The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry
Edited by Eliot Weinberger
Translated by Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder and William Carlos Williams
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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This rich compendium of translations is the first to look at Chinese poetry through its enormous influence on American poetry. Starting with Ezra Pound’s Cathay (1915), it includes translations by three other American poets (William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder) and a translator-scholar-poet (David Hinton), all long associated with New Directions, the great New York literary publishing house founded just over 70 years ago.
The collection gathers some 200 poems by nearly 40 poets, from the anonymous early poetry to the great masters of the T’ang and Sung dynasties. Also included are previously uncollected translations by Pound, a selection of essays (some also not previously collected) by all five translators and biographical notes that are a collage of poems and comments by both the American translators and the Chinese poets themselves.
The Guardian
Praise for William Carlos Williams 'William Carlos Williams, paediatrician by day, literary giant of the evening hours, is one of the great experimentalists of twentieth century American poetry, and this summer we can all enjoy a reprint of his long poem Paterson, named after a town in New Jersey, newly reimagined in this wild, invigorating, free-form, jazz-like patchwork of prose and poetry, whose language veers from the headily philosophical to the footloose and wayward.'
Michael Glover, The Tablet
'This is an essential book for anyone who is serious about poetry.'
Steven Hanson, the Manchester Review of Books
