How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology [Paperback]

Zong-qi Cai (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0231139411 | ISBN-13: 978-0231139410 | Publication Date: December 21, 2007 | Edition: Bilingual

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)

Editorial Reviews

Review

This valuable guidebook offers multiple routes toward understanding the vast and varied traditions and practices of classical Chinese poetry, from its beginnings through the Qing dynasty. Close readings of individual poems-including the 'chestnuts' we all love to teach-are grounded in useful discussions of literary-historical and cultural contexts. A cross-cutting discussion of themes suggests ways in which the poems can speak to each other across boundaries of genre and dynasty. And the unusually extensive attention paid to the sound and prosody of Chinese poetry will be especially welcome to student and scholar alike.

(Pauline Yu, president of the American Council of Learned Societies )

About the Author

Zong-qi Cai is professor of Chinese and comparative literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Matrix of Lyric Transformation: Poetic Modes and Self-Presentation in Early Chinese Pentasyllabic Poetry (Michigan, 1996) and Configurations of Comparative Poetics: Three Perspectives on Western and Chinese Literary Criticism (Hawai'i, 2002), and is the editor of A Chinese Literary Mind: Culture, Creativity, and Rhetoric in Wenxin dialong (Stanford, 2001) and Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature, the Arts, and the Universe in the Six Dynasties (Hawai'i, 2004).

Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press; Bilingual edition (December 21, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231139411
• ISBN-13: 978-0231139410
• Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 8.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #88,712 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #8 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Chinese
  • #38 in Books > History > Asia > Central Asia
  • #39 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Asian

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must-Have for Chinese Poetry Learners, April 19, 2008

By 

K. Liu (Richfield, MN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology (Paperback)

This book is perfectly designed for a variety of Chinese poetry readers, learners, and even researchers. The eighteen chapters starting from The Book of Poetry and ends with the Ming-Qing poetry cover Chinese poetry tradition of more than two thousand years and all types of Chinese poetry genres and sub-genres in this marvelous tradition. You will easily get to know how Chinese poetry developed for two thousand years even just after scanning the Primary Table of Contents!

In these chapters, authors deliberately choose great poems of each important period or Dynasty in Chinese history. They not only list these poems in Chinese characters, translate them into English (for regulated verses and songs, there is even word by word translation), and show each word in pinyin with tones, but also analyze these beautiful poems in historical background and poetic tradition. The templates of poems, including original Chinese texts, English translation and Chinese pinyin with tones to a great extent help Chinese language learners to learn how to understand Chinese poetry word by word and how to recite them in Chinese. The analysis of poems following will largely improve your knowledge of how to appreciate the beauty of Chinese poems, and more importantly, will help you get to see the great ideas underlying those poetic lines in terms of culture, history, religion, art, music, and etc.

And the well-done thematic table of contents, glossary-index, list of entering tones, and careful explanations of syntax, structure, and many other major issues of Chinese poetry will be very useful even for a scholar of Chinese poetry. You will save plenty of time looking up those important informations in all kinds of Chinese dictionaries!

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a great guide and a refreshing approach to classical Chinese poetry, April 25, 2008

By 

A customer (Eugene, OR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology (Paperback)

I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in classical Chinese poetry and language. It is very different from other anthologies of Chinese literature both in approach and in style, and touches upon many essential features of classical Chinese poetry.

Each chapter is written by a well-known scholar in the field. Together they provide a pretty clear picture of classical Chinese poetry. What is especially worth noting of this book is that, first, it well explains the features of Chinese poetry, such as rhymes and ping-ze patterns; it even gives pinyin romanization and tones for the Chinese texts, in addition to English translations which are side by side with the Chinese originals; and secondly, it not only looks at Chinese poetry from a literary perspective, but also tries to interpret the poetic texts according to the particular syntax of the Chinese language. This last feature well illustrates how different syntactic structures could influence the style and effect of a poem, and how the development of the syntax has impacted the development of Chinese poetry in general. Overall, the book is both resourceful and illuminating.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous book, terrible index, March 30, 2009

A Kid's Review

This review is from: How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology (Paperback)

Lukas Klein has a good review of this book in Rain Taxi but I think it understates just how magical the experience this book conveys of making classical Chinese come alive. Despite his complaints, I have one year of college Chinese and I felt able to handle this book, which is written entirely in English.

But the index is utterly useless. There are no entries for "couplets", "parallel couplets", "heptasyllabic," etc. for example. Terms, if they appear at all, are indexed under their pinyin names, not under their English equivalents. None of the poem titles are in the index at all so you can't look up where in the book a given poem is.

Nonetheless buy this book. But I hope the next edition fixes the index.