Du Fu's complete poetry in translation

[Luxi]

Good news for Tang and Du Fu's poetry admirers.

 

The entire extant corpus of Du Fu's poetry (1400 poems), translated and annotated by Professor Steve Owen (Harvard University), has been published recently. The job took Prof. Owen over 8 years, the end product being 6 volumes, 3000 pages : 

 

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/04/translating-nine-pounds-of-poetry/

 

Better and better, the whole work, published by DeGruyter, can be read freely online under an Open Access license.

 

http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/246946

 

Enjoy!

 

[skylee]

Thank you! (Sorry that I pressed the downvote button by mistake. I meant to press the green arrow.)

[Shelley]

Oh my green upvote got removed. I will just say Thank You then.

[mikelove]

This is amazing; you've officially convinced me to add dual-page mode to our PDF reader, so thanks for that :-)

[Guest realmayo]

Thanks this looks wonderful, I think Stephen Owen is amazing and Du Fu knew a thing or two about Chinese poetry too....

[Angelina]

Here it is in The Paper

http://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1456911?from=timeline&isappinstalled=0

comments on WeChat:

好吧，这工作竟然让老外来做，中国人掩面。。

[Guest realmayo]

what does 掩面 mean here?

[Angelina]

ashamed, from the physical act of covering your face with your hands

this

edited

[Luxi]

I'm guessing here 掩面 --- cover the face in shame because 老外来做 ? (kind of an informed guess)

 

But can you imagine a literal, character by character, word by word translation of Du Fu's poetry? without notes from a scholar? It would be unintelligible. Even with the skillful translation and notes most of the poems need a lot of thinking to make any sense at all.

[Guest realmayo]

I'm still trying to understand the comment Angelina highlighted. Why would Chinese people be ashamed that it took an English-speaker to translate Du Fu's poems into English?

[Angelina]

that guy on WeChat is a translator

plus

someone commented at The Paper

叫老外好好看看什么叫有文化

[Guest realmayo]

so? he [that guy on wechat] is probably no good at writing poetry in English.