Chinese Poetry, 2nd ed., Revised: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres

Thanks. This is a great book and a real help for me in understanding Chinese poetry. Poems in Chinese & translations.

Other reviewers have criticized the style of translations, arguing that they are better suited as an aide for the student of classical Chinese than as a standalone literary production. I will add that the book is definitely not meant for a language student, since the original texts of the poems are given only in traditional handwriting. Most people who would want to use this book as an aide for reading the originals will probably find it very difficult to identify many of the characters, especially those that aren't already familiar. The book could have been made usable as a linguistic tool by including a version of the poems in a modern font and/or pinyin, even if in an appendix, but that clearly wasn't the author's intention.

CHINESE POETRY : An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres. Edited and translated by Wai-lim Yip. 358 pp. Durham NC and London : Duke University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8223-1951-9 (pbk.)Wai-lim Yip, Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego, is a poet, a sophisticated thinker, and a brilliant translator, critic, and theorist. As heir to one of the richest and most subtle literatures in the world, he has always been understandably concerned about the often inferior quality of Western translations from Chinese, an inferiority he attributes to a misreading of the Chinese sensibility, and a reading into it of invalid Western assumptions. In other words, Western translators who do not understand the classical Chinese mind, can only represent it as operating more or less like their own minds, and in thus representing it end up by grossly misrepresenting it.Professor Yip earlier devoted an entire study to this subject : 'Diffusion of Distances : Dialogues Between Chinese and Western Poetics' (1993). In the present book he has given the essentials of his argument in an introductory essay that bears careful reading : 'TRANSLATING CHINESE POETRY : The Convergence of Language and Poetics - A Radical Introduction' (pp.1-27).In the Preface to his book, Professor Yip tells us that : "Underlying the classical Chinese aesthetic is the primary idea of noninterference with Nature's flow [cf., the Taoist 'Wu Wei']. As reflected in poetic language, this idea has engendered freedom from the syntactical rigidities often found in English. . . . This opens up an indeterminate space for readers to enter and reenter for multiple perceptions rather than locking thm into some definite perspectival position or guiding them in a certain direction" (page xiii).This opening up of spaces in which all things, including the reader, are allowed to become themselves may sound a bit abstract to some, but its marvelous effects will be felt by anyone who sincerely opens themselves to the poems in this anthology.The anthology contains 150 poems, drawn from all major modes and genres, which span two thousand years - from the 'Book of Songs' (c. - 600) to the poems of the Yuan Dynasty (+ 1260-1368). Each poem is printed with the original Chinese text in Professor Yip's beautiful brushed calligraphy, co-ordinated with word-by-word glosses, and followed by his spare and powerful translations. The effect is to correct more than a century of distortion caused by translators who were blind to the intricacies and aesthetics of the Chinese language, and to let English readers finally enter into the dynamics of the originals. Each section of the book is preceded by a short essay on the mode or genre to follow, and a useful 5-page Bibliography rounds out the book.Here, as an example of Yip's style, is his rendering of a poem by Wang Wei on page 228. The Chinese text is given first at the top of the page, then the word-by-word translation which I shall omit, and then the final translation in four lines (numbered by Yip for the convenience of readers, and with my obliques added to indicate line breaks) :"1. High on tree-tips, the hibiscus. / 2. In the mountain sets forth red calyxes. / 3. A home by a stream, quiet. No man. / 4. It blooms and falls, blooms and falls."The poem's spareness opens up a space which allows each of us to generate our own vividly realized scene, and to entertain different ideas at different readings. Wang Wei, who was Buddhist, rather than getting in the way and trying to control things, is allowing them to come forward and declare themselves, and his procedure gains in meaning if we set it alongside an observation made by Dogen (+ 1200-1253), who wrote:"Conveying the self to the myriad things to authenticate them is delusion; the myriad things advancing to authenticate the self is enlightenment" (Tr., F. H. Cook, 'Sounds of Valley Streams,' page 66).In a word, Professor Yip's "noninterference."So here is a truly marvelous book by a highly competent authority in which the English reader can finally find out what Chinese poetry is really all about. The book is beautifully printed on excellent strong paper, bound in a sturdy decorative wrapper, but sadly has a glued spine instead of the stitching that would have given us a book that could have been held open without effort.Apart from the spine, my only complaint is that Professor Yip's calligraphy, though beautiful, is brushed in a cursive style which tends to make the structure of the more complex and less common characters hard to discern for beginners. Ideal in a book of this nature would have been to give the Chinese texts in large printed characters along with their romanized transcriptions.But you can't have everything, and we should certainly be grateful for the labors that went into this unique anthology of Chinese poems, a book designed to give the English reader true access to the dynamics of one of the most subtle and interesting literatures in the world.

others have characterized this book accurately. a curious omission is that there is no mention of the sound patterns of the originals, which as i understand it, despite changes in the way the language is spoken since the classical period, is still the main way a chinese reader would experience the poems' form.

Wai-Lim Yip sets the standard for the study of Chinese poetry by printing the original text side by side with both a word-for-word translation and an extended interpretation of the same for over 150 poems spanning all genres of Chinese poetry. By far, this book provides the most accessible versions of each poem. What it may lack in comprehensive representation, it more than makes up for in quality and packaging. While its translations do not fully become English poems, as critics have often said, the author does provide the reader with a most direct access to the binary data of the originals. As such, he expects the reader to work a little to put the poem to use. This book will interest a writer, especially one interested in translation and sources for new work, more than a scholar expecting brilliant English renditions of these classic poems.Bottom line, there should be more books of Eastern poetry in "translation" in this form: original text in original characters, a word-for-word bare bones rendition, and then the translator's extrapolation of those bones. A fantastic learning tool for any writer.

These dogmatic and unserviceable translations emerge from Yip's frustration with previous translators who allegedly wrenched the sense of Chinese poetry by rendering them in English syntax. (Straw-man argument, but never mind.) All he demonstrates is that he is not very familiar with translation studies, because merely translating Chinese poetry word for word does not produce the same effect for English readers that the originals do (or did, more precisely) for Chinese readers. It's not much better than W.D. Whitney's preposterous translation of the opening line of Mencius: "Sage! Not far ten thousand mile and come; also will have use gain me realm, hey?" Whitney thought he was proving that Chinese is inferior to English; Yip thinks he's proving that Chinese is superior to English; in reality, both proved no more than that they don't understand how language works.

This is really useful approach to the study of Chinese poetry: the text gives just what the reader / student needs, and the introduction is incisive and free of the literal-minded traditionalist conformism that affects much commentary on Chinese literature.