Evoking Tang: An Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry [Paperback]

In Evoking Tang, writer Qiu Xiaolong breathes new life into the works of the Tang dynasty masters, introducing their universal these—of love and lament, frienship and longing, the serenity to be found in natural beauty—to a whole new audience of western readers.The Tang period is the golden age of Chinese poetry. In Evoking Tang, a bilingual collection, Xiaolong offers English translations of more than 70 classic Chinese poems. The original texts represent the work of almost 40 poets from the Tang period, whose poems are comparable in importance, for English-speaking readers, to those of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Longfellow. The anthology is illustrated with 30 traditional Chinese paintings, which are included to aid interpretation and to stir the imagination of readers as they enter the poetic world.

Mona Van Duyn, U.S. Poet Laureate, 1992-1993: Qiu Xiaolong is extravagantly qualified for translating these poems, having as a citizen of China won prizes for his own poetry and for translating T.S. Eliot and other English and American poets into Chinese and, more recently, as a citizen of the U.S., won prizes for his own poetry and fiction in English. To my mind, the "Changgan Song" in this collection rivals Ezra Pound's justly famous, loosely translated version, "The River Merchant's Wife." These renderings have a limpidity of language and metaphor and a subtle rhythm,and Qiu has a poet's sixth sense for when (occasionally) to lift the line with a less direct and more evocative word. Beata Grant, Professor of Chinese Literature, Washington University in St. Louis: Qiu Xiaolong is one of the few translators of Chinese poetry whose native language is Chinese but whose mastery of the subtle nuances of the English language are truly extraordinary. A published poet and acclaimed author of a series of mystery novels set in modern-day China written in English, he is eminently qualified to bring these ancient poems to life yet again. Qiu Xiaolong's lucid and graceful translations of a selection of Tang poems, among them many well-known favorites and some less familiar ones, are a most welcome addition to world literature in translation.

Qiu Xiaolong was born and raised in Shanghai, China. While in China, as an associate research professor at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and a member of the Chinese Writers Association, he published across diverse fields, including the prize-winning translations of T.S. Eliot's poems and Imagist poems. He came to the United States as a visiting scholar, but what happened in Beijing in 1989 changed his path. He started writing in English and got a Ph.D. degree from Washington University in St. Louis. He won a Missouri Biennial Award and Prairie Schooner Award for his poetry and has since authored several highly acclaimed novels, which have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lives in St. Louis with his wife and daughter.