Book picks similar to
The Selected Poems of T'ao Ch'ien by Tao Qian
poetry
chinese
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china
Farewell My Concubine
Lilian Lee - 1985
Beginning amid the decadent glamour of China in the 1930s and ending in the 1980s in Hong Kong, this brilliant novel, which formed the basis for the award-winning movie, is the passionate story of an opera student who falls in love with his best friend, and the beautiful woman who comes between them.
The Divan
Hafez
The state of God-Realisation is symbolised through union with a Beloved, and drinking the wine of spiritual love.This compact version of the Divan of Hafez is a facsimile illuminated manuscript, complete with beautiful Persian calligraphy and miniature illustrations. There are 43 ghazals, translated into English by classical scholar Gertrude Bell. It is a truly beautiful introduction not only to the works of this beloved Sufi mystic, but also to the artistry of Mahmoud Farshchian. It is like getting two books in one: poetry and art."Hafiz has no peer." — GoethePoetry is the greatest literary form of ancient Persia and modern Iran, and the fourteenth-century poet known as Hafiz is its preeminent master. Little is known about the poet's life, and there are more legends than facts relating to the particulars of his existence. This mythic quality is entirely appropriate for the man known as "The Interpreter of Mysteries" and "The Tongue of the Hidden," whose verse is regarded as oracular by those seeking guidance and attempting to realize wishes.A mere fraction of what is presumed to have been an extensive body of work survives. This collection is derived from Hafiz's Divan (collected poems), a classic of Sufism. The short poems, called ghazals, are sonnet-like arrangements of varied numbers of couplets. In the tradition of Persian poetry and Sufi philosophy, each poem corresponds to two interpretations, sensual and mystic.This outstanding translation of Hafiz's poetry was created by historian and Arabic scholar Gertrude Bell, who observed, "These are the utterances of a great poet, the imaginative interpreter of the heart of man; they are not of one age, or of another, but for all time."
Uncanny Magazine Issue 2: January/February 2015
Lynne M. ThomasAmal El-Mohtar - 2008
Featuring new fiction by Hao Jingfang (translated by Ken Liu), Sam J. Miller, Amal El-Mohtar, Richard Bowes, and Sunny Moraine, classic fiction by Ann Leckie, essays by Jim C. Hines, Erika McGillivray, Michi Trota, and Keidra Chaney, poetry by Isabel Yap, Mari Ness, and Rose Lemberg, interviews with Hao Jingfang (translated by Ken Liu) and Ann Leckie, by Deborah Stanish, a cover by Julie Dillon, and an editoral by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas. Contents:FictionThe Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History by Sam J. MillerFolding Beijing by Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken LiuLove Letters to Things Lost and Gained by Sunny MoraineAnyone With a Care for Their Image by Richard BowesPockets by Amal El–MohtarThe Nalendar by Ann LeckiePoetryAfter the Moon Princess Leaves by Isabel YapAfter the Dance by Mari Nessarchival testimony fragments / minersong by Rose LembergEditorialsThe Uncanny Valley by Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian ThomasEssaysThank You, Again, Kickstarter Backers!The Politics of Comfort by Jim C. HinesAge of the Geek, Baby by Michi TrotaThe Evolution of Nerd Rock by Keidra ChaneyThe Future’s Been Here Since 1939: Female Fans, Cosplay, and Conventions by Erica McGillivrayInterviewsInterview: Hao Jingfang by Deborah Stanish, translated by Ken LiuInterview: Ann Leckie by Deborah Stanish
China and the Chinese
Herbert Allen Giles - 1902
You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
The Golden Hairpin
侧侧轻寒 - 2014
At seventeen, she’s on the run, accused of murdering her family to escape an arranged marriage. Driven by a single-minded pursuit, she must use her skills to unmask the real killer…and clear her name.But when Huang Zixia seeks the help of Li Shubai, the Prince of Kui, her life and freedom are bargained: agree to go undercover as his eunuch to stop a serial killer and to undo a curse that threatens to destroy the Prince’s life.Huang Zixia’s skills are soon tested when Li Shubai’s betrothed vanishes. With a distinctively exquisite golden hairpin as her only clue, Huang Zixia investigates—and discovers that she isn’t the only one in the guarded kingdom with a dangerous secret.
Selected Poetry and Prose
Stéphane Mallarmé - 1982
Also included (not bilingually) are the visual poem “Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance” and the drama “Igitur,” as well as letters, essays, and reviews. Although his primary concern was with poetry, the aesthetics of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) has touched all the arts. During the last twenty years of his life, his Paris apartment was a major literary gathering place. Every Tuesday evening, standing beneath the portrait of himself by his friend Edouard Manet, the poet addressed reverent gatherings which included at various times Paul Valery and André Gide, among many others. The American painter James Whistler was influenced by these “Mardis,” and one of the best-known poems in the present collection, “The Afternoon of a Faun,” inspired Claude Debussy’s famous musical composition. In translation, the subtle and varied shades of Mallarmé’s oeuvre may best be rendered by diverse hands. Editor Mary Ann Caws, the author of books on René Char, Robert Desnos, and various aspects of modern French writing, has brought together the work of fourteen translators, spanning a century, from the Symbolists and the Bloomsbury group (George Moore and Roger Fry) to Cid Corman, Brian Coffey, and other contemporary poets and writers.
Playing for Thrills
Shuo Wang - 1997
Instead of ascribing to the Communist Party's goal of "spiritual civilization", he shunned the heroic models common in Chinese literature. Playing for Thrills is the first book published in English from the man whom Newsweek calls "China's literary bad boy" and The Washington Post acclaims as "the irreverent voice of a disillusioned generation".With shades of Chandler and Kerouac, Playing for Thrills is a dark, disembodied, yet compelling story of an anti-hero's search for the truth about a mysterious murder. As the narrator drifts through the seamy underside of Beijing and its environs, he meets a handful of incredibly varied characters as jaded and enigmatic as himself.
