SUNFLOWER SPLENDOR : Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry. Co-edited by Wu-chu Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo. 631 pp. Bloomington & London : Indiana University Press, 1975 and Reissued. In the present book, co-editors Wu-chu Liu, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Indiana University, and Irving Yucheng Lo, Professor and Chairman of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, have assembled a collection of about one thousand Chinese poems in English translations.
All of the poems were translated by specialists, checked by the editors against the Chinese originals, and criticized and discussed with the contributor before a final version was selected. We are told that "the contributors are mostly East Asian specialists on the faculty of American and Canadian colleges and universities, or younger scholars who have received many years of graduate training in the language" (p.ix).
The editors also tell us that they have "aimed, within the limitation of space, at inclusiveness by giving balanced representation to all major genres and periods and, within each, the chief exponents of major schools of Chinese poetry" (p.ix) - no easy task when we consider that extant T'ang poetry alone runs to almost 49,000 poems by 2,300 poets. But all of the well-known names are here in annotated selections - T'ao Ch'ien, Han Shan, Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Po Chu-yi, etc., - as well as many less familiar names.
After a Preface, a brief but informative Introduction, a section of 'Explanations' which contains a handy list of abbreviations for their main sources (e.g., YSW Yi shih-wen), and a detailed 32-page Table of Contents, the main body of the book follows, chronologically ordered into six parts.
One very useful feature of the book, for students who would like to consult the original Chinese texts, is that precise source references have been given for all poems (e.g., CTS, P.2476). Later, editors Liu and Lo did publish a Chinese-language edition of the present book which contained all of the original Chinese texts, but unfortunately I cannot remember the details.
The book is rounded out with a detailed period-by-period Bibliography; an extremely useful 90 pages of 'Background on Poets and poems' which provides biographical information that can sometimes be a big help in undertanding some of the poems; two additional Appendices; and an Index of Authors. The book is 8vo in size (6.5 by 9.5 inches), well-printed in a clear, readable font on spacious pages of excellent paper, stitched, and bound in full cloth - in other words, a real book.
What it gives us is a substantial collection, with a strong academic flavor, of Chinese poems in accurate translations by academic specialists. But, as everyone knows, specialists may be of two kinds. On the one hand there are brilliant scholar-translators of the caliber of Burton Watson, a few of whose translations are featured in the book; on the other hand there are translators who, though undoubtedly equally as sincere as Watson, are considerably less inspired.
Unfortunately the book lacks an Index to its more than fifty contributors, and so it's hard to gage the relative proportions of these two very different kinds of contributors, but my impression is that, as is usually the case with such anthologies, there are somewhat more of the latter than the former.
'Sunflower Splendor' is in many ways a useful and excellent book, and one appreciates the arduous labors that must have gone into it. Beginning students of Classical Chinese who are able to find the companion volume of Chinese texts will have in these two volumes a virtual library of Chinese poetry that should be enough to keep them happy for a long time.
