Fifty Songs from the Yüan

Book excerpt: This book, first published in 1967, gives us a rich sampling of ch’ü, the characteristic poem of the time of Yüan, when China was under Mongol rule. The ch’ü was a popular form of poetry in the sense that although it was written by literati, they wrote in the vernacular rather than in Classical Chinese. Each poem was written to be sung to an already popular tune. In addition to the ‘final translations’, the steps by which the translators proceeded from a literal, character-by-character translation through several intermediate stages to the final version are revealed in detail.