Three Hundred Tang Poems

A new translation of a beloved anthology of poems from the golden age of Chinese culture—a treasury of wit, beauty, and wisdom from many of China’s greatest poets. These roughly three hundred poems from the Tang Dynasty (618–907)—an age in which poetry and the arts flourished—were gathered in the eighteenth century into what became one of the best-known books in the world, and which is still cherished in Chinese homes everywhere. Many of China’s most famous poets—Du Fu, Li Bai, Bai Juyi, and Wang Wei—are represented by timeless poems about love, war, the delights of drinking and dancing, and the beauties of nature. There are poems about travel, about grief, about the frustrations of bureaucracy, and about the pleasures and sadness of old age. Full of wisdom and humanity that reach across the barriers of language, space, and time, these poems take us to the heart of Chinese poetry, and into the very heart and soul of a nation.

The appreciation of Zen philosophy and art has become universal, and Zen poetry, with its simple expression of direct, intuitive insight and sudden enlightenment, appeals to lovers of poetry, spirituality, and beauty everywhere. This collection of translations of the classical Zen poets of China, Japan, and Korea includes the work of Zen practitioners and monks as well as scholars, artists, travelers, and recluses, ranging from Wang Wei, Hanshan, and Yang Wanli, to Shinkei, Basho, and Ryokan.

The deepest and most varied of the Tang Dynasty poets, Tu Fu (Du Fu) is, in the words of David Hinton, the “first complete poetic sensibility in Chinese literature.” Tu Fu merged the public and the private, often in the same poem, as his subjects ranged from the horrors of war to the delights of friendship, from closely observed landscapes to remembered dreams, from the evocation of historical moments to a wry lament over his own thinning hair. Although Tu Fu has been translated often, and often brilliantly, David Hawkes’s classic study, first published in 1967, is the only book that demonstrates in depth how his poems were written. Hawkes presents thirty-five poems in the original Chinese, with a pinyin transliteration, a character-by-character translation, and a commentary on the subject, the form, the historical background, and the individual lines. There is no other book quite like it for any language: a nuts-and-bolts account of how Chinese poems in general, and specifically the poems of one of the world’s greatest poets, are constructed. It’s an irresistible challenge for readers to invent their own translations.

Tang Dynasty (AD618-907) is one of most powerful and prosperous dynasties in Chinese history, it is also a great era of cultural development, the prosperity of poems is the most distinctive feature of Tang Dynasty, it is closely associated with the government officials admission examination of the Dynasty as the skill of writing poems is a necessary subject of such examination, so the big poets, such as Li Bai, Du Fu and Bai Juyi, etc, are also government officials, their works reflect their thoughts and feeling on official careers and real life. Due to the economic prosperity, the ordinary people also have spare time and interest in writing poems, their works are more close to real life and more natural. The poems of Tang Dynasty showcase all respects of social life of the Dynasty. By reading these poems, you will have a better understanding of the character and spirit of the Chinese.

Classical Chinese poetry reached its pinnacle during the T'ang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.), and the poets of the late T'ang-a period of growing political turmoil and violence-are especially notable for combining strking formal inovation with raw emotional intensity. A. C. Graham’s slim but indispensable anthology of late T’ang poetry begins with Tu Fu, commonly recognized as the greatest Chinese poet of all, whose final poems and sequences lament the pains of exile in images of crystalline strangeness. It continues with the work of six other masters, including the “cold poet” Meng Chiao, who wrote of retreat from civilization to the remoteness of the high mountains; the troubled and haunting Li Ho, who, as Graham writes, cultivated a “wholly personal imagery of ghosts, blood, dying animals, weeping statues, whirlwinds, the will-o'-the-wisp”; and the shimmeringly strange poems of illicit love and Taoist initiation of the enigmatic Li Shang-yin. Offering the largest selection of these poets’ work available in English in a translation that is a classic in its own right, Poems of the Late T’ang also includes Graham’s searching essay “The Translation of Chinese Poetry” as well as helpful notes on each of the poets and on many of the individual poems.

The supreme beauty of Tang Dynasty poetry is captured in lucid translations and charming brush paintigs. A treasure of a book --it is a classic. --Nien Cheng, author of Life and Death in Shanghai.