Furthest Flower

For more than forty years, poet and translator Jin Zhong has devoted himself to the study of Emily Dickinson. Beginning in 1982, as a young literature student in China, he first encountered Dickinson through an American visiting professor at Heilongjiang University - an encounter that profoundly transformed his understanding of poetry and ultimately shaped the course of his literary life.

Now, after decades of study, translation, exile, and lived experience between China and the United States, Jin Zhong presents Furthest Flower, a major new bilingual selection of Emily Dickinson's poetry. This volume is not merely another translation of Dickinson into Chinese; it is the result of a lifelong artistic and intellectual pursuit spanning from 1982 to 2025.

Jin Zhong is widely recognized as one of the rare voices in contemporary Chinese poetry and exile literature. A poet, painter, and translator, he studied English and American Literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University under some of China's leading literary scholars, while later living for decades in the United States. This rare combination of deep academic training and direct immersion in American culture allows him to approach Dickinson from both inside and outside the language itself.

Over the years, Jin Zhong has translated and studied many major Chinese and international poets, including Emily Dickinson, Joseph Brodsky, Anne Sexton, Wang Jiaxin, Duo Duo, Kaneko Misuzu, and numerous contemporary Chinese poets. His work moves between East and West, exile and homeland, history and spiritual reflection.

Unlike many previous Chinese translations of Dickinson, Jin Zhong's versions seek not only linguistic accuracy, but the hidden emotional and philosophical force within Dickinson's language. He believes Dickinson cannot be translated through dictionaries alone; her poetry requires decades of lived experience, literary intuition, and an understanding of the deeper tensions inside American civilization itself.

The result is a translation style that is daring, luminous, and deeply contemporary. Many readers in Chinese literary circles have remarked that these translations make Dickinson feel startlingly new - not a distant nineteenth-century poet, but a prophetic voice speaking directly to the crises of our own age.

This bilingual edition contains carefully selected Dickinson poems in both English and Chinese, accompanied by Jin Zhong's powerful autobiographical preface Dickinson in 1982, a moving literary memoir about poetry, exile, mentorship, and the lifelong search for spiritual truth through language.

Furthest Flower is more than a translation collection.
It is the meeting of two poetic destinies across continents, languages, and generations.