Your first choice is Arthur Waley, A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems. He was really a pioneer in the field?

He wasn’t the earliest, but if you’re talking about his overall achievement he is definitely a pioneering figure. Especially for me. When I first started reading classical Chinese poetry in translation, the books that I could get were all by Arthur Waley. There were other translators before him, but in terms of the quality of translation Waley was the best.

Tell me about the 170 poems he’s chosen.

He uses one term, “poetic form”. What it means is that it’s not enough to convey the meaning of the original. He actually translated a lot more poems, but if he thought the translation was not up to the standard of poetic form, then he didn’t include the poem in his collection. That is something that made a great impression on me, in my own translations as well. Whether I’m translating my own poetry or a well-known poem, if for one reason or another I’m not happy with it in the target language, then I won’t include it no matter how good the original is. I can convey the meaning, there’s no question about that. But that’s not enough.

On to Burton Watson. So he’s translated 100 poems by the Tang poet Han-Shan.

He translated a number of collections but this is one of his translations I read first. I like Burton Watson’s translation because it’s both scholarly and good literature. He does a lot of research, so the translation is really reliable; he has lots of notes and it’s clearly a work of scholarship. But at the same time it’s not an academic translation with so many notes that the poem itself is hardly readable. He is a very good combination of scholarship and literature.

For people who don’t know Han-Shan, do you want to say a bit about him and his poems? He was a hermit, who lived in the mountains?

Ironically, Han-Shan is better known out of China than in China, mainly because of translations like this. Han-Shan was a good Tang dynasty [AD 618-907] poet, but not that well known. But in English, if you’re talking about classical Chinese poetry lots of people immediately think of Han-Shan. That’s interesting, and to the credit of the translators.

Who would Chinese people say is the most famous classical poet then?

For the Tang dynasty people would immediately say Li Bai (also spelt Li Po). Han-Shan, if you want a number, would be maybe number 20 or 30 – he wouldn’t even make the top 10.

Li Bai also appears in some of these anthologies you’ve chosen.

Yes, definitely.

Will you talk a bit about the David Hinton’s book, Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology.

I met David Hinton in October at a conference at Harvard and I read his translation. The thing that struck me is his language. Some translators try to make the language a bit dated – English which is almost not like modern English. With Arthur Waley, you wouldn’t say his language is archaic, but it’s still not like the living language you use today. David is trying to render the translation with a modern sensibility. The language is so fresh! I like that. Of course he has to describe in English things in classical Chinese poetry, no question about that. But the language he chooses for this job is very modern.

Can you give an example? Read me one of his translations you like.

Drinking Wine

I live here in a village house without

all that racket horses and carts stir up,

and you wonder how that could ever be.

Wherever the mind dwells apart is itself

a distant place. Picking chrysanthemums

at my east fence, I see South Mountain

far off: air lovely at dusk, birds in flight

returning home. All this means something,

something absolute: whenever I start

to explain it, I forget words altogether.