CLASSICAL AND MODERN CHINESE LOVE POEMS, ILLUSTRATED WITH BRUSHWORK CALLIGRAPHY AND SCENES FROM RARELY EXHIBITED PAINTINGS The three arts of poetry, calligraphy and painting are regarded in China as the Triple Excellence, and they are brought together here in a beautifully presented anthology of forty Chinese love poems ranging from the earliest known works in the famous Book of Songs to the work of Chairman Mao and other twentieth-century poets, including poignant examples from the high point of Chinese poetry in the Tang dynasty (618–906). The subject of all the poems and extracts is love, in all its variations: the love of husbands and wives, family and friends, times and places as well as courtship, passion and parting. Selected English translations are each illustrated with a scene from a Chinese painting and are illuminated by the artistic brushwork calligraphy of Qu Lei Lei. Jane Portal’s introduction summarizes the history and development of Chinese poetry and provides brief biographical notes on the poets.

This book, first published in 1982, was the first translation of the Chinese classic Yü-t-‘ai hsin-yung – the unique anthology of love poems, compiled in AD 545. This traces the development of love poetry from the second century BC to its full flowering in the fifth and sixth centuries AD. Dr Birrell’s incisive introductory essay provides a concise survey of the historical and literary setting to the poems and explains the conventions governing courtly love poetry. In particular, the reader’s attention is drawn to the many and varied artistic uses of imagery in the poems. Major poets are noted for their artistic achievement and for their contribution to the development of the genre. Dr Birrell also supplies a valuable section of notes on the poems to guide the reader through unfamiliar historical events, legends, anecdotes and famous places and people, and there is a similar section of notes on the poets offering biographical details.

Qiu Xiaolong is extravagantly qualified for translating these poems, having as a citizen of China won prizes for his own poetry and for translating T.S. Eliot and other English and American poets into Chinese and, more recently, as a citizen of the United States, won prizes for his own poetry and fiction in English. To my mind, the Changgan Song in this collection rivals Ezra Pound's justly famous, loosely translated version, The River Merchant's Wife. These renderings have a limpidity of the language and metaphor and a subtle rhythm, and Qiu has a poet's sixth sense for when (occasionally) to lift the line with a less direct and more evocative word; we are thus rescued from the flatness of some translations of early Chinese poetry. This is a generous book and a very welcome addition to the poetry of love and longing from our Significant Stranger, the Chinese nation. --Mona Van Duyn.

In this book we invite you into the immense and alluring world of Chinese love poetry. Hundreds of love poems from almost every era of Chinese history still exist; we have decided to present twenty-five of them to you, complete with fresh translations and line-by-line analysis. Among these twenty-five poems are some of the most beloved poems in Chinese history; others are probably familiar to few people. Our special interest is in poems that describe the full range of the experience of love, from wooing the beloved, to missing out on a hopeful connection; to the problem of distance and absence in a relationship and, finally, to losing a beloved partner much too early. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do!

“A magisterial book” of nearly five hundred poems from some of history’s greatest Chinese poets, translated and edited by a renowned poet and scholar (New Republic). The Chinese poetic tradition is the largest and longest continuous tradition in world literature. This rich and far-reaching anthology of nearly five hundred poems provides a comprehensive account of its first three millennia (1500 BCE to 1200 CE), the period during which virtually all its landmark developments took place. Unlike earlier anthologies of Chinese poetry, Hinton’s book focuses on a relatively small number of poets, providing selections that are large enough to re-create each as a fully realized and unique voice. New introductions to each poet’s work provide a readable history, told for the first time as a series of poetic innovations forged by a series of master poets. “David Hinton has . . . lured into English a new manner of hearing the great poets of that long glory of China’s classical age. His achievement is another echo of the original, and a gift to our language.” —W. S. Merwin

Greg Whincup offers a varied and unique approach to Chinese translation in The Heart of Chinese Poetry. Special features of this edition include direct word-for-word translations showing the range of meaning in each Chinese character, the Chinese pronunciations, as well as biographical and historical commentary following each poem.

Classical Chinese poetry reached its pinnacle during the T'ang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.), and the poets of the late T'ang-a period of growing political turmoil and violence-are especially notable for combining strking formal inovation with raw emotional intensity. A. C. Graham’s slim but indispensable anthology of late T’ang poetry begins with Tu Fu, commonly recognized as the greatest Chinese poet of all, whose final poems and sequences lament the pains of exile in images of crystalline strangeness. It continues with the work of six other masters, including the “cold poet” Meng Chiao, who wrote of retreat from civilization to the remoteness of the high mountains; the troubled and haunting Li Ho, who, as Graham writes, cultivated a “wholly personal imagery of ghosts, blood, dying animals, weeping statues, whirlwinds, the will-o'-the-wisp”; and the shimmeringly strange poems of illicit love and Taoist initiation of the enigmatic Li Shang-yin. Offering the largest selection of these poets’ work available in English in a translation that is a classic in its own right, Poems of the Late T’ang also includes Graham’s searching essay “The Translation of Chinese Poetry” as well as helpful notes on each of the poets and on many of the individual poems.