One Hundred Poems from the Chinese

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New Directions Publishing, 1956 - Literary Criticism - 159 pages
The lyric poetry of Tu Fu ranks with the greatest in all world literature. Across the centuries--Tu Fu lived in the T'ang Dynasty (731-770)--his poems come through to us with an immediacy that is breathtaking in Kenneth Rexroth's English versions. They are as simple as they are profound, as delicate as they are beautiful.

Thirty-five poems by Tu Fu make up the first part of this volume. The translator then moves on to the Sung Dynasty (10th-12th centuries) to give us a number of poets of that period, much of whose work was not previously available in English. Mei Yao Ch'en, Su Tung P'o, Lu Yu, Chu Hsi, Hsu Chao, and the poetesses Li Ch'iang Chao and Chu Shu Chen. There is a general introduction, biographical and explanatory notes on the poets and poems, and a bibliography of other translations of Chinese poetry.
 

Contents

Winter Dawn
5
To Wei Pa a Retired Scholar
11
New Moon
17
A Restless Night in Camp
23
MEI YAO CHEN
37
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About the author (1956)

Kenneth Rexroth was born in South Bend, Indiana, and worked at a wide variety of jobs, being largely self-educated. In the late 1950s, he won a number of awards, including an Amy Lowell Travelling Fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Award, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Literature Award. He translated widely, mainly from the Japanese, and wrote a lively account of his life, An Autobiographical Novel. His work influenced many younger poets, such as Snyder, and continued in part the traditions of imagism and objectivism. A critic as well as a poet, his collections of essays include American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (1971) and Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (1975).

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