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In addition to being a concise anthology of poems representing the breadth of Chinese poetry throughout its long history, Taken to Heart is window into the soul of the Chinese people. These poems are used as tools to educate students not only to literary history, but to cultural and historical imperatives; reading them is an invitation for the English-speaking reader to experience the high art and cultural legacy of a civilization that reaches back for millennia.
These translations by award-winning poet Gary Young and Yanwen Xu, have appeared in over a dozen journals, and are now collected in a single volume.
About the author
Gary Young is the author of several collections of poetry. His most recent books are That's What I Thought, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award from Persea Books, and Precious Mirror, translations from the Japanese. His other books include Even So: New and Selected Poems; Pleasure; No Other Life, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award; Braver Deeds, winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize; Days; The Dream of a Moral Life, which won the James D. Phelan ward; and Hands. He has received a Pushcart Prize, and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Vogelstein Foundation among others. In 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He teaches creative writing and directs the Cowell Press at UC Santa Cruz.
Yanwen Xu was born in Xuzhou, China. He now studies Computer Science and writes at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Summary
These seventy poems are masterpieces from over a thousand years of classical Chinese poetry. Beauty and simplicity meld to convey an astounding landscape with both enchanting details and breath-taking vastness. The poems constitute an anthology, given to Chinese school children as a text to aid their instruction in Mandarin, and to introduce them to China’s rich literary history.
The poems are considered representative of China’s highest poetic achievements from the Han Dynasty to the Qing. We have striven to mirror the emotional state and the musical values of the originals. We chose to translate line by line, and have eschewed jumbling lines within individual poems.
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