Zhang Zao ( 张 枣 ) was a key literary figure of the ‘third generation’ of Chinese contemporary poetry and a recognized literary critic, translator, and scholar of German literature and philosophy. In 1986, he moved to Germany where he married, set up residence and earned a Ph. D. in literature from Tübingen University. He died in 2010 in Tübingen, the home town of Hölderlin. He was forty-eight. Less than ninety of his poems have survived.
Mirror
by Zhang Zao
Translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain