March 9, 2025: Wang Jiaxin

Read KPS’s exclusive Interview with Wang Jiaxin, conducted by Ann van Buren.

Wang Jiaxin’s DARKENING MIRROR, edited and translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell, belongs to this moment, and reading it, one is aware again that poetry is not a matter of movements and historical moments, but of individual voices, in this case stunningly alert and interior. Wang is the Chinese translator of Paul Celan, and reading him one feels something like the presence of the great voices of an intense inwardness in twentieth century European poetry… —Robert Hass

In Wang Jiaxin’s extraordinary poems, a tender, lyrical sensibility meets the bitter world. In these gorgeous translations, the poems shimmer with dreamlike images–gaps in the roof tiles filling with moans, slurred lights, the wind’s weight finding your bones and pushing you towards transformation or surrender. But beneath are intimate threats of knives glinting in darkness…deep images that emerge from the unconscious and name the shadow self, and the world behind the world… —Dr. Tony Barnstone

Wang Jiaxin is an eminent Chinese poet, essayist, and translator and has published more than forty books. His collection of poems in English is Darkening Mirror (Tebot Bach, 2017), translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell, with a foreword by former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass. His poems have been published in The American Poetry Review and The Kenyon Review, and he has been a poet-in-residence at the Dutch Literary Foundation (Amsterdam, 2022) and at the the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa (2013). An esteemed translator of Yeats, Mandelstam, and especially of Paul Celan, he has also translated books by American poets Jean Valentine and Ilya Kaminsky into Chinese. He has won many domestic and international awards, including the inaugural Ai Qing Poetry Award (2023).

Wang Jiaxin was a professor at Renmin University of China for years—he now splits his time between New York and Beijing—he has led a translation workshop at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, lectured and read at Walt Whitman’s birthplace, and a number of American and Canadian Universities.