Chen Li Poems

mailme The Poet Books of His Poems On His Works Home
In Front of the Temple Animal Lullaby Rainstorm Traveling in the Family Microcosmos
The Edge of the Island The Cat at the Mirror New Poems Microcosmos II [Related Links]

Selected Poems of
Chen Li
Translated by Chang Fen-ling et al.

Chen Li (1954- ) is one of the best representatives of contemporary Chinese poetry in Taiwan. A winner of many important prizes of poetry in his country, he has written more than ten books of poetry, and has translated, with his wife Chang Fen-ling, works of many prominent poets—such as Plath, Larkin, Heaney, Neruda, Paz, Szymborska—into Chinese. He subtly combines in his poetry the elements of Western modernism and postmodernism with the merits of Oriental poetics and the Chinese language. He is a poet who humbly and incessantly seeks to find balance between art and life, suffering and joy, dream and reality.

An English translation of his poems, Intimate Letters: Selected Poems of Chen Li, translated by Chang Fen-ling, was published in 1997 by Bookman Books in Taipei. In 1999, Chen Li was invited to the Rotterdam International Poetry Festival. A selection of his poems translated into Dutch by Silvia Marijnissen, De Rand Van Hat Eiland, was published by the Her Trage Vuur magazine in 2001. In 2004, he was invited to the Salon du livre de Paris, reading his poetry and having meetings with other Chinese writers from around the world. A bilingual (Chinese-French) edition of his poems, Les confins de l'île, translated into French by Marie Laureillard, was published by Tigre de Papier in France in 2009. A selection of his poems, 華麗島の边緣, translated into Japanese by Tetsuji Ueda (上田哲二) , was published by Shichosha (思潮社) in Japan in 2010.

One of his best-known poems is "A War Symphony," an amazing visual poem with sound and sense.

"Chen Li is one of the most innovative and exciting poets writing in Chinese today. Ranging from the intensely lyrical to social satire, his work bears witness to the historical changes that have transformed contemporary Taiwan on the one hand, and to the poet's exuberant spirit of experimentation on the other. Chen Li's poetry not only epitomizes Taiwan's bitter-sweet quest for cultural identity, but, above all, it is an eloquent testament to the felicitous union of the personal and the political, artistic avant-gardism and literature of conscience."
—Michelle Yeh, University of California, Davis

"...perhaps my greatest appreciation for Chen Li’s poetics arises from the fact that he supplies richly textured evocations of domestic life as the grounding for sophisticated readings in sexual and other sorts of politics... I wait impatiently for more translations. "

—from Janet Charman: "A reading of Intimate letters"