Visions in the Mirror—A Review of Zhang Zao’s Selected Poems, “Mirror”

By Tony Huang

Mirror by Zhang Zao, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, published by Zephyr, 2025

The posthumous English translation of Zhang Zao’s selected poems, Mirror, offers a breathtaking plunge into the labyrinthine mind of one of China’s most captivating contemporary poets. Born in 1962 and lost far too soon in 2010, Zhang Zao’s poetry defies easy categorization. This collection reveals a poet whose work is a unique synthesis of East and West, one that merges classical Chinese aesthetics with the unforgiving rigors of European modernism and avant-garde experimentation.

What immediately strikes readers is Zhang’s monumental ambition and polyphonic richness. His poems are not singular voices but intricate soundscapes—jazz, opera, folk, even industrial echoes—woven into meticulously structured forms. This tension between flamboyant exuberance and tight formalism mirrors the very contradictions of his life: a multilingual prodigy and exile grappling with identity, home, and linguistic displacement.

The title poem “Mirror” superbly encapsulates his genius. Zhang transforms regret from a passive emotion into a causative force that sets plum blossoms falling—flipping classical Chinese poetic convention on its head and dramatizing the warping of reality through internal states. Elsewhere, his multilingual fluency shines in long sequences like “Love and Death of a German Spy in the England of a Sweet Nightingale,” where espionage meets Keatsian romanticism, only to end in a stark, almost absurd lament for butter lost—a stark reminder that grandeur and banality, heroism and absurdity, coexist in human experience.

Zhang’s final masterpiece, “Lantern Town,” written days before his death, epitomizes his lifelong quest: an epicurean poet whose exuberance contracts into whispered silences and exhausted breaths. Warily taking the form of a play script, it captures the fragile soundscape of near death. This sonic architecture, built from silence and echoes, completes a trajectory from expansion to contraction, life to its ambiguous end.

What animates Mirror beyond its dense allusions and intellectual rigor is Zhang’s insistence that poetry is born from a lived, messy, and sensuous existence. His work is not a sterile intellectual exercise but the raw transcription of a life that was at once solitary and sensually indulgent—a relentless quest for the elusive authentic self amid fragmented identities and fractured realities.

Remarkably, despite the work’s complexity, Zhang Zao’s poetry has found vibrant resonance among younger generations in China, primarily through adaptations in folk and rock music. This popular embrace testifies to the raw emotional power and contemporary urgency embedded in his exploration of regret, identity, and exile.

In Mirror, readers encounter a poetic genius who redefines reality through contradiction—the seen and unseen, the real and phantom, the personal and universal. Zhang’s profound engagement with language’s limits and possibilities ensures his poetry remains ever in motion, ever evolving as new voices interpret and reinterpret his work.

Interestingly, in an earlier version of this review, I completely forgot to mention anything about the translation—or about Fiona Sze-Lorrain, the brilliant translator behind this collection. It wasn’t until an email from Leora Zeitlin, co-director at Zephyr Press, gently nudged me to notice this glaring omission that I snapped out of my oblivion. But then it hit me: maybe this kind of invisibility is actually the highest compliment a translator can receive. Living between Hong Kong and the mainland, I read in both English and Chinese regularly, yet Fiona’s translations so effortlessly capture Zhang Zao’s voice that I almost forget the original was penned in Chinese. Perhaps the best translators are those who, like skilled magicians, make their presence vanish—letting the poetry shine through, unfiltered and unshadowed.

For those willing to engage with its intellectual and emotional depths, Mirror is a monumental achievement—a rare fusion of tradition and modernity, personal pain and universal inquiry, sound and silence. It invites us not just to read but to listen deeply, and it constantly reminds us that poetry is a living mirror ever reflecting and fracturing the human condition. Deep down, Zhang’s poems are all about life, and they, though often clouded by different shades of colors, are sending forth a message that is mostly affirmative:

                        …To live is to improve

                        to walk to the height of valor, to maintain among

                        falling leaves the noble health of our bodies

Tony Huang

Tony Huang, PhD, is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Hong Kong Review. He is also the founder of Metacircle Fellowship, Metacircle (Hong Kong) Culture and Education Co., Ltd. and Metaeducation. He works as a guest-editor for SmokeLong Quarterly. His poems and translations have appeared in Mad Swirl, The Hong Kong Review, The Best Small Fictions Anthology Selections 2020, Tianjin Daily, Binhai Times, SmokeLong Quarterly, Nankai Journal, Large Ocean Poetry Quarterly, Yangcheng Evening News and other places.

Copy editor: Nancy He

Intern copy editor: Andrew Chan