Xi Chuan

Xi Chuan (Chinese: 西川; born 1963), pen name of Liu Jun (Chinese: 刘军), is a poet, essayist, and translator.[1][2] He is considered one of the most influential and celebrated contemporary Chinese poets.[2][3] His poems have been said to "carry a sense of the world’s plentitude and of the world’s puzzlement."[3] In addition to his poetry, he has published two essay volumes, one book of criticism, a play, and translations of works by Pound, Borges, and Miłosz, and others.[4]

Xi Chuan was born in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province and raised in Beijing.[5] He attended a foreign-languages school for diplomats, an unusual opportunity at a time when most schools were closed.[5] At Beijing University, he wrote a senior thesis on Ezra Pound's translations of Chinese poetry, earning an English degree.[5] That's when he adopted his pen name, Xi Chuan (meaning "West Stream").[5] After college, he worked as a magazine editor for Huangqiu (Globus) and launched Qingxiang (Tendency), an independent literary journal that ran from 1988 until it was shut down in 1992, after only 3 issues.[6][7] From 1990 to 1995, he was one of the editors of the unofficial magazine Modern Han Poetry.[7] He also acted in Jia Zhangke's 2000 underground film Platform.[6]

Xi gained recognition in the period following the Misty Poets in the late 1980s, in the early period of China's economic liberalization.[3] In 1989, two of his closest friends, both poets who had attended Beijing University, died: Hai Zi committed suicide on March 26, aged twenty-five, and Luo Yihe died from a cerebral hemorrhage, aged twenty-eight, on May 31.[6] (Xi later published Hai Zi's works posthumously in 1997.[8]) Following these deaths and the failure of the Tiananmen Square protests that year, he barely wrote for two years.[3][5] This break took his poetry from "condensed, numinous lyricism" combining classical Chinese influences with Western modernism to "meditative, expansive prose poems that dismantled the aestheticism and musicality of his previous self".[3]

He teaches classical and modern Chinese literature at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and lives in Beijing, China.[1][2][4] Before that, he had taught Western literature in Chinese translation and introductory English.[5] He has held appointments at universities outside China like New York University and the University of Victoria.[4] He has won prizes in China, Germany, and from UNESCO.[6]