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Chinese Poetry, 2nd ed., Revised: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres
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Manufacturer: Duke University Press
Publisher: Duke University Press
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Chinese Poetry, 2nd ed., Revised: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres Description
Dewey Decimal Number: 895.11008
EAN: 9780822319467
ISBN: 0822319462
Label: Duke University Press
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 376
Publication Date: 1997-12
Publisher: Duke University Press
Studio: Duke University Press
Editorial Review of Chinese Poetry, 2nd ed., Revised: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres
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.
Customer Reviews of Chinese Poetry, 2nd ed., Revised: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres
Review Summary: Not just for scholars
Review: I am neither a scholar, intellectual or poet. I had a passing interest in Chinese poetry and language. I picked this book up at random.
The chapter about translation is fascinating. To see how translation developed since the late 19th century is illuminating. I remember being taught in elementary school that Japanese and Chinese were "inferior" language because of their use of pictograms.
The poetry is beautiful and fascinating in its' spaciousness of translation, which invites the reader into experience.
This book drew me into studying Chinese for a short while, just enough to give me the ability to read a bit here and there in some simple poetry. With even my paltry understanding, Yip's analysis and examples of his students' experimental translations, gave me the audacity, perhaps, to try this. The most non-intellectual response: what a lovely treat!
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A Superb Writing Resource
Review: 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.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Poetic and Cultural Breakthrough
Review: I find Yip's approach to be a fundamental breakthrough in crosscultural awareness which attempts to bring chinese culture to life for the western mind.
This attempt reaches past the analytic perspective and borders on a cultural anthropology of mind. This is of keen value to psychologists, who began a primitive study in the late 1880's under the direction of Wundt. It went no further than 1900.
Besides the importance for linguists, those inspired by ancient texts, translators who value perspective within a language, students of comparative religion and traditional chinese medicine, a breakthough in the realm of poetry is attempted with a boldness that affirms the host culture as experienced by a chinese person. This will be an incredible experience for those who approach poetry with a serious intention. Yip's sensitivity and straightforwardness is refreshing and opens a vast new landscape. This, to me, places the text in the forefront of a new begining.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Fundamental breakthrough in cultural awareness. Incredible!
Review: I find Yip's approach to be a fundamental breakthrough in crosscultural awareness which attempts to bring chinese culture to life for the western mind.
This attempt reaches past the analytic perspective and borders on a cultural anthropology of mind. This is of keen value to psychologists, who began a primitive study in the late 1880's under the direction of Wundt. It went no further than 1900.
Besides the importance for linguists, those inspired by ancient texts, translators who value perspective within a language, students of comparative religion and traditional chinese medicine, a breakthough in the realm of poetry is attempted with a boldness that affirms the host culture as experienced by a chinese person. This will be an incredible experience for those who approach poetry with a serious intention. Yip's sensitivity and straightforwardness is refreshing and opens a vast new landscape. This, to me, places the text in the forefront of a new begining.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Half Translations
Review: First a note on the format of the book. The subtitle is important: "An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres". This is the theme which governs the organisation of the material: the poems are grouped by form rather than by poet. There is a contents list for the poems, but no indexing by author or title, so the book seems to be aimed at those who will like what they are given rather than those who know what they are looking for.
Wai-lim Yip is Chinese poetry's equivalent of the period instrument zealots of classical music. He produced this collection in the 1970s in what he calls "dismay and anger" at what he sees as the "gross distortions" of Chinese poems by the old school translators of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Yip's argument is essentially that Chinese poetry is characterised by the juxtaposition of images; that the relationships between these images are the more expressive for being left unsaid; and that when they are spelt out by the insertion by translators of prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns, the productive ambiguity of these relationships is lost.
Thus far, Yip is absolutely right, but it is in his attempts to apply this argument to the practice of translation that he goes wrong. Firstly, his introductory essay is devoted largely to raising and destroying men of straw: the examples of "gross distortion" which he produces are from forgotten translators of a pre-modernist period and aesthetic, which differs as much from contemporary translations as it does from the Chinese viewpoint. He never takes on respected translators such as Waley, let alone those working in the 70s or today.
The second problem is that he fails to realise that the filling in of prepositions and other syntactic helpers is the result not of misunderstanding Chinese, but of understanding English. English translations need these words because that is the way that the English language expresses relationships; where they are omitted, we have good Chinese but bad English. Word for word translations such as Yip's are "half translations": helpful cribs for reading the original, but nothing more. Yip's failure to appreciate this shows the dangers of attempting to translate into, rather than from, a foreign language.
Yip attempts to circumvent this difficulty by pointing to poets of the modernist period, particularly Pound, who produced this kind of work under the influence of Chinese and Japanese poetry. But he fails to see that these are Orientalist works of the early 20th century, rather than signs of a lasting change in the English language or in the western aesthetic. Translating Du Fu and Li Bai as if they were Ezra Pound merely reinforces their apparent strangeness, rather than helping us to understand them.
As an example, Yip's Chun Wang is as follows:
Spring Scene
All ruins, the empire; mountains and rivers in view./To the city, spring: grass and trees are thick./The times strike. Before flowers, tears break loose./Separation cuts. Birds startle our heart./Beacon fires continued for three months on end./A letter from home is worth thousands of gold pieces./White hair, scratched, becomes thinner and thinner,/So thin it can hardly hold a pin.
In this translation, Yip's determination not to spell out the relationship between the elements leads him to deny their relationships. The translation of each line as one or more complete sentences, for example, destroys the couplets which are the main structural element of the poem. He can only avoid clarifying the relationship between the city and spring in the second line by producing a phrase with no meaning at all ("To the city, spring").
So Yip's translations fail as English poems. He replaces the implied connections of the original only with disconnections. But where the book does succeed is as a learning tool: the most valuable version of each poem is not the translation itself but the word for word crib which precedes it. This coupled with the reasonably legible calligraphic Chinese text is a great help for students of Chinese wishing to understand the original. This, then, is not a book for those seeking English translations, but it is an excellent resource for the student of the language.