Nominated for the 41st Annual Northern California Book Award (NCBA) in California Translation in Poetry as one of the best works by a California translator
“Shang Qin’s poetry is a fascinating blend of the mundane and the high modern, welding the prosaic with the intriguing twists of fantasy and difficulty. This is delivered in a language that matches the extremes in content. John Balcom has done a masterful job of bringing that out in these English translations. Like Shang, Balcom is willing to stay close to the hard ground, but when needed to take chances with soaring and daring language. A thoroughly intriguing read.” —Joseph R. Allen, University of Minnesota
“This is a beautiful translation of the works of world-class poet Shang Qin, who was born in China and spent his entire adult life in Taiwan. His work speaks intimately yet powerfully to human suffering and dignity, alienation and empathy, darkness and hope. Once you have read Shang Qin’s poetry, you will want to reread it again and again!” —Michelle Yeh, UC Davis
“To read the poetry of Shang Qin, an exile in Taiwan, is to dwell in the liminal space between dream and dawn. What begins deceptively as storytelling crystalizes into cosmic lyricism. Shang Qin is the most influential prose poet of his era and has exerted great influence on the mainland Chinese poets of the 1990s. The veteran translator John Balcom is one of the few up to the challenge of walking Shang Qin’s tightrope between narrative and lyric, between tactile and redolent natural imagery and the unconscious, and his renderings are a scintillating success.” —Christopher Lupke, University of Alberta
"The late Taiwanese poet Shang Qin’s poetic world is the purest surrealism; it’s a world infused with dreams, fantasy, and odd juxtapositions, often seemingly controlled by the workings of the unconscious mind....John Balcom’s translation of The All-Seeing Eye is brilliantly sensitive to the nuances of Shang Qin’s writing as it moves from the concrete world to that of the unconscious mind with all its extremes of language and flights of fancy. To quote André Breton once more, “The mind of the dreaming man is fully satisfied with whatever happens to it”; Balcom fully understands this, and his sympathetic translation makes reading Shang Qin’s poetry in English a moving and most enlightening experience." —Asian Review of Books
