The Heart of Chinese Poetry: Fifty-Seven of the Best Traditional Chinese Poems in a Dual-Language Edition

If you have an interest in Chinese poetry, this is an excellent way to start. I wish there were more books like this. Or rather, if there are please let me know.

Very nice and guided introduction to Chinese Poetry with teaching some characters. I enjoyed the comparison ofTu Fu (Du Fu) and Li Po (Li Bai) as being like Beethoven and Mozart.

It is really interesting, informative and well written.

Whincup provides a representative selection from famous poets and their poems. What is especially valuable about this book is the inclusion of the Chinese script, a Western transliteration, a word-for-word translation, a final artistic rendition of the poem, and a short commentary that places the poem in context. Whincup succeeds in whetting our appetite for classical Chinese poetry.

My favorite book of Chinese poetry.

This is an outstandingly helpful book for those who are learning Chinese in order to read the classical poetry. It needs a second edition, however:This excellent book merits a 2nd edition, updated as follows:1) Most importantly, a large-format hardcover edition on high quality paper is needed (or a paperback of comparable quality and size). The Chinese characters of many strokes in the present small-format paperback are barely distinguishable without a magnifying glass.2) Secondarily, the Yale romanization, despite its excellence, should be replaced with the now nearly universal pinyin. That will make it much more usable with Pulleyblank's Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation and (in conjunction with Pulleyblank's provided radical:stroke count numbers) Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary.

The poems and selections are just beautiful. I appreciated his narratives, but I think what was most unique was the explanation of the Chinese Characters…. I just hadn’t’ been exposed to that before. A favorite is the “barking dog” symbol … picture of a dog with an open mouth. The poems span all the way to 500 BC to about 1200AD. Although many of the poems are infused with wine, he does mention that tea became popular during the Sung Dynasty and “Many Sung poems have the pale astringency of Chinese tea.” There is a lot revealed in a simple sentence of commentary “Chinese gentlemen lived between two ideals: the conventional idea of government service, and the private ideal of the cultured recluse”. The section of poems by and about women also welcome, as that is probably under appreciated. Some favorites included:• Du Mu “A thousand miles, / of caroling warblers, / Flowers that flash re/ Against the green.”• Du Fu also a favorite ‘My head white/ I have scratched/ Till it is so sparse

THE HEART OF CHINESE POETRY. By Greg Whincup. 178 pp. (Anchor Books). New York : Doubleday, 1987. ISBN 0-385-23967-X (pbk.)Greg Whincup has here had the useful idea of making Chinese poetry come alive for the Western reader by bringing readers face-to-face with the original texts. Although it has been done before, for example by David Hawkes in his 'A Little Primer of Tu Fu' (Renditions Press, 1988), Whincup seems certainly to have done as well, and considering the incredible importance of the Chinese language, and the wealth of its literature, there really ought to be many more books like this.Whereas Hawkes' book focused exclusively on the work of Tu Fu, Whincup has chosen instead to give us fifty-seven of China's greatest poems from a wide range of writers - Li Bai, Du Fu, Du Mu, Su Shr, etc. If these names look strange it's because Whincup, rather than employing the Wade-Giles system of transcription which everyone is familiar with, has chosen instead to use the far less well-known Yale system of romanization. For those who don't know it, which probably includes almost everyone, he has provided a brief guide on pages 173-74. The book also contains an extensive 5-page English-language BibliographyThe poems have been topically arranged under the following headings : The Heart of Chinese Poetry; The History of Chinese Poetry; Three Poets of the Golden Age; Poems of War; Poems by and about Women; Landscape/Enlightenment.For each poem we are given : 1. Whincup's final translation; 2. the Yale word-by-word romanization; 3. the printed full-form Chinese character (ideogram; sinograph); 4. a literal translation of each character; 5. explanatory notes. A nice touch is that the texts have been arranged vertically.As anyone who has read the poems like this can vouch, it really is the only way for the non-specialist to get an idea of how glorious Chinese poems are when understood in their original language. My only complaint is that, although the Chinese font that has been used in the book is a beautiful cursive form and without the stiffness of the usual printed form, it's also incredibly tiny, and the beginner is going to need very good eyes and very good lighting to be able to discern the structure of the more complex characters.Here is an example of Whincup's final translation of a famous poem, 'Deer Fence,' by Wang Wei (with my obliques added to indicate line breaks) :"In the empty mountains / I see no one, / But hear the sound / Of someone's voice. // Slanting sunlight / Enters deep forest, / And shines again / On green moss" (p.169).This is a respectable effort, and readers might care to compare it with Wai-lim Yip's treatment of Wang Wei in his excellent bilingual anthology, details of which follow below.Whincup's is a wonderful book that, by enabling the reader to come to grips with the Chinese, will help anyone to arrive at a deeper and richer appreciation of Chinese poetry, and to see how far short of the originals any English translation must inevitably fall. You simply can't do in English what can be done in Chinese, and there really ought to be more books like 'The Heart of Chinese Poetry.'For those who may be interested, here are details of the Yip: CHINESE POETRY : An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres. Edited and translated by Wai-lim Yip. 358 pp. Durham NC and London : Duke University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8223-1951-9 (pbk.)