Designed to work with the acclaimed course text How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology, the How to Read Chinese Poetry Workbook introduces classical Chinese to advanced beginners and learners at higher levels, teaching them how to appreciate Chinese poetry in its original form. Also a remarkable stand-alone resource, the volume illuminates China's major poetic genres and themes through one hundred well-known, easy-to-recite works. Each of the volume's twenty units contains four to six classical poems in Chinese, English, and tone-marked pinyin romanization, with comprehensive vocabulary notes and prose poem translations in modern Chinese. Subsequent comprehension questions and comments focus on the artistic aspects of the poems, while exercises test readers' grasp of both classical and modern Chinese words, phrases, and syntax. An extensive glossary cross-references classical and modern Chinese usage, characters and compounds, and multiple character meanings, and online sound recordings are provided for each poem and its prose translation free of charge. A list of literary issues addressed throughout completes the volume, along with phonetic transcriptions for entering-tone characters, which appear in Tang and Song-regulated shi poems and lyric songs.

How to Read Chinese Poetry is now the textbook to buy for those who wish to teach classical Chinese poetry to undergraduates. It is comprehensive and thoughtful in its selections, and the readings are authoritative yet accessible, showcasing a variety of interpretive methods and possibilities. The format in which the Chinese text is presented, along with its pronunciation in pinyin and English translation, not only facilitates textual analysis but also meets the growing needs of bi-lingual students. -- Wang Ping, author of The Age of Courtly Writing: Wen xuan Compiler Xiao Tong (501-531) and His Circle This is, by far, the most comprehensive and useful collection of traditional Chinese poems that will serve a broad range of readers and purposes for many years to come. General readers will find it an excellent guidebook on the major themes, forms, and techniques of Chinese poetry. For students of the language, it is a great tool for studying both classicaland modern Chinese. Teachers won't have to pore through numerous anthologies of Chinese poetry for course material any more. The impressive breadth and depth, the thoughtful design and organization, of this workbook, meets all of their pedagogical and intellectual needs. -- Michelle Yeh, University of California, Davis

About the Author
Jie Cui is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is currently working on a dissertation entitled "Gu Tang Shigui and the Making of Commented Poetry Anthologies in Seventeenth-Century China" and has extensive experience teaching Chinese. She assisted in the editing of How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology. Zong-qi Cai is professor of Chinese, comparative literature, and medieval studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Matrix of Lyric Transformation: Poetic Modes and Self-Presentation in Early Chinese Pentasyllabic Poetry and Configurations of Comparative Poetics: Three Perspectives on Western and Chinese Literary Criticism. He has also edited A Chinese Literary Mind: Culture, Creativity, and Rhetoric in Wenxin Dialong; Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature, the Arts, and the Universe in the Six Dynasties; and How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology.


Book Information
ISBN 9780231156585
Author Zong-qi Cai
Format Paperback
Page Count 232
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press