Fifty-Five T’ang Poems: A Text in the Reading and Understanding of T’ang Poetry (Far Eastern Publications Series) Paperback – March 11, 1976

the excellence of this volume in explaining the grammar and conventions of Tang poetry more than compensate for its admittedly unattractive and dated design. the'article' style publication in no way detracts from the characters' legibility. this book was personally recommended to me by Dr. Paul Rouzer (author of the thoroughly excellent New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese) as a primer maintaining the philological tradition of commentary writing. Outside of Archie Barnes' book, there is very little in English to match this book as an entry point into understanding how to analyze Chinese poetry. recommended to anyone with a strong interest in the subject and who is willing to put in the work

Old "article" style publication that would benefit immensly from good remake. I guess the inhabitants of Ivory Towers would get more from it than us, simple mortals.But if Yale wants to sell more of these, they will have to use better paper, better fonts and actually use good Chinese printed fonts, not the ones scratched by a needle on the plates. Chinese poetry deserve better.This is an in-depth introduction to both Chinese Classical poetry and Chinese Classical Literary language (Wen Yan). If you have patience, you will be rewarded.But there are better ways of learning Wen Yan and better ways of enjoying Tang poetry. However, if you are a specialist, there may be gems in this book that you may not find elsewhere. But as an introduction, it comes short.I was so offended by the poor polygraphy of the book...Alex Chaihorsky.

To be precise, this is a Middle Chinese textbook (Middle Chinese is a stage in the evolution of the Chinese language; it is what Tang Dynasty writers used). You will be disappointed if you buy this book looking for Chinese poetry in translation. If, however, you want to learn to read Chinese poetry on your own, this is a very valuable book.The poems are very thoughtfully selected - if your vocabulary is limited, and you learn more signs as you work through the poems in the book, you will notice that most of the signs are basic ones (meaning that they appear in the list of 2000 characters in common use in China today). The grammar sketch is very brief but it contains some of the best ideas on the structure of the Chinese language I have found anywhere.I do not agree with the criticism of the fonts used - they may not be particularly pretty, but they are easy to read, and easy to count the strokes.The only limitation, from my point of view, is that the transliteration of most signs is given only for the Middle Chinese pronounciation. This is correct from the point of view of helping people appreciate these poems as they were written, however, is very inconvenient if you are using a modern dictionary or hanzi textbook to learn about the signs.If you are interested in learning to read Chinese poetry in the original, this is probably the best book you can get.

This copy replaces my first tattered copy whose pages have begun travelling to unforeseen places inside and outside the book.

Stimson's book is for learning to read classical chinese via the medium of Middle Chinese readings of Tang dynasty poetry. His reconstruction of the sounds of that time has been superseded buy other reconstructions, as Stimson's reconstruction is based primarily on Karlgren's. That aside, we can see that each annotated reading to each poem shows the riming of Middle Chinese.I used the character listings in this book and from the unicode kTang listing together with the brief description of his system in thus book to figure out the details of his reconstruction. There are a number of simplifications he has made for this book compared to the data in kTang which derives from his other work chinese T'ang Poetic Verse. There are also a number of typographical errors too.Although the reconstructed readings have been superceded by newer reconstructions, I have to give the book 5 stars as the 55 poems gives a wide range of subject matter for the reader, and that on the whole. My interest, initially, was soley to find out the MC sound system of the kTang data using this book, but as I used the book, I began to read his MC renderings and started to appreciate the poetry in a new light reading not in any modern dialect, but seeing a MC poem with its riming standing out. As for the sound system, I managed to figure it out, and this book provided enough data to enable me to do what I set out to do in the main. I have recently obtained one of the author's other book, T'ang Poetic Vocabulary, a small dictionary of characters and their English gloss for two popular Chinese anthologies of Tang poetry.