Same Moon Shines on All The Lives and Selected Poems of Yanagawa Seigan and Kōran
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Jonathan Chaves is professor of Chinese at the George Washington University. His many books include Every Rock a Universe: The Yellow Mountains and Chinese Travel Writing (2013), winner of the American Literary Translators Association’s Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize.Matthew Fraleigh is associate professor of East Asian literature and culture at Brandeis University. He has published New Chronicles of Yanagibashi and Diary of a Journey to the West: Narushima Ryūhoku Reports From Home and Abroad (2010) and Plucking Chrysanthemums: Narushima Ryūhoku and Sinitic Literary Traditions in Modern Japan (2016).
This remarkable collection gives a new richness and depth to our understanding of traditional Japanese poetry, revealing the significance, both aesthetic and political, of the learned poetry written in Chinese by two late Tokugawa poets. Yanagawa Seigan and Kōran’s poems, here rendered into elegant and forthright translations by Chaves, are accompanied by a masterful essay by Fraleigh concerning their lives and the increasingly tumultuous times in which they lived. To read and enjoy these poems is a fresh and bracing experience, filled with a sense of a larger poetic and philosophic world that belongs to all of East Asia.
- J. Thomas Rimer, University of Pittsburgh,
Fraleigh’s meticulous introduction engagingly frames the lives and work of this unusual husband-and-wife pair of Sinitic poets. Chaves’s translations bring the freshness, authenticity, and originality of their poems to life. Anyone with a heart for poetry will find two new and wonderful friends here.
- Sonja Arntzen, University of Toronto,
This volume, along with Burton Watson's classic <i>kanshi</i> translations, constitutes the finest translations of poetry written in classical Chinese by Japanese poets. The introduction and preface immerse the reader in the cultural history surrounding the lives of Seigan and Kōran—perfect preparation for the literary feast that follows in the form of 195 exquisite poems. A profound aesthetic experience.
- David K. Schneider, University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
In many ways the culmination of early modern Sinitic poetry in Japan, Yanagawa Seigan’s and his wife Kōran’s works are finally made accessible to readers of English. Chaves and Fraleigh have done a masterful job in unlocking a rich and mesmerizing poetic universe that is at once a guide to traditional Japanese literature and a timeless treasure trove of two talented poets.
- Ivo Smits, Leiden University,
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Jonathan Chaves is professor of Chinese at the George Washington University. His many books include Every Rock a Universe: The Yellow Mountains and Chinese Travel Writing (2013), winner of the American Literary Translators Association’s Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize.Matthew Fraleigh is associate professor of East Asian literature and culture at Brandeis University. He has published New Chronicles of Yanagibashi and Diary of a Journey to the West: Narushima Ryūhoku Reports From Home and Abroad (2010) and Plucking Chrysanthemums: Narushima Ryūhoku and Sinitic Literary Traditions in Modern Japan (2016).