WHAT: Chinese Culture Days, featuring author Qiu XiaolongWHEN: 12:00 noon-2:00 p.m., Sunday, May 18, 2008WHERE: Missouri Botanical Garden, 4344 Shaw Blvd., St. Louis, MOINFO: Contact Winnie Sullivan at PenUltimate Press, Inc., (314) 862-3842 orpenultim@swbell.net
St. Louis writer Qiu Xiaolong has racked up numerous awards for his highly acclaimedInspector Chen mystery series. Now he returns to his fi rst love-poetry-to fi nd similar success.Evoking Tang, Qiu's newly translated collection of Chinese classical poems, was justnamed a fi nalist, in the Poetry/Literary Criticism category, in the 2008 Ben Franklin Award scompetition sponsored by the Independent Book Publishers Association. The designation of fi nalist is an acknowledgment of excellence from the nation's largest trade association of independent publishers. Winners of the competition will be announced later this month. Qiu will be on hand to sign his book and greet visitors during the Missouri Botanical Garden's annual celebration of Chinese arts, culture, music, and cuisine.
In Evoking Tang, Qiu mines the literary wealth of the Tang period, China's golden age of poetry.This bilingual collection offers English translations of more than 70 classic Chinese poems, representing the work of almost 40 poets from the Tang period, whose poems are comparable in importance, for English-speaking readers, to those of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Longfellow. The translation of the beloved poems of the Tang dynasty remains faithful to their original meaning and imagery, yet proves enjoyable to English readers as poetry. The anthology is illustrated with 30 traditional Chinese paintings, which are included to aid interpretation and to stir the imagination of readers as they enter the poetic world.
A native of Shanghai, who came to the United States in 1988 on a Ford Foundation Fellowship, Qiu was already a distinguished poet and scholar before arriving at Washington University in St. Louis, where he obtained a doctorate in comparative literature. He has been the recipient of a host of awards for his poetry, including the Missouri Biennial Award and the Prairie Schooner Readers' Choice Award. Qiu has written, in addition to Evoking Tang, another volume of poetry translations, the Treasury of Chinese Love Poems, and Lines around China, a collection of his own poems.
Qiu lives in St. Louis with his wife and daughter. Currently, he's hard at work on the sixth in the series of his mystery novels, which have been translated into 14 languages. |
