Open Letters Monthly Reviews Calligrams Titles

literarymindandthecarvingofdragonsSteve Donoghue at Open Letters Monthly reviews three books from the “deservedly popular” Calligrams reprint series from New York Review of Books and Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, devoted to “writings from and on China”: Chinese Rhyme-Prose, translated by Burton Watson with a preface by Lucas Klein; The Literary Mind & The Carving of Dragons, by Liu Hsieh translated by Vincent Yu-Chung Shih; and The Three Leaps of Wang Lun, by Alfred Döblin translated by C. D. Godwin. Here’s a passage:

Chinese literature has one of the longest histories in the world; Chinese writers and poets and scholars were parsing fine points of rhetoric and prosody long before the Greeks had ever heard the song of Troy, and they were hotly debating critical fine points a millennium before the monks of Ireland wrote their first playful erotica with ice-cold fingers. The outflow has continued almost unabated for three thousand years, with major works spawning minor works and minor works spawning commentaries and the major commentaries spawning commentaries of their own. It’s an immense and frighteningly tangled bookish heritage.

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