Wow! eBook
How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology Bilingual Edition
Author(s): Zong-qi Cai (Author)
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Publication Date: 28 Dec. 2007
- Edition: Bilingual
- Language: English
- Print length: 456 pages
- ISBN-10: 0231139403
- ISBN-13: 9780231139403
Book Description
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
By presenting poems in so many different forms: Chinese characters, Romanization, English translation, audio files, stress maps, and transliteration, the book enables the reader – no matter what her background in Chinese language, to grasp much of what is going on.–BLT Not Just a Sandwich
An innovative guided anthology of classical Chinese. . . . A reader with some background in Chinese language will especially benefit from this anthology that encourages one to engage with the Chinese texts more directly. I recommend this book to anyone who wishes to understand how classical Chinese poetry works. One will also expect to see this anthology appear soon on the reading lists of courses on Chinese poetry and Chinese literature in general.–Tian Yuan Tan “Monumenta Serica “
The strengths of the book . . . appear in the elegance and facility with which the contributors engage with and explain the language beneath (not beyond) translation. . . . In its scholarly awareness of the relationship between poetic lines and historical context, readers of poetry in any language can learn from the critical traditions, as much as the poems, of Chinese poetry, and glean from
How to Read Chinese Poetry the answer to the question of how to read poetry.–Lucas Klein “Rain Taxi “This book successfully achieves its goal of helping students to overcome linguistic difficulties and to appreciate Chinese poems in their original settings. This is an excellent guided anthology of selected representative works in pre-modern Chinese poetry, and is suitable for students majoring in East Asian/Chinese Studies, teachers of Chinese literature, and readers who want to learn how to better appreciate various forms and genres of Chinese poetry.–Yue Zhang “Studies on Aisa “
