Chinese Poetry

"This is also a very interesting collection. First he gives you the text in Chinese. That part is not that different from some other bilingual editions. Then he gives you a translation, word-by-word. In Chinese poetry there are seven Chinese characters per line, as I mentioned. Also, in the Chinese language, it’s difficult to say whether a character is a noun or a verb or an adjective. Or whether the line has a subject or not. So what he does is he gives you the Chinese character and then the English word equivalent to that, underneath. So seven English words underneath. Of course this is hardly readable, but he just wants you to see how the Chinese language works. Maybe in Chinese we don’t have conjunctions, maybe our verbs don’t have tenses, maybe this line doesn’t have a subject. But he wants you to see. And then he gives you a third version, which is a translation, just like Waley’s or Watson’s – his own translation. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes. Sometimes I even want to call his approach deconstructionist. He deconstructs each line by syllable – the equivalent of each Chinese character – without worrying about the meaning, or the syntax or the grammar of English. In this way he is able to show the subtle way in which Chinese poetry works."