A pioneering translator of the classic Confucian and Taoist texts was James Legge, whose works, still standard, appear in many volumes. Translations of individual classics include A. Waley, tr., The Book of Songs (1937) and The Analects of Confucius (1938); R. Wilhelm and C. F. Baynes, tr., The I Ching or Book of Changes (1950); B. Carlgren, tr., The Book of Odes (1950); W. I. Ch'an, tr., The Way of Lao Tzu (1963); W. A. C. H. Dobson, tr., Mencius (1963); B. Watson, tr., The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (1968); D. C. Lau, tr., Mencius (1970); J. C. Wu, tr., Tao Teh Ching (1989).
General anthologies of Chinese literature in translation include C. Birch, ed., Anthology of Chinese Literature (2 vol., 1961–72); H. C. Chang, Chinese Literature (1982–83); and V. H. Mair, The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (1994).
Collections of short stories, new and old, include C. Levenson, W. Bauer, and H. Franks, tr., The Golden Casket: Chinese Novellas of Two Millennia (1964); E. Snow, ed., Living China: Modern Chinese Stories (1937, repr. 1989); J. Tai, The Nine Houses: A Collection of Contemporary Chinese Short Stories (1989).
Anthologies of Chinese poetry include W. Bynner and K. H. Kiang, tr., The Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology, Being Three Hundred Poems of the T'ang Dynasty (1929); D. Hawkes, tr., Ch'u Tz'u: The Songs of the South, an Ancient Chinese Anthology (1959); A. R. Davis, ed., The Penguin Book of Chinese Verse (1962); B. Watson, ed., Chinese Rhyme-Prose (1971) and The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (1986); J. Chaves, ed., The Columbia Book of Later Chinese Poetry: Yuan, Ming, and Ch'ing Dynasties, 1279–1911 (1988).
Bibliographical guides to translations and criticisms of modern Chinese literature include M. Davidson, comp., A List of Published Translations from Chinese into English, French, and German (2 vol., 1952–57); T. L. Yuan, comp., China in Western Literature: A Continuation of Cordier's Bibliotheca Sinica (1958); J. D. Paper, A Guide to Guides to Chinese Prose (1984).
See also C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (1961) and The Classic Chinese Novel (1968); B. Watson, Early Chinese Literature (1962); L. Ming, A History of Chinese Literature (1964); W. C. Liu, An Introduction to Chinese Literature (1966); S. Owen, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T'ang (1980) and Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics (1985); M. Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (1990); D. D. Wang, Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China (1992).
Sections in this article:
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: Asian Literature
