A beautiful book to learn classical Chinese poems

[slowrabbit]

Hi all,

 

I am so happy to find out this forum on Chinese learning and hope that I am not being intruding to introduce one of my books to you. I've been struggling to find a good introductory book on classical Chinese poetry to my 3 kids who were all born in the US. Current related books on market  are often illustrated with cartoon pictures which I dislike very much because I don't think they go well with the classical poems. So I decided to make one by myself. And what pictures can be better than the classical Chinese paintings? So I carefully selected 50 simple but elegant ancient Chinese poems each of which is paired with a traditional Chinese painting by a famous artist in different ages. My kids and many of my friends and their children love the book. Although it's originally designed for children,  adults find it enjoyable as well since the combination of classical Chinese poems and classical Chinese paintings enhances the beauty of each other.

 

The book is titled "50 Simple Ancient Chinese Poems with 50 Ancient Chinese Paintings" with a Chinese subtitle "古诗古画50首". It's currently available on Amazon worldwide including in the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, etc. The book has two versions in both formats of ebook and paperback. One version is marked with Pinyin and the other without Pinyin. Please select the version best suits your need.  

 

本书包含两个版本，“注音版” 及 “无注音版”, 分别有“电子书”和“纸版书”两种形式。请根据您的需要选择不同的版本。

 

For your reference, I'm attaching a few interior pages from the book and hope you like it.

 

I'm also making the audio book version. So stay tuned. 

 

Please visit my author page on Amazon for more information:

https://www.amazon.com/Slow-Rabbit/e/B078BNTHDX

 

Thank you all.

 

Slow Rabbit

Edited December 1, 2017 at 12:42 AM by slowrabbit
add a picture for Pinyin version and edited the text to include more information

[Xiao Kui]

I think it's really beautiful, but in China we can get these books at any bookstore (the art you chose is definitely more appealing than those books which are illustrated for kids.) The books we can get here have even more helpful footnotes, but like yours, they are in Chinese, making them inaccessible to beginner and low intermediate learners. (I can read the footnotes, but I am an advanced learner.) If you want to share this as a useful language learning tool, my suggestion would be to include English footnotes, which would set it apart from most of the stuff already available. Still, it's very pretty - thank you for sharing!

[Luxi]

It's lovely, @slowrabbit! I just got the e-book from Amazon UK - it's for PCs or tablets/phones, not for the Kindle, so the pictures are nice and clear. It's  nice of Amazon to facilitate this type of publishing.

The selection of poems is good, they all seem short enough to try memorizing a few. The audio version will be very helpful.

One small thing, I'd like to have a table of contents with links to the individual poems to find them quickly. 

 

Your children must be very proud!

[Shelley]

I just had a look at your author page and noticed there is also a pinyin version, this is very helpful.

 

I have to agree this is a beautiful book and I appreciate the art and the poetry.

 

Thank you for sharing and your efforts.

 

P.S. I wouldn't call it "cute" this, in my opinion, belittles the beauty of the book. I would substitute beautiful for cute.

[Zbigniew]

 

1 hour ago, Xiao Kui said:

my suggestion would be to include English footnotes, which would set it apart from most of the stuff already available.

I'd echo that. Advanced readers containing unsimplified material and accompanied by an English commentary are rare as hen's teeth. Their rarity has been one of the major frustrations of learning Chinese for me, and another reason besides the script why making progress in reading can be painfully slow when compared with progress in say French, German, Spanish, et al., for all of which readers with commentaries can easily be had.

 

The book is attractive, nonetheless.

[slowrabbit]

On 11/26/2017 at 3:56 AM, Xiao Kui said:

I think it's really beautiful, but in China we can get these books at any bookstore (the art you chose is definitely more appealing than those books which are illustrated for kids.) The books we can get here have even more helpful footnotes, but like yours, they are in Chinese, making them inaccessible to beginner and low intermediate learners. (I can read the footnotes, but I am an advanced learner.) If you want to share this as a useful language learning tool, my suggestion would be to include English footnotes, which would set it apart from most of the stuff already available. Still, it's very pretty - thank you for sharing!

 

Thanks Xiao Hui for  your suggestion. I made this book mainly for children like mine who can understand Chinese but can't read well. So you are right that this book is not very friendly to beginning Chinese learner. I actually also like doing translation so I may make a bilingual version in the future. Two reasons I am hesitate to do it are firstly poetry is hard to translate and classical Chinese poems are even harder; I rarely see a well translated classical Chinese poem. Secondly, I am not sure how important it will be since people  who know Chinese will definitely prefer the original and others simply would not care. 

