The Heart of Chinese Poetry

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 Chinas greatest poems from a wide range of writers - Li Bai, Du Fu, Du Mu, Su Shr, etc. If these names look strange its 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 dont 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 Bibliography

The 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. Whincups 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, its 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 Whincups 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 someones 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 Yips treatment of Wang Wei in his excellent bilingual anthology, details of which follow below.

Whincups 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 cant 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.)