Chinese classic poetry

CLASSIC POETRY CHINA. - Edition of Guojian Chen. Chair. 2001.

The Chinese poetry is an interminable lode, and sometimes it seems that, also, unapproachable. Perhaps be the exuberance of the genre throughout last 30 centuries of poetical history in China, perhaps be the inscrutability inherent in a few poems, with a few rhythms and almost incomprehensible heaps for the western reader. Every year some books are published on Chinese poetry, some new studies, new translations, and new interpretations. And every year, instead of seeming that the topic becomes exhausted, it gives the impression that the topic scarcely begins.

Every new anthology is like a new walk along a well-known quarter, accompanied by a different guide. Each one selects a few experiences that prove to be different, a few aspects of the poetry and the Chinese culture that were remaining unpublished for the publishers and previous translators, a few poems, which till then remained relegated to the negligence, they appear before us with brilliant lucidity with every new anthology.

The present anthology edited by Chen Guojian, a Chinese Hispanist who takes dedicating during the last 20 years to the translation of Chinese poetical works to Spanish, presents, as a careful study is habitual in the books of his collection "Universal letters" on the Chinese, sufficient poetry for itself to justify it to buy of this book. The interesting biographical notes that precede the poems of every author, might constitute for his part, a good portion of the "History of the Chinese poets."

As for the content. The proper generous extension of the book allows to the author, not only to present a selection representative of the different epochs and styles of the Chinese poetry, but to include what might be up to a brief anthology of the principal authors, as there can be considered to be 40 poems of Du Fu, the 25 of Li Bai and the 20 of Bai Juyi included in the work.

The translation is clear, it drizzles, light. He avoids the reader the pitfalls that sometimes persist on having spilled a work written originally in so remote time and place, to allow him to be enjoyed of the included poems, and take part with the authors selected in his particular vision of the world that they shell across his works. An effort that all the interested parties will be able to appreciate for the poetry and for China.

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