What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our fifth series, What Translation Sparks, a group of poet-translators share a seminal experience in translation. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.  
Han Yu
Translated from the Chinese by Jonathan Stalling
new year's          comes but            blooms don't grow
March nears      sur-prised            grass sprouts grow
yet white            snow thinks         spring's come late
and falls             through trees      like blooms blow

    春 雪     韩愈
新 年         都 未       有 芳 花
二 月         初 驚       見 草 芽
白 雪         卻 嫌       春 色 晚
故 穿         庭 樹       作 飛 花
from the journal CHA: AN ASIAN LITERARY JOURNAL
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Painting of Han Yu
What Sparks Poetry:
Jonathan Stalling on "Spring Snow" 

"The most influential genre of Classical Chinese Poetry is called ‘regulated verse’ (各路诗), and these forms gather the world into words and refold them into inter-resonant patterns on a cosmological scale. Each monosyllabic word must be stacked in relation to the one before and after, above and below until the whole rests upon a final balanced point, as relaxed and exact as a cairn of transparent quartz."
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Virtual Event: The Cheuse Center and Poetry Daily will be hosting a monthly virtual event Friday evenings at 8:00 EST. We'll feature a moderated conversation between four poet translators, as featured on Poetry Daily. Our second event will be Friday, December 18th, featuring Matvei Yankelevich, Taije Silverman, Johannes Göransson and Jonathan Stalling.
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"The Best Poetry of 2020"

Elisa Gabbert discusses some of her favorite poetry collections from 2020, including work by Tyree Daye, Wanda Coleman, and more. "Apart from the books I’ve already had a chance to recommend (like Don Mee Choi’s National Book Award-winning DMZ Colony or Chessy Normile’s great debut), here are several collections that I wasn’t able to write about in full."
 
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