Classical Chinese Literature

Rating:
Summary: Gorillas in the mist.
Review: CLASSICAL CHINESE LITERATURE : An Anthology of Translations, Volume I : From Antiquity to the Tang Dynasty. Edited by John Minford and Joseph S. M. Lau. 1176 pp. New York and Hong Kong : Columbia University Press and The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000.

Sometime in the 1950's, a committee of bureaucrats sat down in the People's Republic of China to create a new system of transliteration for the Chinese language. As Chinese Communists, they shared an extreme loathing for traditional 'feudalistic' Chinese culture. In addition, none of them of course were native users of the Roman alphabet.

The monstrous and deformed offspring of their lucubrations, which was approved at the 5th session of the National People's Congress on February 11th, 1958, is the system known as 'Hanyu pinyin.' Although a system designed by Chinese for Chinese, it was eagerly fastened upon and promoted by certain benighted elements of the Official West, and is, sad to say, the system of transliteration employed in the present book.

Pinyin has been condemned by no less an authority than scientist and sinologist Joseph Needham, distinguished author of the multi-volume 'Science and Civilization in China,' who described it as "extremely repulsive." Others, too, have expressed disgust with it, including American author John Updike, a man remarkably knowledgeable about China, who finds it "grotesque."

In contrast to the familiar, beautiful, sonorous and elegant names produced by the Wade-Giles system of romanization - names such as T'ao Chien, Hsieh Ling-yun, Hsiao Kang, Ch'u Kuang-hsi, and so on - pinyin gives us names which sound like they belong to a bunch of gorillas. Meet, for example, pinyin's "Kong Rong" (page 418), a distant relative presumably of King Kong. Meet too "Cao Pi," son of "Cao Cao" (page 628), whose presence may account for the many instances of "dung" (or is it "ding" or "dong"?) scattered throughout the book. Meet them, that is, if you would rather visit Minford's Beijing than Waley's Peking.

Pinyin's uglification of China's past is bad enough, but it leads to a far larger and more serious problem. Sinologist Victor Mair, who in his own fine 'Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature' (1994) made the correct and sensible decision to employ Wade-Giles, cautions us that:

". . . the vast bulk of scholarly writing in English about Chinese literature employs Wade-Giles romanization. It would be terribly confusing and difficult for students without any background in the study of Mandarin (the typical student who will use this [i.e., his own] book) to try to follow up the readings with any sort of research if another sort of romanization system were chosen" (page xxxi).

So there you have it. PINYIN = Uglification + Confusion + a compounding of Difficulties, when anything to do with the study of China is already difficult enough. In other words, precisely what the Chinese Communists would have wanted : the beautiful made ugly, and the difficult made to look impossibly difficult to the general reader.

The only reason that editors Minford and Lau have condescended to offer us for the mess they have made in the present book is that pinyin is "now widely used internationally" (page lviii). In other words, dear general reader, it's trendy, and you're just going to have to bite the bullet and learn pinyin newspeak, or struggle with unpronounceables such as 'cen,' 'cuipin,' 'qiong,' 'xunzi,' or 'zhitui.'

A second problem with this book, since it lacks an index of titles, is that items can be impossible to find without searching through the entire 34-page Table of Contents. This difficulty is compounded by the Index of Authors, which is incomplete; amazingly it fails, for example, to mention Lao Tzu (Laozi), though extracts from the Tao Te Ching (but not its Chinese name) will be found on pages 202-206.

A third problem is that, judging by the pages of my own copy, there would seem to be a world shortage of printing ink. Instead of the print being crisp, clear, black, and readable, it's greyish. This makes it tiring and difficult to read (especially the footnotes which are printed in a miniscule font). It's rather like peering into a fog or mist.

A fourth problem is that there would also seem to be a world cotton shortage, since, despite its exorbitant price, the boards of this book are covered, not with cloth, but with mock cloth made of soft paper which is already showing signs of wear despite being brand new. But at least the printed pages are strong heavy stock, and the signatures are, as in real books, actually stitched.

As for the contents of this book (apart from their being liberally spattered with pinyin), they are, in a word, MAGNIFICENT! - Oracle Bones, Bronze Inscriptions, I Ching, Myths, Legends, Folksongs, Narrative and Philosophic Prose, Shamanistic Poems, Historical Wrings, Miscellaneous Prose, Women Poets, Drama, Literary Criticism, Ballads, Buddhist Writings, T'ang poets, Strange Tales, Zen and Taoist Poetry, etc., etc.

