Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei - by Eliot Weinberger

ISBN: 0811226204
Date read: 2024-04-27
How strongly I recommend it: 4/10
(See my list of 360+ books, for more.)

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Understanding the difficulty and importance of translation, by looking at 19 different translations of a single poem from the Tang Dynasty.

my notes

First-person singular rarely appears in Chinese poetry.
By eliminating the controlling individual mind of the poet, the experience becomes universal.

Ezra Pound’s Cathay contains some of the most beautiful poems in the English language.
It was based on a notebook of literal Chinese translations.
Pound created a new poetry in English drawn from what he found was unique to the Chinese.