Help with Chinese poetry recs?
Sep. 11th, 2019 04:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
astolatSo I have a character in a book who wants to write poetry, only she's a native Mandarin speaker who grew up from birth to 13 somewhere not far from Shanghai.
I need help figuring out some poetry and literature she would have read and finding decent English translations. Does anyone have any recs for either? Or for any favorite Chinese-to-English poetry translators in general?
Also hey in other news I'm in Lisbon this week for Comic-Con Portugal! Lmk if you're in the vicinity. :D
I need help figuring out some poetry and literature she would have read and finding decent English translations. Does anyone have any recs for either? Or for any favorite Chinese-to-English poetry translators in general?
Also hey in other news I'm in Lisbon this week for Comic-Con Portugal! Lmk if you're in the vicinity. :D
no subject
Date: 2019-09-11 05:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-11 07:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-12 12:07 am (UTC)As bonus, have some neat poetry meta posts Larry wrote for
no subject
Date: 2019-09-25 09:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-25 01:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-11 05:39 pm (UTC)If modern day, the first poet she'd learn about is Li Bai. If she's into reading more female poets, then there's Li Qingzhao. The Tang and then Song dynasties are famous for (among other things) producing great poets.
Also, if she's into Classical Chinese, she can go back to China's roots and read Classic of Poetry...
Again, everything I've named are still pretty much what you'd learn in school
If she's into more contemporary poets, there's Bei Dao, who is still writing.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-11 07:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-12 06:49 am (UTC)What's the background of your character, btw? Are her parents college-educated?
Middle-class children will probably be given the book of 300 Tang Poems, as another poster has mentioned, when they start school. Another Tang poet your character would have read at elementary school would be Du Fu, who was a contemporary of Li Bai.
She'd have also come across poetry in modern Chinese at school, with poets like Yu Kwang-chung, who passed away in 2017. Also mixed in would be short essays or excerpts from longer books, etc, by various famous modern Chinese writers, like Lao She and Lu Xun. But this'd be in middle school.
She would have also started reading easy Classical Chinese essays by middle school. The style and language of Classic of Poetry/Book of Odes would probably be too difficult to copy at her age, but the style of Tang and Song poets she can probably manage.
Mind you, I'm getting this info from the table of contents in the elementary and then junior high Chinese subject textbooks.
I won't know which poet she'd explore more on her own initiative unless I know her personality? If she's into more obscure poets, there's always Index Finger. Another famous modern poet who definitely wouldn't be taught at school is Gu Cheng (1956-1993), who supposedly killed his wife and then hanged himself, but his poetry is pretty decent.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-11 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-11 08:08 pm (UTC)I don't know how useful classic poets would be for learning how to write poems, though -- every single native speaker I've talked with about Tang poetry has, without exception, complained about how different it is from contemporary language, in particular (over)-compressed and using outdated meanings for characters. Contemporary poetry I've sampled has definitely more contemporary/idiomatic.
For classic poetry in general, to get an idea of the canon, you could do far worse than 300 Tang Poems, a canonical anthology still used in schools. It's been multiply translated: my current favorite is Peter Harris's from Everyman Library.
ETA: I should mention that Burton Watson is a Chinese and Japanese scholar who has for decades done a good job of balancing technical nuance with a decent poetic ear. Pretty much any book of his is good.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-11 10:14 pm (UTC)For an old-fashioned education: the four novels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Chinese_Novels), the Analects, the three character classic, the Dao de Jing, the 300 Tang poems.
I love how rectangular the three character classic (https://ctext.org/three-character-classic) and some classical Chinese poetry is. Check out this famous rectangle by Li Bai, where each line is a couplet of 5-character phrases (https://www.gushiwen.org/GuShiWen_9ba73ea1cf.aspx). I also love shockingly loose translations of Chinese poetry, such as the text Mahler used for his Song of the Earth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Lied_von_der_Erde#Text_of_Das_Lied_von_der_Erde) and the very famous Ezra Pound "translation" of the aforementioned rectangle (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47692/the-river-merchants-wife-a-letter-56d22853677f9).
Traditional Chinese education heavily emphasizes memorization, and an educated teen would be able to reel off upwards of 20 poems from the Tang collection off the top of their head -- many of them being exactly 20=4x5 characters long, so they're not long -- they come up in the national exam .
no subject
Date: 2019-09-12 07:28 am (UTC)But writing modern poetry is much easier, so maybe look at that kind? Guo Moruo's poem was the first that came to mind: http://poetrypacific.blogspot.com/2013/11/2-poems-by-guo-moruo.html