Shi-Jing, or Book of Songs: China’s Earliest Verse Anthology

The Shi-Jing, or Book of Songs, is a rendering of China’s oldest verse anthology of poets, from the 11th to the 7th century BCE. It’s time we moderns got to know it well—for the sheer pleasure of experiencing the colorful multitude of 325 intimate voices. There’s a direct, earnest warmth about the lyrical expressions of all the people we overhear, and it is a privilege to enter into their confidence. They are so alive they startle me, and they’ll speak on what they care about.The poems are offered in the versions I translate using the endlessly varied melodious forms devised for them by the phenomenally gifted 19th-century poet-translator Friedrich Rückert. He is correct in saying he has “appropriated” [angeeignet] his materials. The anonymous collection is reshaped and newly crafted by this world-class German poet and linguistic genius, who was himself a major humanist educator. In disclosing that double role, Rückert’s Shi-Jing may be called his own centrally symbolic achievement, his paradigm contribution to world literature. Read more