 

As one example, the following is a poem I translated before:

 

李清照《夏日絕句》

 

生当作人杰，

死亦为鬼雄。

至今思项羽，

不肯过江东

 

To live as a hero

To die as a man

The king though defeated

Would never retreat

[slowrabbit]

On 11/26/2017 at 5:07 AM, Luxi said:

It's lovely, @slowrabbit! I just got the e-book from Amazon UK - it's for PCs or tablets/phones, not for the Kindle, so the pictures are nice and clear. It's  nice of Amazon to facilitate this type of publishing.

The selection of poems is good, they all seem short enough to try memorizing a few. The audio version will be very helpful.

One small thing, I'd like to have a table of contents with links to the individual poems to find them quickly. 

 

Your children must be very proud!

 

Thanks Luxi for your support! I would love to have the hyperlink from the table of contents to the poems too. But I haven't figure it out how to do . My kids do love the book, even my 4 year old girl . 

[slowrabbit]

On 11/26/2017 at 5:17 AM, Shelley said:

I just had a look at your author page and noticed there is also a pinyin version, this is very helpful.

 

I have to agree this is a beautiful book and I appreciate the art and the poetry.

 

Thank you for sharing and your efforts.

 

P.S. I wouldn't call it "cute" this, in my opinion, belittles the beauty of the book. I would substitute beautiful for cute.

 

Thank you Shelley for your encouragement. I will use "beautiful" next time following your suggestion

[slowrabbit]

On 11/26/2017 at 5:57 AM, Zbigniew said:

I'd echo that. Advanced readers containing unsimplified material and accompanied by an English commentary are rare as hen's teeth. Their rarity has been one of the major frustrations of learning Chinese for me, and another reason besides the script why making progress in reading can be painfully slow when compared with progress in say French, German, Spanish, et al., for all of which readers with commentaries can easily be had.

 

The book is attractive, nonetheless.

 

Thank you Zbigniew. Now your are motivating me more to make a bilingual version. Which one do you think is useful? A fully translated version or just some footnotes or comments?

[陳德聰]

I think if you are going to do a translation like the one you did of 夏日絕句, it is probably best to just do footnotes instead for learners. This is not a comment on the quality of your translation, but just that it is probably more useful to have a footnote explaining who 項羽 is and where 江東 is than to have just a translation that avoids referring to 項羽 altogether.

[thechamp]

This is a really nice book. I actually became interested in Chinese when studying English Literature and being exposed to Pound's Cathay translations. I have an HSK 5 in Chinese so far from expert but I do try to teach myself classical Chinese poems from time to time, and then also have a go at translating them (which is an absolute nightmare!). I think translation of classical Chinese poetry into English might be the most difficult translation in the world. I'm going to ask for this as an Xmas present. It's lovely!

[slowrabbit]

On 11/27/2017 at 11:38 PM, 陳德聰 said:

I think if you are going to do a translation like the one you did of 夏日絕句, it is probably best to just do footnotes instead for learners. This is not a comment on the quality of your translation, but just that it is probably more useful to have a footnote explaining who 項羽 is and where 江東 is than to have just a translation that avoids referring to 項羽 altogether.

 

Thanks for  your suggestion. Poetry translation is one of my hobbies and I mainly translate the free-style poems between English and Chinese. The translation of classical Chinese poems are extremely challenging and the version I posted before is meant for people who has no Chinese background at all because I think whoever can read Chinese should always read the original  nothing can be better than the original version. Maybe I will do a background introduction, a word by word translation, and a poetic translation in order to deliver more flavors of the poems in the bilingual version. But it looks like a lot of work to do ....  

[slowrabbit]

11 hours ago, thechamp said:

This is a really nice book. I actually became interested in Chinese when studying English Literature and being exposed to Pound's Cathay translations. I have an HSK 5 in Chinese so far from expert but I do try to teach myself classical Chinese poems from time to time, and then also have a go at translating them (which is an absolute nightmare!). I think translation of classical Chinese poetry into English might be the most difficult translation in the world. I'm going to ask for this as an Xmas present. It's lovely!

 

I definitely agree that translation of classical Chinese poetry into English IS the most difficult translation in the world! Thanks for your encouragement  I will try my best to make a bilingual version but I only do it in my free time so Xmas seems to be a mission impossible  But please stay tuned. I am making an interactive ebook with audios. I think it should be available by Xmas and I believe  you will find it both lovely and useful