Shi-Jing, or Book of Songs: China's Earliest Verse Anthology

By Friedrich Rückert and Martin Bidney

The Shi-Jing, or Book of Songs, is a rendering of China's oldest verse anthology of poets, from the 11th to the 7th century BCE. It's time we moderns got to know it well-for the sheer pleasure of experiencing the colorful multitude of 325 intimate voices. There's a direct, earnest warmth about the lyrical expressions of all the people we overhear, and it is a privilege to enter into their confidence. They are so alive they startle me, and they'll speak on what they care about.
The poems are offered in the versions I translate using the endlessly varied melodious forms devised for them by the phenomenally gifted 19th-century poet-translator Friedrich R?ckert. He is correct in saying he has "appropriated" [angeeignet] his materials. The anonymous collection is reshaped and newly crafted by this world-class German poet and linguistic genius, who was himself a major humanist educator. In disclosing that double role, R?ckert's Shi-Jing may be called his own centrally symbolic achievement, his paradigm contribution to world literature.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B09DMTZJ1W
• ISBN13: 9798464292277
• Release Date: August 2021
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 524 Pages
• Weight: 1.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"