Reviews for When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism

The average rating for When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-04-05 00:00:00 Marco Travaglini An interesting book but I think it might be aimed more at students of Chinese language and literature, rather than a layperson like me. It felt quite academic at times, and was a bit of a slog to get through. Regardless, it's still a good introduction to classical Chinese poetry and it offers insights into the historical contexts, development and interpretation of the poems. In particular, I appreciated the word-for-word translations that accompanied most of the poems, along with a more standard translation. These showed the difficulty of translation, and led me to another book I would like to read, called, "19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei," which takes a short poem and demonstrates how it can be interpreted and translated at least 19 different ways. I will probably dip into this anthology again from time to time.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-10-28 00:00:00 Michael Green Since I have a working knowledge of Chinese and Japanese, I used to compare the original Chinese text to the translation of any Chinese poetry that I was reading. I often felt something was lacking in the translation since the sources for the Chinese texts were generally included accompanying aids, like annotations, commentaries, background information on the poem and author, plus a paraphrase in modern Chinese or Japanese. Most Chinese or Japanese collections of Chinese poems are like the well-known study aids Cliff Notes with all kinds of helpful information for understanding poems. This "guided" anthology, edited by Professor Zong-Qi Cai is a collection of essays by experts who guide students through the major genres and eras of Chinese poetry from ancient to relatively the modern times. The book is divided into 6 chronological sections and includes more than 140 examples of the best poems in various styles (shi, sao, fu, ci, and qu poems). It is a comprehensive introduction to the thematic, formal, and prosodic features of Chinese poetry. Each chapter is written by a scholar with a specialty in a particular period or genre. The poems are presented in Chinese and English, accompanied by a tone-marked romanized version with an explanation of Chinese linguistic and poetic conventions, and recommended strategies for reading the poems. Sound recordings of the poems are available online free of charge. This book fulfills a real need for tools to understand the Chinese poetic tradition. The kind of information accompanying each poem is much like the notes that appear in Chinese and Japanese anthologies of poems. It also helps dispel certain myths about Chinese poetry and the written language that are commonly held because of Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, who lacked any real knowledge of Chinese in spite of the success of their translations. They were impressed by features such as the iconicity of the ideograms which are really only a very small part of the written language and have little effect on the production of the actual poems.