Poems on Poetry

Originally published to critical acclaim in the Münchener Ostasiatische Studien Series (Bd. 33), Steiner, Wiesbaden 1982, this Quirin Press Revised Edition offers the original text with the following features:

• Older Wade-Giles transliteration fully updated and revised to Pinyin.

• Fully re-typeset and proofed for typographical errors and inconsistencies.

• Expanded index.   • Fully revised by the author.

Keywords:  

Yuan Haowen , 1190-1257 — Criticism and interpretation.

|  Chinese poetry — History and criticism — Poetics.

Reviews of the original 1982 edition

[Yuan Haowen’s poems on poetry] are devilishly hard to translate. Only someone at home in Chinese poetic tradition or at least capable of understanding the numerous commentators who have worked on these poems could ever hope to cope with all the difficulties involved. The present translation is excellent and the translator carefully presents an enormous amount of explanatory material which makes it possible for even the most obtuse to grasp not only the general meaning of these difficult verses, but even the subtle nuances contained in allusions culled from the entire poetic tradition.

Donald Holzman, (Orientalistische Literaturzeitung: 82.2 (1987), pp. 204-205)

The result is a study of Yuan Haowen’s criticism on poetry which is truly of outstanding scholarship.

Yuan’s poems are indeed like riddles. A few of them defied even the skill and scholarship of Dr. Wixted, as he freely admits. His study is, on the other side, a great tribute to the geniality of Yuan Haowen, the poet who wrote, seemingly with ease, these short poems which baffled, fascinated and challenged so many scholars who in the course of time have tried so hard to decipher Yuan’s thoughts, so masterly expressed.

The Bibliography is a treasury of information in itself.

Eugen Feifel, (Monumenta Serica: 35 (1981-83), pp. 631-635)

Professor Wixted’s work is now a very fine book. Of all the difficult kinds of texts in classical Chinese letters, perhaps poems on poetry are the most difficult to understand—because of their terse, dense, elliptical and highly allusive mode of discourse.…The exact meanings of the terms of this vocabulary are often extremely difficult to determine since they seem to vary so much over time and from writer to writer. In dealing with such terms one has to keep in mind a series of overlapping contexts: (1) the individual critic’s own body of writings, (2) the values and views of the group or ‘school’ to which he might belong, (3) his historical period and stage in the overall development of creative and critical writing, (4) the broader context of current intellectual discourse including philosophical and religious writings, and (5) the tradition of criticism up to his own time....