How to Read Chinese Poetry

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.

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.