Customer Reviews

How to Read A Chinese Poem: A Bilingual Anthology of Tang Poetry

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This really is a how to book, but a more complete title would be 'How to Read a Chinese Poems as the Chinese Read them.' Because with just a rudimentary understanding of romanized pinyin, a reader is able to experiance the euphonious quality of Chinese verse from the Tang period(618-907).
English translations starting in the last century have made these poems popular with modern readers,because these 1,200 year old verses are more compatible with contemporary poetic sensebilities than Europeon sagas and romances written at the same time and all western verse untill the romantic movement.
Despite the problems of conveying meaning from the tenseless ambivalence of Chinese to the regimented structure of English, some translations have carried much of the original thrust of the poems, minus nuances, across centuries and grammars and reshaped them into English poetry. But no translation can transport the lyric rhythems of the tonal patterns across the language barriers. This book sidesteps the barriers making Tang cadences accesible to many more.
Having enjoyed Chinese poetry from translations,and wanting to find out about the original poems, but having a very limited knowledge of Chinese characters, I looked for books with literal word by word translations. 'Chinese Poetry' edited and translated by Wan-Lim Yip seems to give the most straightforward word for word transcription. Reading the actual loose ambiguous syntax of Tang poetry gives the poems a boundless feel. Its only shortcoming is there is no clues to the poem's intonations.
This book rectifies that omission bypassing the language barrier giving us Tang music through a readable romanization and a concise and clear introduction explains the poetic rules of the time. Beware the rhythems are enticing and might lead to an addictive urge to learn Chinese.

This is the first most comprehensive bilingual book of Chinese poetry. It is designed for those who are interested in the Chinese culture and want to read and understand classical Chinese poetry. After reading the book, even a reader who does not know the Chinese language can recite the Tang poems written by famous poets in the 7th Century. The word -for- word and literary translation also elegantly express the poet's inner thought. Members of the Washington Chinese Poetry Society and I strongly recommend this book to the readers.

For one thing this book is slightly mislabelled. It's a crib and a translation of the famous anthology _ 300 Tang Poems _ / _ Tang Shi San Bai Shou _. It gives the pronunciation in modern Mandarin of every single character in every single poem so that even those who don't know any Chinese, or like me know only a few characters, can appreciate the sound of the poems. No one else has ever done this and the editor is certainly to be praised and thanked for doing such a superb job. I truly hate to be ungracious but the editor chose to follow the traditional order of the anthology, by genre rather than by poet. So if you want to read all the poems of Tu Fu or Li Bo or Wang Wei you have to hunt for them. I think a much better order would have been by poet. Further, the notes about the poet are quite meagre, totally unlike Kenneth Rexroth's masterful essays in his translations.

This book provides an excellant explaination of the patterns of old Chinese Poetry. As well as having a translation of each poem, it includes the Chinese characters, pronuncination, and word by word defination. Extreemly helpful to a non native Chinese speaker. It makes some of the beauty of Tang Poetry accessable to "Narrow nosed foreign devils" like myself.

This book is misrepresented in reviews and blurbs that say you can read a Chinese poem aloud to yourself after reading the text. There is no way that can be done without a DVD, which this book does not provide.

Too, this book lowballs the aesthetics of Chinese poetry in its watered down comments. The contrast with, say Stephen Owen's Chinese Literary Thought, is extreme. Owen does that job well; this book's text is child's play.

Worse, the English translations are awkward and unpoetic.

Of the price I paid for it, I estimate that about half to two-thirds was wasted money. I anticipated that it would be a gem instead.

R. B. Burnett
MA, California State University, Long Beach; MFA, Vermont College of the Fine Arts.