Wen YiduoThe son of a well-to-do Hubei family and a product of its privileged status, Wen Yiduo was introduced to the West at an early age, eventually studying western painting in Chicago and New York from 1922-25. It was during this time that his first colletion of poetry, Hongzhu (Red Candle) was published. Upon his return to China, he became a university professor, a leading literary critic and scholar, and soon an outspoken critic of the Nationalists. His speeches became more political and defiant as the army's suppression of student demonstrations became bloodier. On June 6, 1946 at 5pm, after stepping out of the office of the Democratic Weekly, Wen Yiduo died in a hail of bullets. Mao blamed the Nationalists, and thus Wen was transformed into a paragon of the revolution. STAGNANT WATER AND OTHER POEMS is Wen's second and final collection.

Robert Dorsett studied Chinese at the Yale-in-China Program at the Chinese University in Hong Kong. He received an M.D. degree from the State University of New York and completed his training in pediatrics at Cornell. He also has an M.F.A. degree from New York University, where he subsequently taught creative writing. Robert has translated many individual poems and essays from the Chinese. With David Pollard, he translated the memoirs of Gao Ertai, In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labor Camp (Harper Collins, 2009). STAGNANT WATER is his second book of translations. He has also published his own poetry in The Literary Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. Formerly a senior physician at Kaiser Hospital Oakland, he now writes full time. Read More Read Less