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Title: How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology
ISBN: 0231139411
Author:
Publicate Date: 2007-12-14
Publish: 2007-12-14
List Price: $32.50
Average Customer Rating: 5.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $27.79
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $22.20
Amazon Merchant Price: $29.25
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| Customer Review: |
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1: a great guide and a refreshing approach to classical Chinese poetry
I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in classical Chinese poetry and language. It is very different from other anthologies of Chinese literature both in approach and in style, and touches upon many essential features of classical Chinese poetry.
Each chapter is written by a well-known scholar in the field. Together they provide a pretty clear picture of classical Chinese poetry. What is especially worth noting of this book is that, first, it well explains the features of Chinese poetry, such as rhymes and ping-ze patterns; it even gives pinyin romanization and tones for the Chinese texts, in addition to English translations which are side by side with the Chinese originals; and secondly, it not only looks at Chinese poetry from a literary perspective, but also tries to interpret the poetic texts according to the particular syntax of the Chinese language. This last feature well illustrates how different syntactic structures could influence the style and effect of a poem, and how the development of the syntax has impacted the development of Chinese poetry in general. Overall, the book is both resourceful and illuminating.
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2: A Must-Have for Chinese Poetry Learners
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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3: An essential addition to any Chinese studies library.
I had the privilege of reading chapters of this anthology before it went to print, and as my first introduction to the intricacies of Chinese poetry it was an excellent place to start.
The format in which the poems are printed, with Chinese and English side by side, helped me to understand translations better. There is also an excellent chapter on ping-ze patterns in Tang poetry, which is a difficult concept to convey in English.
I highly recommend this book to students of Chinese literature and anyone else interested in a solid explanation of Chinese poetic styles.
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