Austin Woerner, Chinese-English Translator

Projects > Ouyang Jianghe

Ouyang Jianghe


Ouyang Jianghe is one of the most prominent living Chinese poets, but unlike contemporaries such as Bei Dao, Duo Duo, and Yang Lian, he has rarely been translated, because of the complexity of his poems. He is an influential art critic and chief editor of the literary magazine Jintian; he lives in Beijing.

Chinese critics consider Ouyang's poetry to be some of the most challenging avant-garde verse written in China over the past several decades. His poems, which have the intricate, sculpted quality of fugues, are concerned with dissecting the layers of meaning which underlie everyday objects and notions like "doubled shadows."

I have been fortunate to have the chance to work closely with Ouyang, taking apart the subtleties of his poems line by line, character by character. I traveled to Beijing in May 2009 on a travel grant from the Jintian Literary Fund, where I lived and worked with Ouyang for several weeks; in September 2009 Ouyang and I did a joint residency at Vermont Studio Center as the first writer-translator pair to take part in VSC’s Literature in Translation Program.

Doubled Shadows: Selected Poems of Ouyang Jianghe will be published by Zephyr Press in early 2011. Several poems will be appearing in the 2010 issue of Zoland Poetry, a yearly anthology of international poetry.

Samples of Ouyang Jianghe's poetry