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The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry

Edited by Eliot Weinberger

Translated by Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder and William Carlos Williams

No Text
Imprint: Anvil Press Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (272 pages)
(Pub. Nov 2007)
9780856463969
Out of Stock
Digital access available through Exact Editions
  • Description
  • Editor
  • Reviews
  • This rich compendium of translations is the first to look at Chinese poetry through its enormous influence on American poetry. Starting with Ezra Pound’s Cathay (1915), it includes translations by three other American poets (William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder) and a translator-scholar-poet (David Hinton), all long associated with New Directions, the great New York literary publishing house founded just over 70 years ago.

    The collection gathers some 200 poems by nearly 40 poets, from the anonymous early poetry to the great masters of the T’ang and Sung dynasties. Also included are previously uncollected translations by Pound, a selection of essays (some also not previously collected) by all five translators and biographical notes that are a collage of poems and comments by both the American translators and the Chinese poets themselves.

    Eliot Weinberger
    Eliot Weinberger ’s first study of multiple Chinese translations was the perennially popular 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (1987). His essays are collected in Works on Paper, Outside Stories and Karmic Traces . Among his many translations are The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz 1957–1987, Bei Dao’s ... read more
    Ezra Pound
    One of the key figures of the modernist movement, Ezra Pound played a formative role in the poetic career of T.S. Eliot as well as distinguishing himself through his own work. Born in 1885, Pound emmigrated to Europe after a childhood and adolescence in America. In London, he became very well ... read more
    Kenneth Rexroth
    ... read more
    Gary Snyder
    ... read more
    William Carlos Williams
    William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), a great contemporary of Pound, H.D., Wyndham Lewis and others, is one of the fathers of American free verse. Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, he began writing poetry while still a student at Horace Mann High School, at which time he made the decision to become both ... read more
    Praise for Ezra Pound 'The previously unpublished pages of an epic masterpiece offer fresh insights into its creation'
    The Guardian

    Praise for William Carlos Williams 'William Carlos Williams, paediatrician by day, literary giant of the evening hours, is one of the great experimentalists of twentieth century American poetry, and this summer we can all enjoy a reprint of his long poem Paterson, named after a town in New Jersey, newly reimagined in this wild, invigorating, free-form, jazz-like patchwork of prose and poetry, whose language veers from the headily philosophical to the footloose and wayward.'
    Michael Glover, The Tablet

    'This is an essential book for anyone who is serious about poetry.'
    Steven Hanson, the Manchester Review of Books
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