The Best Translator for the Best Tang and Sung Poetry

Poems of the Masters: China's Classic Anthology of T'ang and Sung Dynasty Verse by Red Pine
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an amazing book and highly recommended.

Usually, I score based on the ridiculously subjective assessment of how fun was it to read? On that scale, I'll admit, this was about 3.5. But it's so well presented and so well broken down for the reader, I have to give it all the points.

This is a collection of 224 poems from Tang and Sung China, first collected in the 13th century and amended a bit afterwards. Part of what's interesting is seeing what contemporary readers (or readers who were at least several hundred years closer to their creation than we are) considered the most important poetry of those times. I'll admit, it's not what I would have chosen. But the original collectors would have taken into account the appropriateness of rhyme and meter and other effects of language that don't survive in translation, and of course I care nothing for that since I don't read Chinese. I prefer poetry with a lot of comprehensible imagery and easily accessed human emotion that one can still connect with. And there is some of that for sure.

But what there is plenty of is support for the English reader. Red Pine is (in my narrow, unsophisticated but unerring opinion) the absolute best at translating the poetry and supplying commentary making the poetry accessible. The fact that this poetry needs so much support is what makes it not my favorite, but having decided to read it, I can say that this is undoubtedly the best English version to get into it. Red Pine gives amazing biographical details, explicates oblique references to poetry we simply don't know, places the poetry in a specific historical context, and supplies all kinds of cultural knowledge that makes the poems make sense. It's a lot.

Ideally, I prefer to read poetry in books with nothing but the poems. You know? Just the words, just the lines. It's so much prettier to look at and more esthetic to experience. But that wouldn't work here at all, so the half-page or so of explanation for each poem is the next best thing.

There are lots of poems by familiar poets like Wang Wei or Tu Fu or Li Bai, but there are many, many more by poets I'd never heard of. Some of them, hopefully, will lead me to collections of their own.

Anyway, lots to enjoy and chew on here. Highly recommended for those making a study of Chinese poetry. Modestly recommended for casual readers like me.

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