Written in Exile

Written in Exile PDF

Author: Liu Tsung-yuan

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

Published: 2020-01-15

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1619322072

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After a failed push for political reform, the T’ang era’s greatest prose-writer, Liu Tsung-yuan, was exiled to the southern reaches of China. Thousands of miles from home and freed from the strictures of court bureaucracy, he turned his gaze inward and chronicled his estrangement in poems. Liu’s fame as a prose writer, however, overshadowed his accomplishment as a poet. Three hundred years after Liu died, the poet Su Tung-p’o ranked him as one of the greatest poets of the T’ang, along with Tu Fu, Li Pai, and Wei Ying-wu. And yet Liu is unknown in the West, with fewer than a dozen poems published in English translation. The renowned translator Red Pine discovered Liu’s poetry during his travels throughout China and was compelled to translate 140 of the 146 poems attributed to Liu. As Red Pine writes, “I was captivated by the man and by how he came to write what he did.” Appended with thoroughly researched notes, an in-depth introduction, and the Chinese originals, Written in Exile presents the long-overdue introduction of a legendary T’ang poet.

The Banished Immortal

The Banished Immortal PDF

Author: Ha Jin

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2019-12-03

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0525562435

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In his own time (701–762), Li Bai’s brilliant poems—shaped by Daoist thought, filled with an irrepressible lust for life—were never given their proper due. Nonetheless, his lines rang out on the lips of tavern singers, soldiers, and writers throughout the Tang dynasty, and his deep desire for a higher, more perfect world gave rise to his nickname: the Banished Immortal. With the instincts of a master novelist, Ha Jin draws on a wide range of historical and literary sources to weave the great poet’s life story, following Bai from his origins on the western frontier to his rambling travels as a young man. Jin also takes us through the poet’s later years—in which he became swept up in a military rebellion that altered the course of China’s history—and the mysterious circumstances of his death. Today, Bai’s verses remain an inextricable part of the Chinese language—taught to schoolchildren, recited at parties and toasts—and are famed throughout the world. The Banished Immortal is an extraordinary portrait of a poet who both transcended his time and was shaped by it, and whose ability to live, love, drink, dance, and mourn without reservation produced some of the world’s most enduring verses.

A Free Life

A Free Life PDF

Author: Ha Jin

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2009-01-27

Total Pages: 674

ISBN-13: 0307278603

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A New York Times Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Entertainment Weekly, Slate In A Free Life, Ha Jin follows the Wu family — father Nan, mother Pingping, and son Taotao — as they sever their ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square and begin a new life in the United States. As Nan takes on a number of menial jobs, eventually operating a restaurant with Pingping, he struggles to adapt to the American way of life and to hold his family together, even as he pines for a woman he loved and lost in his youth. Ha Jin's prodigious talents are in full force as he brilliantly brings to life the struggles and successes of the contemporary immigrant experience.

The Crazed

The Crazed PDF

Author: Ha Jin

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0307428354

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A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post, Los Angeles times, and San Jose Mercury News Best Book of the Year Ha Jin’s seismically powerful new novel is at once an unblinking look into the bell jar of communist Chinese society and a portrait of the eternal compromises and deceptions of the human state. When the venerable professor Yang, a teacher of literature at a provincial university, has a stroke, his student Jian Wan is assigned to care for him. Since the dutiful Jian plans to marry his mentor’s beautiful, icy daughter, the job requires delicacy. Just how much delicacy becomes clear when Yang begins to rave. Are these just the outpourings of a broken mind, or is Yang speaking the truth—about his family, his colleagues, and his life’s work? And will bearing witness to the truth end up breaking poor Jian’s heart? Combining warmth and intimacy with an unsparing social vision, The Crazed is Ha Jin’s most enthralling book to date.

Written in Exile

Written in Exile PDF

Author: Liu Tsung-yuan

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781556595622

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Renowned translator Pine brings into English the work of an ancient Chinese poet little-known in the West. Appended with thoroughly researched notes, an in-depth Introduction, and the Chinese originals, this edition presents the long-overdue introduction of a legendary T'ang poet.

