Customer Reviews

How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

I had the privilege of reading chapters of this anthology before it went to print, and as my first introduction to the intricacies of Chinese poetry it was an excellent place to start.


The format in which the poems are printed, with Chinese and English side by side, helped me to understand translations better. There is also an excellent chapter on ping-ze patterns in Tang poetry, which is a difficult concept to convey in English.

I highly recommend this book to students of Chinese literature and anyone else interested in a solid explanation of Chinese poetic styles.

I took a long time to read this book, about 8 or 9 months. I kept being blown away and then coming back to it. There's also the frustration of wanting to be able to appreciate this material MUCH better, but I can't imagine a better introduction. Columbia University Press also hosts a web page with mp3 files of dozens and dozens of these poems being recited.

I did a few years of mandarin with traditional characters decades ago back in college but have been brushing up on it again the last few years with simplified characters, so some frustration was caused by not recognizing more of the book's traditional characters, but traditional characters and toneless pinyin are an academic convention so it's not really a shortcoming that this book follows the academic convention. I've communicated with the editor and he's planning a workbook with simplified characters which I will definitely eat up.

If you don't follow Chinese and have any interest at all, you are bound to love this book. The translations do justice to the original much more than most of what's out there and the text is uniformly interesting. The book even offers many word-by-word grids with translation to help any readers appreciate the prosody of how each syllable is loaded with meaning so their sequence has a semantic rhythm used by the master poets with power and elegance.

Chinese culture is vast and varied and this book offers a revealing introduction to why poetry has such a leading, treasured role in the high culture. As an opportunity for individual expression, its status is very unique and offers endless personally touching insights. The role of convention is also interesting because there are many conventions but these masters regularly use the existence of them cleverly to raise layered implications or introduce form-defying touches, all with flair. While this book can only survey the basics because of its vast scope, I hope to be much more than a newcomer someday and will always be grateful for this introduction.

A kind of textbook/anthology survey. Having the mp3 files available on the Columbia U. Press website pulls this all together, even for those with little or no Chinese. The book is in English, with the poems given in Chinese with romanized transliterations (and all the tone marks). For the songs, literal word-by-word layouts are also given. The poetic interpretations and historical explanations are clear, balanced, and take in historical views of these classics. Discussion of possible interpretations of conventional imagery and topics is illuminating.
The paperback is 28 x 22 cm and pretty heavy--like a textbook.
There is a ten-page Index of Thematic Contents after the normal Table of Contents, with the categories "Intellectual and Cultural Milieu," "Themes," "Prosody," and "Diction," "Syntax," and "Structure." This more than makes up for the lack of the General Index. Every chapter has a reference bibliography with English and Chinese citations separate.

This "Guided Anthology" covers the gamut of Chinese poetry, from the very beginning. Fifteen of the very best Chinese scholars are given an historical slice of the genre, from Pre-Qin Times to the Ming and Qing Dynasties. It offers a thematic index as well as help on prosody, diction, syntax and structure. All translations are excellent.

The book comes having more writings in it than it has disclosed on the sales page. I am not very happy with it.