Readers of this volume will be able to tell from the Introduction andnotes throughout the book how great a debt I owe to many distin-guished scholars past and present. Without them, this work would havebeen impossible. Here I want to express my gratitude to a number ofpeople who have influenced this project more directly. The book isdedicated to David R. Knechtges, wh…
Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs offers fifteen essays on the triptych of poetry + translation + Chinese. The collection has three parts: "The Translator's Take," "Theoretics," and "Impact." The conversation stretches from queer-feminist engagement with China's newest poetry to philosophical and philological reflections on its oldest, and from Tang- and Song-dynasty classical p…
When traditional Chinese critics discuss pentasyllabic poetry,they usually give allegorical interpretations of individual works, makegeneral observations about social backgrounds and the lives of poets, oroffer impressionistic comments on the aesthetic qualities of the works ofgiven poets. Based on what they discover in these studies, they sketch abroad outli…
The poems in this book were written in Chinese, in the classicshih form.1 Their authors were Japanese Zen monks whose livestogether span the years from 1278 to 1429, for Japan a time ofturmoil but also of growth. Although ten of these sixteen menvisited China, all were born and died in Japan: for all, Chinesewas an acquired tongue. Most of their ver…