Chinese Love Poems

Qiu Xiaolong is extravagantly qualified for translating these poems, having as a citizen of China won prizes for his own poetry and for translating T.S. Eliot and other English and American poets into Chinese and, more recently, as a citizen of the United States, won prizes for his own poetry and fiction in English. To my mind, the Changgan Song in this collection rivals Ezra Pound's justly famous, loosely translated version, The River Merchant's Wife. These renderings have a limpidity of the language and metaphor and a subtle rhythm, and Qiu has a poet's sixth sense for when (occasionally) to lift the line with a less direct and more evocative word; we are thus rescued from the flatness of some translations of early Chinese poetry. This is a generous book and a very welcome addition to the poetry of love and longing from our Significant Stranger, the Chinese nation. --Mona Van Duyn.