The Shorter Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (Translations from the Asian Classics)

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Product Description

With its fresh translations by newer voices in the field, its broad scope, and its flowing style, this anthology places the immense riches of Chinese literature within easy reach. Ranging from the beginnings to 1919, this abridged version of The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, retains all the characteristics of the original. In putting together these selections Victor H. Mair interprets “literature” very broadly to include not just literary fiction, poetry, and drama, but folk and popular literature, lyrics and arias, elegies and rhapsodies, biographies, autobiographies and memoirs, letters, criticism and theory, and travelogues and jokes.

The Shorter Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (Translations from the Asian Classics) Review

I realize that translating poetry can be extremely difficult, but when a simple Google search turns out better translations, that's when you know that the translations in the book are lacking. Also, for names it doesn't use pinyin, it uses the "Wade-Giles" system. So instead of Dou E, a character's name is given as Tou O. As a student of Mandarin Chinese, I found it annoying, especially since we read aloud from this book frequently in class and I was often at a loss as to how to pronounce names. A conversion chart between their system and pinyin is included in the book, but it really wasn't practical to use.

Those two details really grated on me. That said, this is a really HUGE anthology (which also means it's a really thick and heavy book, both reasons to use the Google Docs version whenever possible) which comes chock-full of stories and poems and prose. For the price and the quantity, it's still worth the buy - even though the quality is somewhat lacking.

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