Claimed by some to have been compiled by Confucius in the 5th century BCE, the Book of Songs is an ancient anthology of Chinese poetry. Produced using traditional Chinese bookbinding techniques, this newly-translated edition is a selected anthology of 25 classic poems presented in an exquisite dual-language edition.
Joseph R. Allen's new edition of The Book of Songs restores Arthur Waley's definitive English translations to the original order and structure of the two-thousand-year-old Chinese text. One of the five Confucian classics, The Book of Songs is the oldest collection of poetry in world literature and the finest treasure of traditional songs that antiquity has left us. Arthur Waley's translations, now supplemented by fifteen new translations by Allen, are superb; the songs speak to us across millennia with remarkable directness and power. Where the other Confucian classics treat "outward things, deeds, moral precepts, the way the world works", Stephen Owen tells us in his foreword, The Book of Songs is "the Classic of the human heart and the human mind".
The Chinese “Book of Odes” (Shijing) is a collection of 305 poems dating from between 1000 and 600 B.C., and, thus, is one of the earliest literary works in any living language. It offers vignettes of life in an almost unimaginably remote society; many of the poems have great charm, for instance, some are authored by women about their love problems. (For such early literature it is remarkable how many poems are by women.) Over the centuries the content of the Odes has become obscured by developments in the Chinese language, by prudishness and pomposity on the part of commentators, and because earlier translators were often more interested in philological technicalities than in the poems’ human significance. This book cuts through these obscurities to present a new translation into straightforward, down-to-earth English. The Odes are the earliest rhyming poetry in any language, and they make use of alliteration and assonance to achieve their poetic effects, but changes in the sounds of modern Chinese have destroyed all this speech-music. This book restores it: alongside the author’s translations, it spells the Chinese wording out in the sounds used by the original poets—something which has only recently become possible through advances in the reconstruction of Old Chinese speech.
The Homeric epics and the Book of Songs are not just the fountainheads of the Western and Chinese literary traditions; for centuries they played a central role in education and communal life, and thus exercised a lasting influence on both civilizations. This volume presents the first systematic comparison of the two corpora. Part One analyzes their genesis and their reception, while Part Two discusses their characteristics as poetic creations. The book brings together Chinese and Western sinologists and classicists, and so promotes significant interdisciplinary and intercultural dialogue. Though the contributors rank among the leading experts in their fields, the essays here are accessible not only to their peers, but also to the interested ‘general reader’, and so to all those who seek a deeper understanding of Chinese and Western civilizations, their common human basis and their characteristic differences.
In this "guided" anthology, experts lead students through the major genres and eras of Chinese poetry from antiquity to the modern time. The volume is divided into 6 chronological sections and features more than 140 examples of the best shi, sao, fu, ci, and qu poems. A comprehensive introduction and extensive thematic table of contents highlight the thematic, formal, and prosodic features of Chinese poetry, and each chapter is written by a scholar who specializes in a particular period or genre. Poems are presented in Chinese and English and are accompanied by a tone-marked romanized version, an explanation of Chinese linguistic and poetic conventions, and recommended reading strategies. Sound recordings of the poems are available online free of charge. These unique features facilitate an intense engagement with Chinese poetical texts and help the reader derive aesthetic pleasure and insight from these works as one could from the original. The companion volume How to Read Chinese Poetry Workbook presents 100 famous poems (56 are new selections) in Chinese, English, and romanization, accompanied by prose translation, textual notes, commentaries, and recordings. Contributors: Robert Ashmore (Univ. of California, Berkeley); Zong-qi Cai; Charles Egan (San Francisco State); Ronald Egan (Univ. of California, Santa Barbara); Grace Fong (McGill); David R. Knechtges (Univ. of Washington); Xinda Lian (Denison); Shuen-fu Lin (Univ. of Michigan); William H. Nienhauser Jr. (Univ. of Wisconsin); Maija Bell Samei; Jui-lung Su (National Univ. of Singapore); Wendy Swartz (Columbia); Xiaofei Tian (Harvard); Paula Varsano (Univ. of California, Berkeley); Fusheng Wu (Univ. of Utah)
Unmatched in scope and literary quality, this landmark anthology spans three thousand years, bringing together more than six hundred poems by more than one hundred thirty poets, in translations–many new and exclusive to the book–by an array of distinguished translators. Here is the grand sweep of Chinese poetry, from the Book of Songs–ancient folk songs said to have been collected by Confucius himself–and Laozi’s Dao De Jing to the vividly pictorial verse of Wang Wei, the romanticism of Li Po, the technical brilliance of Tu Fu, and all the way up to the twentieth-century poetry of Mao Zedong and the post—Cultural Revolution verse of the Misty poets. Encompassing the spiritual, philosophical, political, mystical, and erotic strains that have emerged over millennia, this broadly representative selection also includes a preface on the art of translation, a general introduction to Chinese poetic form, biographical headnotes for each of the poets, and concise essays on the dynasties that structure the book. The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry captures with impressive range and depth the essence of China’s illustrious poetic tradition.
This volume presents twelve essays on the evolution of shih poetry from the second to the tenth century, the period that began with the sudden flowering of shih poetry in live-character meter and culminated in the T'ang, the golden age of classical Chinese poetry. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.