Timeless Quatrains: Concise Classics from the East, Translated into English (Timeless Poetry)

When it comes to Asian poetry, many Westerners are familiar with the Japanese Haiku but unfamiliar with the Chinese quatrain, the so-called Juejyu (絕句) in Chinese. That's what this book is meant to change. It will familiarize English speakers with the Chinese quatrain form, which is only slightly longer than Haiku and can work equally well for social media posts, definitely worth promoting today.It is notable that Chinese quatrains have been essential to Chinese speakers' early childhood education for centuries. Most native speakers of Chinese know certain famous Chinese quatrains by heart, because their parents or teachers made them memorize these quatrains when they were in kindergarten and elementary school. Such quatrains belong to the collective memory of Chinese communities worldwide, but almost exclusively, because language barrier keeps those who don't speak Chinese from understanding them.Now, this book will make the Chinese quatrain genre and 100 classical Chinese quatrains accessible to English speakers. Most notably, the English translation of each Chinese quatrain preserves the rhyme scheme (either AABA or ABCB) of the original. Moreover, when a Chinese quatrain contains a couplet or even two in parallel structure, the English translation is structured in exactly the same way. Such exquisite English translations are really rare to come by...For literature lovers, this will be a treat. For those learning Chinese as a foreign language, this will be a guide. For either literary enjoyment or language learning, or both, this is a must-read! Read more