The Book of Songs: the Ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry

Jacket Description/Back: Joseph R. Allen's new edition of The Book of Songs restores Arthur Waley's definitive English translations to the original order and structure of the two-thousand-year-old Chinese text. One of the five Confucian classics, The Book of Songs is the oldest collection of poetry in world literature and the finest treasure of traditional songs that antiquity has left us. Arthur Waley's translations, now supplemented by fifteen new translations by Allen, are superb; the songs speak to us across millennia with remarkable directness and power. Where the other Confucian classics treat "outward things, deeds, moral precepts, the way the world works", Stephen Owen tells us in his foreword, The Book of Songs is "the Classic of the human heart and the human mind". Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 384-388). Publisher Marketing: One of the five Confucian classics, The Book of Songs (Shijing) is the oldest collection of poetry in world literature and the finest treasure of traditional songs left from antiquity. Where the other Confucian classics treat outward things: deeds, moral precepts, the way the world works, as Stephen Owen tells us in his foreword, The Book of Songs is the classic of the human heart and the human mind.

Contributor Bio:  Waley, Arthur As one recent evaluation puts it, "Waley was the great transmitter of the high literary cultures of China and Japan to the English-reading general public; the ambassador from East to West in the first half of the 20th century. He was self-taught, but reached remarkable levels of fluency, even erudition, in both languages. It was a unique achievement, possible (as he himself later noted) only in that time, and unlikely to be repeated." His importance for raising awareness and scholarly attention to the English speaking world is considered immense, reaching a wider popular readership with later re-publications in classics series. Contributor Bio:  Owen, Stephen Stephen Owen, Ph. D. Yale, is James Bryant Conant Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His books include The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T ang; Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: An Omen of the World; Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature; and An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911.