A Map of Betrayal

A Map of Betrayal PDF

Author: Ha Jin

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2015-07-07

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0804170363

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A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year Lilian Shang, a history professor in Maryland, knew that her father, Gary, had been the most important Chinese spy ever caught in the United States. But when she discovers his diary after the death of her parents, its pages reveal the full pain and longing that his double life entailed—and point to a hidden second family that he’d left behind in China. As Lilian follows her father’s trail back into the Chinese provinces, she begins to grasp the extent of her father’s dilemma—torn between loyalty to his motherland and the love he came to feel for his adopted country. As she starts to understand that Gary, too, had been betrayed, she finds that it is up to her to prevent his tragedy from endangering yet another generation of the Shangs. A stunning portrait of a multinational family, an unflinching inquiry into the meaning of patriotism, A Map of Betrayal is a spy novel that only Ha Jin could write.

The Chinese Poetry of Bei Dao, 1978-2000

The Chinese Poetry of Bei Dao, 1978-2000 PDF

Author: Dian Li

Publisher: Edwin Mellen Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13:

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Presents an assessment of Bei Dao as a Chinese poet. Through a reading of a selection of his poems, this book constructs a conceptual roadmap of Bei Dao's complex poetics.

A Bilingual Edition of Poetry Out of Communist China

A Bilingual Edition of Poetry Out of Communist China PDF

Author: Xiang Huang

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13:

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This facing-page edition makes translations of over 150 poems of contemporary Chinese poet/author Huang Xiang available to the Western world for the first time in a collection. Since he is subject to a long-term ban against publication of any of his writings in his native China, only a few of his poems have ever been read and translated in the West. A member of the proscribed classes by virtue of his birth, he was subjected to harassment, imprisonment and brutality from his childhood until his departure from China in 1997. His writings have already gained high and deserved respect in the small scholarly circle that is familiar with them in China and the West. Xiang outside China, plus many that refer to him or quote his works, as well as general works on Chinese poetry. The long biographical introduction will be of great value to scholars who wish to pursue the origins of Underground Literature in which Huang is a major figure, and the later Menglung misty, obscure) poetry that followed it. The poems themselves are in clear recitable English. The book's composition, with the original Chinese on the left and English on the right, matched line for line, offers an excellent pedagogical tool, as well as a subject for study by critics, commentators, and students of language. The book also includes a section of personal photographs, and a foreword by Huang Xiang.

Women’s Poetry of Late Imperial China

Women’s Poetry of Late Imperial China PDF

Author: Xiaorong Li

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2013-05-03

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0295804432

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This study of poetry by women in late imperial China examines the metamorphosis of the trope of the "inner chambers" (gui), to which women were confined in traditional Chinese households, and which in literature were both a real and an imaginary place. Originally popularized in sixth-century "palace style" poetry, the inner chambers were used by male writers as a setting in which to celebrate female beauty, to lament the loneliness of abandoned women, and by extension, to serve as a political allegory for the exile of loyal and upright male ministers spurned by the imperial court. Female writers of lyric poetry (ci) soon adopted the theme, beginning its transition from male fantasy to multidimensional representation of women and their place in society, and eventually its manifestation in other poetic genres as well. Emerging from the role of sexual objects within poetry, late imperial women were agents of literary change in their expansion and complication of the boudoir theme. While some take ownership and de-eroticizing its imagery for their own purposes, adding voices of children and older women, and filling the inner chambers with purposeful activity such as conversation, teaching, religious ritual, music, sewing, childcare, and chess-playing, some simply want to escape from their confinement and protest gender restrictions imposed on women. Women's Poetry of Late Imperial China traces this evolution across centuries, providing and analyzing examples of poetic themes, motifs, and imagery associated with the inner chambers, and demonstrating the complication and nuancing of the gui theme by increasingly aware and sophisticated women writers.