Name: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei
ISBN: 9780811226202

At a Glance

Why This Clicks

Ways In

A compact, layered way into Chinese poetry, with scholarship that still reads like literature.

Come here for

close reading, by design
poetry as criticism

Expect

annotations and perspective shifts
teaching notes with bite

Book Details

Authors: Eliot Weinberger, Octavio Paz
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Published: October 11, 2016
Format: Print & ebook
Theme: Chinese Poetry · Chinese Literary Criticism
Reading lane: Chinese Poetry

Affinity

Publisher Categories

Translating & Interpreting
Chinese Literary Criticism
Poetry Criticism

About This Book

The difficulty (and necessity) of translation is concisely described in Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei , a close reading of different translations of a single poem from the Tang Dynasty—from a transliteration to Kenneth Rexroth’s loose interpretation. As Octavio Paz writes in the afterword, “Eliot Weinberger’s commentary on the successive translations of Wang Wei’s little poem illustrates, with succinct clarity, not only the evolution of the art of translation in the m...

Read full description

The difficulty (and necessity) of translation is concisely described in Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei , a close reading of different translations of a single poem from the Tang Dynasty—from a transliteration to Kenneth Rexroth’s loose interpretation. As Octavio Paz writes in the afterword, “Eliot Weinberger’s commentary on the successive translations of Wang Wei’s little poem illustrates, with succinct clarity, not only the evolution of the art of translation in the modern period but at the same time the changes in poetic sensibility.”