Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei
Eliot Weinberger
(Author)
Octavio Paz
(Afterword by)
21,000+ Reviews
Bookshop.org has the highest-rated customer service of any bookstore in the world
Description
The difficulty (and necessity) of translation is concisely described in Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, a close reading of different translations of a single poem from the Tang Dynasty--from a transliteration to Kenneth Rexroth's loose interpretation. As Octavio Paz writes in the afterword, "Eliot Weinberger's commentary on the successive translations of Wang Wei's little poem illustrates, with succinct clarity, not only the evolution of the art of translation in the modern period but at the same time the changes in poetic sensibility."
Product Details
Price
$11.95
$11.11
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
October 11, 2016
Pages
64
Dimensions
4.4 X 0.5 X 7.0 inches | 0.2 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780811226202
BISAC Categories:
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliateAbout the Author
Eliot Weinberger's books of literary essays include Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing, The Ghosts of Birds, and Angels & Saints. His political writings are collected in What I Heard About Iraq and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he is a translator of the poetry of Bei Dao and the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. He was formerly the general editor of the series Calligrams: Writings from and on China and the literary editor of the Murty Classical Library of India. Among his many translations of Latin American poetry and prose are The Poems of Octavio Paz, Paz's In Light of India, Vicente Huidobro's Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia's Nostalgiafor Death, and Jorge Luis Borges' Seven Nights and Selected Non-Fictions. He has been publishing with New Directions since 1975.
Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was born in Mexico City. He wrote many volumes of poetry, as well as a prolific body of remarkable works of nonfiction on subjects as varied as poetics, literary and art criticism, politics, culture, and Mexican history. He was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1977, the Cervantes Prize in 1981, and the Neustadt Prize in 1982. He received the German Peace Prize for his political work, and finally, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.
Reviews
Weinberger is like an ancient Chinese zither player, tuning lonely in the mountain overlooking the world.--Bei Dao
Essential reading for anyone interested in translation.--M. A. Orthofer
Essential reading for anyone interested in translation.--M. A. Orthofer