Xi Chuan

The widely celebrated poet Xi Chuan 西川, the pen name of Liu Jun 刘军, was born in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, and raised in Beijing, China. Lucas Klein translated two volumes of his selected poetry, Bloom & Other Poems (New Directions, 2022) and Notes on the Mosquito (New Directions, 2012), into English. Xi Chuan has also published essays, criticism, a play, and translations of works by writers including Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, and Czeslaw Milosz. He has received numerous awards and honors in China and abroad, including the Modern Chinese Poetry Award (1994), the national Lu Xun Prize for Literature (2001), the Zhuang Zhongwen Prize for Literature (2003), Sweden’s Cikada Prize for poetry (2018), and the 2018 Tokyo Poetry Prize.

In 1985, Xi Chuan graduated from the English Department of Beijing University, where he wrote a senior thesis on Ezra Pound’s translations of Chinese poetry. Around this time, he adopted his pen name, Xi Chuan, which means “West Stream.” His poetry career can be divided into two distinct periods. In the late 1980s, he first gained recognition as a “post-Misty” poet and was known for condensed, ethereal lyricism that combined the seemingly disparate influences of classical Chinese poetry with Western Modernism. 

In 1989, two of Xi Chuan’s close friends, both poets he met while attending Beijing University, died: Hai Zi died by suicide in March, and Luo Yihe died from a cerebral hemorrhage in May. Xi Chuan posthumously published Hai Zi’s collected poems in 1997. Hai Zi became one of the most important figures in Chinese poetry in part due to Xi Chuan's championing of his work. Following these deaths and the failure of the Tiananmen Square protests, in which Xi Chuan participated, he barely wrote for two years. In his essay “On Xi Chuan and Translating ‘Written at Thirty,’” Lucas Klein observes 

When he began again, it was evident that his poetry had undergone a radical transformation … at an open dialogue this past winter at the MLA convention, he said he wasn't interested in writing “good poems,” which I take to mean both acceptable to more conservative aesthetic standards as well as simply poems that are too “well-behaved” … mostly, he is interested in writing texts that explore possibilities rather than neat poems that offer one emotion or sensation at a time.

Notes on the Mosquito, the first volume of Xi Chuan’s poetry translated into English, is organized into two sections and introduces readers to his work from these two distinct periods. This collection won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. 

Xi Chuan teaches classical and modern Chinese literature at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and lives in Beijing. Previously, he taught Western literature in Chinese translation and introductory English. He has held appointments at universities such as New York University and the University of Victoria.