The book, in short, offers us a rich and brilliant selection of texts, in translations both literary (Pound, Waley, Rexroth, Snyder, etc.) and academic (Watson, Graham, Birch, Owen, etc.) - and contains almost every conceivable help and enhancement. These latter include full and informative introductions; extensive and useful annotations; numerous interesting black-and-white illustrations; seals; calligraphy; a few texts in the original Chinese; bibliographies; maps; an index of authors in both pinyin (full) and Wade-Giles (skimpy); and much else besides.

In sum, this book is clearly one of the richest and finest Anthologies of Classical Chinese Literature in English that we have ever seen. In terms of its contents it certainly deserves 5 stars. But in terms of the pinyin system which defaces those contents, a system which can be read with ease only by students of Mandarin - whereas if Wade-Giles had been used the book could have been read with ease by anyone - it deserves no more than a single star. Hence the 3 stars.

Who, after all, on opening a collection of writings by the refined, civilized, and highly intelligent ancient Chinese, wants to find instead a bunch of gorillas moving about in a mist ?

Rating:
Summary: Well worth
Review: John Minford, one of our finer Sino-Anglo translators, here brings out a remarkably successful anthology of Chinese literature which stands together with the Norton's as a must-buy for lovers of Chinese literature. The book gives a comprehensive account of its beginnings from ancient classics (Book of Songs, Analects etc) to Tang luminaries Li Bo and Du Fu, using a collection of translations from Waley, Pound to Owen and Birch, while offering insightful annotations, readings and essays. There's a bit of everything: biographies, ballads, poetry, histories (a big genre in Chinese literature), and short tales, and a lot to delight the unsuspected.

Some things said in the last review seem so blatantly biased (and ignorant) I have to correct them there. There are actually very little difference between the Wade-Giles and the Pinyin system. Both are supposed to transliterate Chinese characters into Roman alphabets. So how can one makes Chinese more "beautiful, sonorous and elegant" while the other renders it like "gorillas"? What is important of course is how accurately they depict the spoken tongue. Pinyin does have an advantage over Wade-Giles in that it is more accurate: the poet Du Fu, transliterated as Tu Fu in Wade-Giles, is closer in Pinyin to the original, the Chinese character for "Du" pronounced with the consonant "d" (as in "death") rather than "t" (as in "tongue") in "Tu". The word "Beijing" is also better reflected (the two consonants, "b" in "bell" and "j" in "joke", are far more accurately rendered than "p" and "k" in Peking). It's sad that someone who obviously doesn't know Chinese tries to work his personal bias in others, and bringing out "critics" like Updike who doesn't know Chinese himself.

Rating:
Summary: Songs, biographies, and early Chinese philosophy
Review: Nearly a thousand selections from the best translators of Chinese literature covers antiquity to the Tang Dynasty in this first volume, an essential anthology of Chinese literature important for any scholarly or college-level collection strong in Chinese works. This gathers the most important writings of poetry, fiction, songs, biographies, and early Chinese philosophy, with a chronological and genre arrangement which makes study easy. Chapters are introduced by quotes and introductions in this weighty presentation which includes individual chapters on early literary criticism and works.

Rating:
Summary: not a review but support for
Review: quote Tepi Tepi:
"So there you have it. PINYIN = Uglification + Confusion + a compounding of Difficulties, when anything to do with the study of China is already difficult enough. In other words, precisely what the Chinese Communists would have wanted : the beautiful made ugly, and the difficult made to look impossibly difficult to the general reader."

i agree with this absolutely, the part about PINYIN. given a choice i absolutely will NOT purchase any chinese translations with "modern" pinyin because it is not only ugly. it is because no one without the benefit of a chinese education, and therefore cannot actually read/speak chinese writings CANNOT do "pinyin" correctly.

(if you CAN read chinese scripts you would NOT be reading translations but the originals!)

pinyin of chinese into romanized english is s t u p i d.

for example Chin = Qin. "Q" is NOT pronounced "Ch" in english. "Q" is neither pronounced "Ch" in chinese. it is just too stupid. too difficult to even guess you are saying it right in english or chinese! Romance of the 3 Kingdoms: Tsao Tsao becomes Cao Cao. an english educated person without any chinese speaking/reading ability will pronounce "ka-o ka-o"! or Cow Cow.

in short to pinyin correctly you have to be able to speak/read chinese. when you speak to chinese who knows the works they will find your romanized-pinyin pronounciation extremely funny.

i implore all chinese translators to abandon pinyin! and return to the "earlier" methods of translations.