Customer Reviews

Love and Time

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Professor Seaton is a remarkable translator. The essence and simplicity of Chinese poetry are so easily lost by casual or inept translation. Overembelishment, attempts to rhyme, and verbosity are the natural enemies of clear, poignant Chinese verse. But you won't find any of that here.

Ou-Yang Hsiu is a wonder and a delight. His poetry is fresh, simple, charming; yet richly imbued with perception, emotion, and understanding. In this thin, wonderful volume, master poet--by way of the efforts of master translator--arrives as fresh and vital as he must have appeared in original form, 900 years back.

I had the great good fortune of taking several courses with Professor Seaton some twenty five years ago. His knowledge of his subject and his exuberance are clearly unflagging. I've already ordered five volumes of this book, and will likely exhaust its availability before running out of interested friends who want copies of their own.

This thin book of poetry is quite nice, though I'd have preferred a bigger selection of this master poet's work. I find some of the translations to be strangely minimalistic, as if the translator is attempting to reproduce the style of the original monosyllabic Chinese. It is successful, to a degree, though some of the translations leave me wondering, "what is the poet saying?" Seaton is a long-time highly respected translator of Chinese poetry. This is a good addition to anyone's collection of Chinese poems in English translation, given the caveat above.

One comment about the cover - the ink used for the front and back covers fades easily. I cannot read the blurb on the back cover because the color has faded so much. This may be because my used copy sat in the sunlight for a long time. I don't judge a book by its blurb (though I'm always interested in what blurbs have to say), but this is a problem with my own copy and may or may not apply to new copies.