300 TANG POEMS.

January 9, 2003 by 5 Comments

Via Plep comes this wonderful site presenting the classic Chinese poetry anthology in bilingual versions. The translations are mostly by Witter Bynner, who isn’t my favorite but will do; I can’t actually get the characters (I see gibberish on my screen), but I will bookmark the site in the expectation that someday I will be able to see the originals, and I assume that some of my readers can do so already. Give it a try.

Update (Oct. 2022). You can now see the poems and translations in book form at Internet Archive.

Comments

  1. nelson says
    January 10, 2003 at 7:47 am

    Just switch your encoding to Big5/Traditional Chinese. I guess they couldn’t Unicode it.

  2. Songdog says
    January 10, 2003 at 9:53 am

    Thats in the View Menu, under Encoding in Internet Explorer, or in the View Menu under Character Encoding in Mozilla. I’ll be happy to email you screenshots of a poem or two if you’re interested.

  3. language hat says
    January 10, 2003 at 10:24 am

    Thanks, but I have a copy of the anthology in Chinese (a printed book, I mean), so I don’t actually need to see it on my screen. I did try switching the character set to Traditional Chinese, but it didn’t help. Bog s nim, as the Russians say to dismiss whatever or whoever they don’t feel like dealing with.

  4. Anonymous says
    January 12, 2003 at 11:13 am

    Nelson: I downloaded Traditional Chinese – Big 5, and now instead of gibberish symbols I get question marks. Do you see characters or question marks here?
    孤鴻海上來， 池潢不敢顧；

  5. thehepthalite says
    January 14, 2003 at 2:43 pm

    You will be glad to know that Witter Bynner spent his final years in Santa Fe, NM, as a vegetable. He simply lay in a cot at one end of his vast library–gurgling (rather poetically, I might add), gagging, and grunting. At one moment just afore he passed into veggiedom, he winked at a bunch of us and said he, Winfield Townley Scott, Chris LaFarge, that guy Johnson of poco tiempo fame (he was Bynner’s secretary–D.H. and Frieda stayed at his house once–also a good friend of Ez’s–Ez wrote “Ez Sez” for the Santa Fe newspaper in those days), and a few others, including painters, would sit around a pocket watch–they would start with one of them and go clockwise around the group creating poetry. One poem started, “Horses…shit…upon…their…fevered…
    ground…only…left…to…wallow…in…their…
    creations…as…though…pigs.” In eating a bowl of Winfield Townley’s famous clam chowder, I said, Hey Winfield, where’s the horse that made this? To which he cleverly replied, I am that Horse, You Pig. I did however enjoy Witter’s book Journey With Genius.

    [Added Oct. 2022: In case it’s not clear from the prose style, “thehepthalite” was none other than our late fiend thegrowlingwolf.]

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