The Poetry Book Society Spring 2022 Translation Choice Chinese
poetry is unique in world literature in that it was written for the
best part of 3,000 years by exiles, and Chinese history can be read
as a matter of course in the words of poets. In this collection
from the Tang Dynasty are poems of war and peace, flight and refuge
but above all they are plain-spoken, everyday poems; classics that
are everyday timeless, a poetry conceived "to teach the least and
the most, the literacy of the heart in a barbarous world," says the
translator. C.D. Wright has written of Wong May's work that it is
"quirky, unaffectedly well-informed, capacious, and unpredictable
in [its] concerns and procedures," qualities which are evident too
in every page of her new book, a translation of Du Fu and Li Bai
and Wang Wei, and many others whose work is less well known in
English. In a vividly picaresque afterword, Wong May dwells on the
defining characteristics of these poets, and how they lived and
wrote in dark times. This translator's journal is accompanied and
prompted by a further marginal voice, who is figured as the rhino:
"The Rhino in Tang China held a special place," she writes, "much
like the unicorn in medieval Europe - not as conventional as the
phoenix or the dragon but a magical being; an original spirit", a
fitting guide to China's murky, tumultuous Middle Ages, that were
also its Golden Age of Poetry, and to this truly original book of
encounters, whose every turn is illuminating and revelatory.
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