Impossible Paradise: Selected Poems

The Poetry Book Society Translation Choice Spring 2026

‘May the stone steps and the deep-sleeping door summon
the camellia’s impossible paradise
and your face the impossible key
May the window shudder
May the notes be blue
and the candleflame shake unequivocally’
(from ‘May the Rain’)

One of Taiwan’s most celebrated poets, Chen Yuhong draws on both Western and Asian literary traditions, inflected by her work as a translator of contemporary English-language women poets (Glück, Oswald, Duffy). This selection makes her art widely available in English for the first time.

Her award-winning translators, George O’Connell and Diana Shi, carry across the richly metaphorical lexicon of her poems and their uncanny inhabitation of places both real and imagined, conjuring mood, angles of thought or light, animal presence, and the tides of the seasons.

In a world where much that seemed united has frayed, Chen Yuhong’s finely balanced poems bring us news of other imagined worlds, and acknowledge the unexpected, its capacity to terrify or astonish.

Chen Yuhong (陳育虹) was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and graduated from the Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages. After a decade in Canada, she returned to Taiwan, settling in Taipei. Among her many awards, she was named Taiwan Poet of the Year for Annotations, her 2004 collection. Bewitched received 2007’s Taiwan Chinese Writers & Artists Association’s Poetry Award, while two of her eight poetry volumes, Trance and In Between, earned the United Daily News Grand Prize in Literature. Chen’s Half-Light appeared in 2022, when the Swedish Institute awarded her its International Cikada Prize for poetry.

She has also published a collection of essays, 2010 Diary: An Oblique Angle of 365°. Chen’s distinguished Mandarin translations include the poetry volumes Nobody by Alice Oswald, Short Talks by Anne Carson, The Great Fires by Jack Gilbert, The Wild Iris by Louise Glück, Eating Fire by Margaret Atwood, Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy, and the French novel La Citadelle de Neige by Matthieu Ricard. In 2021, she won Taiwan’s Chinese Writers & Artists Association’s Translation Award, followed by the 2022 Liang Shih-chiu Literary Translation Prize.

A selection of her poetry, translated into Japanese by Sato Fumiko as I Once Told You (あなたに告げた), came out in 2011. Chen’s Half-Light in Japanese, also by Sato Fumiko, appeared in 2025 as 薄明光線その他. Je te l’ai déjà dit, Chen’s poems in French translation by Prof. Marie Laureillard, featured in 2018 from les éditions Circé in France, leading to Chen’s invitational Paris reading at the Foreign Cultural Institute’s Night of Literature. A collection in Dutch, De zon verschrompelt tot een witte dwerg, rendered by Silvia Marijnissen, was published in 2022, followed in 2025 by another in Swedish, Din hud är täckt av rost, translated by Anna Gustafsson Chen, for which the poet was invited to Stockholm. At both the 2014 Nicaragua Poetry Festival and the 2018 Singapore Writers Festival, Chen Yuhong represented Taiwan.

George O’Connell, editor and translator with Diana Shi, has received numerous honors for his poetry, including Atlanta Review’s International Grand Prize and the Pablo Neruda Award, as well as two US National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowships. He has also served as Fulbright professor to Peking University and National Taiwan University. Among his translations with Ms. Shi are Darkening Mirror by Wang Jiaxin; Crossing the Harbour: Ten Contemporary Hong Kong Poets; Passages: Thirteen Contemporary Taiwan Poets; Capriccio on the Way to Buy Salt, poems by Han Dong; and From Here to Here, poems by Lan Lan, newly released in New York.

Diana Shi, co-recipient of two US National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowships, has collaborated since 2006 with George O’Connell in translating many prominent western and Chinese-speaking poets. In 2012 they launched Pangolin House, pangolinhouse.com, an international journal of poetry and art. Ms. Shi’s extensive selections from American poet Arthur Sze’s The Glass Constellation appeared in Chinese under the same title in 2023. Her volume of translations of American poet Jane Hirshfield, I Wanted Only a Little, was published in 2024.