How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is perfectly designed for a variety of Chinese poetry readers, learners, and even researchers. The eighteen chapters starting from The Book of Poetry and ends with the Ming-Qing poetry cover Chinese poetry tradition of more than two thousand years and all types of Chinese poetry genres and sub-genres in this marvelous tradition. You will easily get to know how Chinese poetry developed for two thousand years even just after scanning the Primary Table of Contents!
In these chapters, authors deliberately choose great poems of each important period or Dynasty in Chinese history. They not only list these poems in Chinese characters, translate them into English (for regulated verses and songs, there is even word by word translation), and show each word in pinyin with tones, but also analyze these beautiful poems in historical background and poetic tradition. The templates of poems, including original Chinese texts, English translation and Chinese pinyin with tones to a great extent help Chinese language learners to learn how to understand Chinese poetry word by word and how to recite them in Chinese. The analysis of poems following will largely improve your knowledge of how to appreciate the beauty of Chinese poems, and more importantly, will help you get to see the great ideas underlying those poetic lines in terms of culture, history, religion, art, music, and etc.
And the well-done thematic table of contents, glossary-index, list of entering tones, and careful explanations of syntax, structure, and many other major issues of Chinese poetry will be very useful even for a scholar of Chinese poetry. You will save plenty of time looking up those important informations in all kinds of Chinese dictionaries!


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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 bestshi,sao,fu,ci, andqu 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. 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)

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