About this site

Ying Chen divides her time into "Busy days" and "Empty days": 

When she wants to be busy, she plans to translate a selection of extracts from ancient Chinese poems, with her understanding and feeling about the spirits, the aesthetics and the historical background of this vast literary corpus, She would try to keep the work as much simple, accurate and inclusive as possible, hoping to provide, not as a scholar but as a poetry lover,  an entry point or a window, to ordinary readers.

When the mind is quiet, Ying Chen will write poems in Qing Ping form, trying to erase first the verb, then eventually the word "I". This writing would be less as a literary practice than as a way to record some plain moments of life.

Ying Chen values her empty days very much. Here the chosen poetical form, Qing ("Q" could be pronounced as "TSh") Ping Yue (清平乐) -- "the air of peaceful simplicity", is an ancient form created very early in the history, inspired by a musical form having the same name, It became popular around 1000 ACE at the Song epoch. 

Our shortened Qing Ping contains only four verses. The syllabation is 4/5/7/6. Rhyming can be flexible.

The main topic of this poetry is about NATURE.

It is a way to meditate.

This very brief and restrictive form may help to evoke the void within the fullness, the silence between the words.