庭院深深：最美的宋詞英譯新詮 by 吳俁陽（賞析）
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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This is a bilingual (Chinese / English) anthology of Song Dynasty poetry. It features more than 140 poems by almost fifty poets of the Song Dynasty, but a few of the Song poetic rockstars are particularly well represented (e.g. Su Shi, Qin Guan, Ouyang Xiu, and Xin Qiji.) The principal language of the book is Chinese (Mandarin) and so, while the poems themselves appear in English as well as Chinese, the ancillary matter is only in Chinese. Said ancillary matter includes notes, contextual information, bio-blurbs on the poets, and brief front and back matter.

I learned after reading the translations, that the translator was Xu Yuanchong and that he was (i.e. he’s now deceased) a very big deal as a translator, translating classical Chinese poetry into both English and French. All in all, I enjoyed the translations and found them to be sound as poems in their own right. That said, my personal preference would have been to have had less effort put into maintaining rhyme. I suspect a closer transmission of the ideas of the originals could have been achieved without the forced constraint of rhyme. Furthermore, while in many cases metering was attended to, sometimes it was not, leaving those poems to have a doggerel quality. [I come to this conclusion by comparing a few of the poem’s translations to those by other translators as well as to literal translations.] That said, the translator was clearly no slouch, and his stylistic choices were likely informed by what was popular during his career.

This book is part of a series. Other volumes include: In the Thick Woods a Deer Is Seen at Times (Tang Dynasty poems) and A Pair of Swallows Fly (from The Book of Songs, a.k.a. The Classic of Poetry.) I picked this book up in Taipei’s Zhongshan Book Street (Eslite Bookstore,) and don’t know how widely available the books of this series are outside of Taiwan, but if you are interested in Classical Chinese poetry and can find a copy, I’d recommend it.

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