from Notes on the Mosquito

Xi Chuan (penname of Liu Jun 刘军) was born in Jiangsu in 1963 but grew up in Beijing, where he still lives. One of contemporary China's most celebrated poets, having won the Lu Xun Prize for Literature (2001) and the Zhuang Zhongwen Prize (2003), he is also one of its most hyphenated littérateurs—teacher-essayist-translator-editor-poet—and has been described by American writer Eliot Weinberger as a "polymath, equally at home discussing the latest American poetry or Shang Dynasty numismatics." A graduate of the English dept. of Beijing University, where his thesis was on Ezra Pound's Chinese translations, he is currently employed at the Central Academy for Fine Arts in Beijing, where he was hired as an English instructor, then taught Western literature in Chinese translation, and now teaches pre-modern Chinese literature. He has taught at New York University (2007) and University of Victoria (2009), and is currently translating the work of Gary Snyder into Chinese.

Lucas Klein is a father, writer, translator, and assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacket, Rain Taxi, CLEAR, Comparative Literature Studies, and PMLA, and from Black Widow, Fordham University Press, and New Directions. His translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, and his October Dedications, translations of the poetry of Mang Ke, is now available from Zephyr and Chinese University presses. New York Review Books will be publishing his translations of Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin, and his monograph, The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness, is forthcoming from Brill.