This book is the first in Western literature to focus on the poetry of Li Yu and Feng Yen-ssu. It contains nearly one hundred translations of Chinese poems written during the brief and turbulent Southern T'ang Dynasty (907- 960 A.D.). Bryant describes and evaluates the major contribution of Li Yu and Feng Yen-ssu to the evolution of the poetry form known as 'tz'u' -- a form which reflects the highly developed cultural milieu of the period.
Li Yu was the last ruler of the tenth century Chinese kingdom known as the Southern Tang. The author comments:"This book contains my translations of, and musings about, the surviving poetry of the ruler of an area of China during the confused period between the collapse of the Tang dynasty in 907 and the re-unification of the country under the Song in 960. What I have set out to do is to provide for an English-speaking reader with a general interest in the subject matter but who does not read Chinese some general impression of what, to a Chinese reader, is conveyed by the words or characters of the poems. [Li Yu's] poetry is widely read, much loved and the subject of lengthy scholarly analysis. Most Chinese school children will know two or three of these poems by heart. However, his work is not at all well known outside Chinese communities. This is surprising because he is a very accessible poet in the sense that his poetry is largely free of the complex, and frequently obscure, historical and literary references which bedevil the understanding of a good deal of classical Chinese poetry. He wrote directly from the heart about his emotions in simple and direct but lyrical language. There is a haunting melancholy in his verse."
A reconsideration of Chinese decadent (tuifei) poetry which argues that this poetry is not a marginal trend but rather a vital part of the Chinese literary tradition.
"This innovative textbook for learning classical Chinese poetry moves beyond the traditional anthology of poems translated into English and instead brings readers—including those with no knowledge of Chinese—as close as possible to the texture of the poems in their original language. The first two chapters introduce the features of classical Chinese that are important for poetry and then survey the formal and rhetorical conventions of classical poetry. The core chapters present the major poets and poems of the Chinese poetic tradition from earliest times to the lyrics of the Song Dynasty (960–1279).Each chapter begins with an overview of the historical context for the poetry of a particular period and provides a brief biography for each poet. Each of the poems appears in the original Chinese with a word-by-word translation, followed by Michael A. Fuller’s unadorned translation, and a more polished version by modern translators. A question-based study guide highlights the important issues in reading and understanding each particular text.Designed for classroom use and for self-study, the textbook’s goal is to help the reader appreciate both the distinctive voices of the major writers in the Chinese poetic tradition and the grand contours of the development of that tradition."
" The poetry of the Late Tang often looked backward, and many poets of the period distinguished themselves through the intensity of their retrospective gaze. Chinese poets had always looked backward to some degree, but for many Late Tang poets the echoes and the traces of the past had a singular aura. In this work, Stephen Owen resumes telling the literary history of the Tang that he began in his works on the Early and High Tang. Focusing in particular on Du Mu, Li Shangyin, and Wen Tingyun, he analyzes the redirection of poetry that followed the deaths of the major poets of the High and Mid-Tang and the rejection of their poetic styles. The Late Tang, Owen argues, forces us to change our very notion of the history of poetry. Poets had always drawn on past poetry, but in the Late Tang, the poetic past was beginning to assume the form it would have for the next millennium; it was becoming a repertoire of available choices--styles, genres, the voices of past poets. It was this repertoire that would endure. "
Shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize 2023 Shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry 2023 by the American Literary Translators Association The Poetry Book Society Spring 2022 Translation Choice Chinese poetry is unique in world literature in that it was written for the best part of 3,000 years by exiles, and Chinese history can be read as a matter of course in the words of poets. In this collection from the Tang Dynasty are poems of war and peace, flight and refuge but above all they are plain-spoken, everyday poems; classics that are everyday timeless, a poetry conceived "to teach the least and the most, the literacy of the heart in a barbarous world," says the translator. C.D. Wright has written of Wong May's work that it is "quirky, unaffectedly well-informed, capacious, and unpredictable in [its] concerns and procedures," qualities which are evident too in every page of her new book, a translation of Du Fu and Li Bai and Wang Wei, and many others whose work is less well known in English. In a vividly picaresque afterword, Wong May dwells on the defining characteristics of these poets, and how they lived and wrote in dark times. This translator's journal is accompanied and prompted by a further marginal voice, who is figured as the rhino: "The Rhino 通天犀 in Tang China held a special place," she writes, "much like the unicorn in medieval Europe ― not as conventional as the phoenix or the dragon but a magical being; an original spirit", a fitting guide to China's murky, tumultuous Middle Ages, that were also its Golden Age of Poetry, and to this truly original book of encounters, whose every turn is illuminating and revelatory.
