, by Wang Xiaoni (Zephyr, 2014), won the 2015 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, was short-listed for the 2015 Griffin International Poetry Prize, and was the recipient of a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Grant. Her first collection of her own poems, Nine Dragon Island, was a finalist for the Drunken Boat First Book Prize, and was published in 2016 (Enclave Publishing House and Zephyr Press).

Tags: 
Region: 
China