I'm writing up program notes for my chamber group's madrigal concert, which reminds me how my sense of historical time is inextricably embedded in Chinese history, as I can't help thinking of Janequin, Marenzio, Weelkes, and the lot of them as middle Ming composers.
Josquin and Shen Zhou were rough contemporaries (Shen was about a generation older). The Chinese chronology helps me keep European history in sequence, but on consideration I think there are lessons from the other direction, too, specifically lessons from poetry:
the earthiness and bawdiness of medieval and Renaissance composer-poets taught me not to mistake archaic language for formality. Resisting the same error in reading Chinese poetry often has the same rewards, revealing works which are much wittier, funnier, and deeply humane.
Ironically enough, I don’t, because I don’t usually read Chinese poetry in translation and it’s not central to my teaching either; I refer you to @bokane.org who has the right attitude toward the whole business and may have some tips
Ooh, not really sure what to recommend, to be honest —James J. Y. Liu’s “The Art of Chinese Poetry” is a compact starting point, but it’s a bit precious and uses Wade-Giles rather than the now more common Pinyin romanization. “How to Read Chinese Poetry,” edited by Zong-qi Cai, is excellent, but…
…might be longer and have more emphasis on history than you’re looking for. The translations in it are mostly pretty uninspired/ing, too, though that’s generally true of most translations and almost all scholarly studies. But it’s a very good intro to the major forms and poets.
“Classical Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Translations,” edited. by John Minford and Joseph S. M. Lau, only goes up to the Tang dynasty, but it collects a nice range of translation approaches. It’s a little *too* varied for me to use it in teaching, but it might be worth paging through to see
whether there are any translators in it whose approach you like, and then looking for more by them elsewhere.
In classrooms, I’ve used Stephen Owen’s “An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911,” in which Owen does almost all of the translations. He has the PDF for free on his site.
