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Chinese Poetry, 2nd ed., Revised

An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres

Chinese Poetry, 2nd ed., Revised cover image

Book

Pages: 376

Illustrations: 181 ideograms

Published: April 1997

Editor: Wai-lim Yip

This is the first paperback edition of a classic anthology of Chinese poetry. Spanning two thousand years—from the Book of Songs (circa 600 B.C.) to the chü form of the Yuan Dynasty (1260–1368)—these 150 poems cover all major genres that students of Chinese poetry must learn.
Newly designed, the unique format of this volume will enhance its reputation as the definitive introduction to Chinese poetry, while its introductory essay on issues of Chinese aesthetics will continue to be an essential text on the problems of translating such works into English. Each poem is printed with the original Chinese characters in calligraphic form, coordinated with word-for-word annotations, and followed by an English translation. Correcting more than a century of distortion of the classical Chinese by translators unconcerned with the intricacies and aesthetics of the Chinese language, these masterful translations by Wai-lim Yip, a noted and honored translator and scholar, allow English readers to enter more easily into the dynamic of the original poems. Each section of the volume is introduced by a short essay on the mode or genre of poem about to be presented and is followed by a comprehensive bibliography.

Praise

“With the first edition of this anthology, translating Chinese poetry was never the same again. This new edition of Yip’s landmark book is warmly welcomed. Hopefully, the paperback edition will make it easily accessible to all those who ever wondered about the discrepancies between a Chinese poem and its Western translation and tried themselves—more or less skillfully—on this or that poem.” - Bernhard Buehrer, The China Quarterly

“For three decades now, Wai-lim Yip has been a linking figure between American modernism (in-the-line-of-Pound) and Chinese traditions and practices form which that modernism has long drawn. His two classic American works—in the lovely way that classic, as a word and concept, can still resonate in Chinese context—are his Pound’s Cathay and Chinese Poetry.” - Jerome Rothenberg, from the introduction to Between Landscapes: Poems by Wai-lim Yip

“Yip, himself a poet, captures the rhythm of Chinese nature poetry in his characteristically punctuated and contracted imagery. The inclusion of the word-for-word annotations is a feature that distinguishes the book from most anthologies of Chinese poetry in translation.” - Jing Wang, author of The Story of Stone

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Wai-lim Yip has been Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego for the past 30 years. A bi-cultural poet, translator, critic, and theorist, Yip has written more than 40 books in two languages. His works of poetry include Fugue, Crossing, Edge of Waking, Thirty Years of Poetry, Between Landscapes, and The Voice of Blooming. Yip’s scholarly works include Ezra Pound’s Cathay, Reading the Modern and the Postmodern, Chinese Poetics, and Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues between Chinese and Western Poetics. His translations include Modern Chinese Poetry 1955–1965, Lyrics from Shelters: Modern Chinese Poetry, 1930–1950, and Hiding the Universe: Poems of Wang Wei. He has been honored as one of the main figures of modern Chinese literary and cultural theory in Beijing and Taiwan and was awarded recognition in Taiwan as one of the “Ten Major Modern Chinese Poets.”

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Paper ISBN: 978-0-8223-1946-7 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8223-1951-1 / eISBN: 978-0-8223-8209-6 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822382096

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