Finest Gems

We can understand a people best through their poetry. The Chinese, who have written poetry since the beginning

of time, have always regarded poetry as the finest flower of their culture. If we start with the two Chinese pagoda poems

translated by George Puttenham in Arte of Poesie in 1589, classical Chinese poetry has been translated for more than

400 years. Since then, the "flowers of culture" translated by James Legge, Hebert Gelis, Arthur Waley, Ezra Pound,

Burton Watson, David Hendon Hinton, and other poetry translators, have bloomed in foreign lands.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus in late 2019, countries have closed their doors to prevent the spread of the

virus. In the ennui of the continuous blockade and isolation, peoples' spiritual needs began growing day by day. The

convenience of the Internet gave birth to instantaneous communication over any distance to people all over the

world. During this period, Chinese culture repeatedly captured overseas interest on a global scale, and classical

poetry was no exception. At the end of 2021, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, posted Cao Zhi's "A Poem

Composed in Seven Paces" on his social media platform. There are different interpretations of his motivations, but

facts are facts: we can see that Chinese classical poetry is spreading more and more widely abroad, and its acceptance

is also increasing.

As lovers of poetry and translation, we naturally wanted to contribute to the translation of classical Chinese

poetry through Finest Gems: The Shortest Rhyming Poems of Ancient China. "(ln lng)" is a part of the Chinese

name of our work. It means pieces of glittering jade, as the classical Chinese poems in this collection are all short and

precise, which is actually the scope of our original selection: First of all, the selected original poems needed to have a

certain classic feeling, something that could be remembered once heard; secondly, they had to be short: within five words

and four sentences, which could be regarded as the shortest poems in the Chinese library of poetry. In addition, we only

included poems translated into English by contemporary Chinese translators. Works of deceased translators are not

within our book. The included poems are not limited to translation strategies and methods, but were translated by

rhyme, emotion, or any other method that delivered the essence of the poems. In this way, we could present the most

flexible oriental poetry in the shortest possible space. After only two months of receiving manuscripts, the book

includes 97 translations of 57 poems from 25 translators, covering seven Chinese dynasties from Wei and Jin to Ming

and Qing dynasties. Among them are Cao Zhi's "A Poem Composed in Seven Paces" and other well-known poems

such as Yu Shinan's "Ode to the Wind". There are both rhyming transla...