Shi-Jing, Or Book of Songs

The Shi-Jing, or Book of Songs, is a rendering of China's oldest verse anthology of poets, from the 11th to the 7th century BCE. It's time we moderns got to know it well-for the sheer pleasure of experiencing the colorful multitude of 325 intimate voices. There's a direct, earnest warmth about the lyrical expressions of all the people we overhear, and it is a privilege to enter into their confidence. They are so alive they startle me, and they'll speak on what they care about. The poems are offered in the versions I translate using the endlessly varied melodious forms devised for them by the phenomenally gifted 19th-century poet-translator Friedrich Rückert. He is correct in saying he has "appropriated" [angeeignet] his materials. The anonymous collection is reshaped and newly crafted by this world-class German poet and linguistic genius, who was himself a major humanist educator. In disclosing that double role, Rückert's Shi-Jing may be called his own centrally symbolic achievement, his paradigm contribution to world literature.