The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis
Odysseas Elytis - 1997
Renowned for their astonishing lyricism and profound optimism, Elytis's poems capture the natural wonders of Greece and give voice to the contemporary Greek—and to a more universally human—consciousness.Originally published in 1997, The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis, translated into English by Jeffrey Carson and Nikos Sarris, was the first complete collection of Elytis's poems in any language. Included in this landmark volume were Elytis's early poems, influenced in equal parts by surrealism and the natural world; Song Heroic and Mourning for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign, his epic poem connecting Greece's—and his own—Second World War experience to the myth of the eternal Greek hero; his most ambitious work, The Axion Esti; and his mature poetry, from Maria Nephele to West of Sorrow.For this expanded new edition, Carson and Sarris have added sixty free verse and prose poems first published in Greek in the posthumous 1998 volume From Close By, as well as a set of song lyrics, The Rhos of Eros, and a cantata, The Sovereign Sun, previously omitted. All have been translated with the same care and elegance as the rest of Elytis's oeuvre, brilliantly rendering into English the Greek poet's lyrical voice and the richness of his diction.
100 Selected Poems
E.E. Cummings - 1954
Cummings is without question one of the major poets of the 20th century, and this volume, first published in 1959, is indispensable for every lover of modern lyrical verse. It contains one hundred of Cummings’s wittiest and most profound poems, harvested from thirty-five of the most radically creative years in contemporary American poetry. These poems exhibit all the extraordinary lyricism, playfulness, technical ingenuity, and compassion for which Cummings is famous. They demonstrate beautifully his extrapolations from traditional poetic structures and his departures from them, as well as the unique synthesis of lavish imagery and acute artistic precision that has won him the adulation and respect of critics and poetry lovers everywhere.
Empty Chairs: Selected Poems
Liu Xia - 2015
A new myth, maybe, was formingthere, but the sun was so brightI couldn't see it. --from "June 2nd, 1989 (for Xiaobo)"Empty Chairs presents the poetry of Liu Xia for the first time freely in both English translation and in the Chinese original. Selected from thirty years of her work, and including some of her haunting photography, this book creates a portrait of a life lived under duress, a voice in danger of being silenced, and a spirit that is shaken but so far indomitable. Liu Xia's poems are potent, acute moments of inquiry that peel back to expose the fraught complexity of an interior world. They are felt and insightful, colored through with political constraints even as they seep beyond those constraints and toward love.
Idylls
Theocritus
These vignettes of country life, which center on competitions of song and love are the foundational poems of the western pastoral tradition. They were the principal model for Virgil in the Eclogues and their influence can be seen in the work of Petrarch and Milton. Although it is the pastoral poems for which he is chiefly famous, Theocritus also wrote hymns to the gods, brilliant mime depictions of everyday life, short narrative epics, epigrams, and encomia of the powerful. The great variety of his poems illustrates the rich and flourishing poetic culture of what was a golden age of Greek poetry. Based on the original Greek text, this accurate and fluent translation is the only edition of the complete Idylls currently in print. It includes an accessible introduction by Richard Hunter that describes what is known of Theocritus, the poetic tradition and Theocritus' innovations and what exactly is meant by bucolic poetry.
The Membranes
Chi Ta-wei - 1995
Humanity has migrated to domes at the bottom of the sea to escape devastating climate change. The world is dominated by powerful media conglomerates and runs on exploited cyborg labor. Momo prefers to keep to herself, and anyway she's too busy for other relationships: her clients include some of the city's best-known media personalities. But after meeting her estranged mother, she begins to explore her true identity, a journey that leads to questioning the bounds of gender, memory, self, and reality.First published in Taiwan in 1995, The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese. Chi Ta-wei weaves dystopian tropes--heirloom animals, radiation-proof combat drones, sinister surveillance technologies--into a sensitive portrait of one young woman's quest for self-understanding. Predicting everything from fitness tracking to social media saturation, this visionary and sublime novel stands out for its queer and trans themes. The Membranes reveals the diversity and originality of contemporary speculative fiction in Chinese, exploring gender and sexuality, technological domination, and regimes of capital, all while applying an unflinching self-reflexivity to the reader's own role. Ari Larissa Heinrich's translation brings Chi's hybrid punk sensibility to all readers interested in books that test the limits of where speculative fiction can go.
Shipwrecks
Akira Yoshimura - 1982
His people catch barely enough fish to live on, and so must distill salt to sell to neighboring villages. But this industry serves another, more sinister purpose: the fires of the salt cauldrons lure passing ships toward the shore and onto rocky shoals. When a ship runs aground, the villagers slaughter the crew and loot the cargo for rice, wine, and rich delicacies. One day a ship founders on the rocks. But Isaku learns that its cargo is far deadlier than could ever be imagined. Shipwrecks, the first novel by the great Japanese writer Yoshimura to be translated into English, is a stunningly powerful, Gothic tale of fate and retribution.
A Small Town Called Hibiscus
Gu Hua - 1981
Its author Gu Hua was brought up in the Wuling Mountains of south Hunan. He presents the ups and downs of some families in a small mountain town there during the hard years in the early sixties, the "cultural revolution," and after the downfall of the "gang of four." He shows the horrifying impact on decent, hard-working people of the gang's ultra-Left line, and retains a sense of humor in describing the most harrowing incidents. In the end wrongs are righted, and readers are left with a deepened understanding of this abnormal period in Chinese history and the sterling qualities of the Chinese people.