Tony Barnstone - The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry: From Ancient to Contemporary, The Full 3000-Year Tradition

IN THIS ANTHOLOGY WE HAVE ATTEMPTED TO BRING TOGETHER into one volume the essence of Chinese poetry. The selection begins with the Book of Songs (the ancient anthology of folk songs supposedly collected by Confucius himself) and culminates in the political and experimental poetry of contemporary Chinese poets, many of whom are in political exile in the diaspora that followed the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. We have sought to represent in fine translation the well-established canon of great Chinese poems, and to deviate from that canon in ways we found interesting. Here you will find many of the familiar classical gems, popular favorites, and anthology pieces, and yet we have chosen to cut out old touchstones that don't fare well in translation in favor of including poems that read in English as poems in and of themselves. We have also attempted to adjust the canon, here and there, to shine a spotlight on fine poets whose work is often overlooked, and especially to make room for the poems of Chinese women. In the classical Chinese anthologies, the voices of women were largely ignored. Relegated to a few pages at the end of the volumes, they have survived the ravages of the centuries at significantly lower rates than those of men. The work of many of the finest Chinese women poets has been lost entirely. Those we know are represented by only a few poems or a few dozen poems, if we are lucky (while for many male poets, hundreds or even thousands of poems survive). Perhaps one could argue that we are skewing the canon by including a fifth of the fifty extant poems of the great woman poet

Li Qingzhao, while including only one thousandth of the poems of Lu You, who wrote more than ten thousand poems. However, our goal is not to be merely representative in this anthology. We have chosen to swell the selections of poets whose work we particularly admire (Tao Qian, Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, Han Shan, Su Shi, Mao Zedong, Bei Dao, and others) so that the reader can truly come to know their work. We consider such larger selections to be pillars that support the book, little books or chapbooks within the larger book that show the range and development and depth of the finest poets of this extraordinary tradition.

To aid the general reader (as well as students and scholars of Chinese) in navigating such a large selection of work by so many poets, we have provided an author index with both Pinyin and Wade-Giles transliterations of the authors' Chinese names. To help give readers the context necessary to ground their reading of this selection from three millennia of Chinese poetry, we have outfitted the book with an essay on the key issues that confront the English-language translator of classical and contemporary Chinese poetry, a short history of the development of Chinese literary forms, and introductions to each major historical period.

I would like to thank the poet and novelist Ha Jin for generously putting us in touch with Anchor Books and helping this project find a home. I would also like to thank our editor, LuAnn Walther, and John Siciliano at Anchor Books, for their patience with the book's slow development and for making the project possible. Although the majority of the selections in the volume have been team-translated by Chou Ping and myself, I supplemented our translations with exceptional examples by my father, Willis Barnstone, and by other poet-scholar-translators of Chinese, among them Arthur Waley, Sam Hamill, Kenneth Rexroth, David Hinton, Xu Haixin, Eliot Weinberger, Newton Liu, Ko Ching-p'o, Burton Watson, Michelle Yeh, Arthur Sze, Gregory B. Lee, John Cayley, A. C. Graham, J. P. Seaton, John Rosenwald, Mabel Lee, Sun Chu-chin, Bonnie S. McDougall, Chen Maiping, James A. Wilson, and Ho Yung. They have played an extraordinary role in carrying Chinese poetic genius across oceans and centuries and transplanting it in American soil, and I would like to thank them for allowing me to reprint their translations here. Finally, I would like to thank my coeditor and primary cotranslator for his good humor and insight, which have made it a pleasure to work with him on this and other projects since we first met in my small apartment in Beijing in the winter of 1984.