Study of Sorrow Book Launch with Shangyang Fang, Sally Wen Mao and C. Francis Fisher
Join us for a special evening celebrating Study of Sorrow, Translations, Shangyang Fang’s new translation of Song Dynasty poetry. The book explores themes of grief, love, and longing through inventive, experimental translations. Shangyang Fang will be joined by poets Sally Wen Mao and C. Francis Fisher for a reading and discussion on translation, classical Chinese poetry, and the emotional worlds these poems continue to shape today.
Hosted by Accent Publishing Fellow Laetitia Keok, this event offers an intimate introduction to a beautiful and deeply felt work.
Study of Sorrow: Translations
For many years, Song Dynasty Ci poetry has seemed eclipsed by the incandescence of Tang Poetry in the English-speaking world. InStudy of Sorrow, Shangyang Fang aims to bridge this gap, translating the works of twenty-nine Song Dynasty poets, many of whom are introduced to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Collated into seven parts, these poems move through grief, love, and longing, exploring the tension and connection between the material and immaterial world. Unlike traditional scholarly translations, these renditions represent the translator’s endeavor to breathe contemporary life into ancient poems, including revisions of the original text, experimentations, and even rewrites. A beautiful conversation between these poets and their translator unfolds. Shangyang masterfully navigates the irregularity of the lines, the elusiveness of the descriptions, the indirect approach to subjects, the precise musicality, the twisting language, and the unspeakable tenderness. As investigated here, “sorrow” is transformed from a mere individual sadness to a collective experience that spans time, people, and place.
Shangyang Fanggrew up in Chengdu, China. A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, he is the recipient of the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. His poems have appeared inThe Nation,Ploughshares,The Yale Review,The Best American Poetry,Best of the Net,The Pushcart Prize Anthology, andThe Forward Book of Poetry(UK), among others. He is the author of the poetry collectionBurying the Mountain(Copper Canyon Press, 2021) and the translation volumeStudy of Sorrow(Copper Canyon Press, 2025). Fang teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he is a core faculty member.
Sally Wen Mao is the author of Oculus (Graywolf Press), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. Her first book, Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014), was the winner of the 2012 Kinereth Gensler Award. She was born in Wuhan, China and raised in the Bay Area, California.
C. Francis Fisher is a poet and translator. Her first book of translations, In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour, appeared with World Poetry Books in 2024. She has been supported by fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo.