From a general point of view, any translation of the Shijing 詩經 (The Classic of Poetry, The Book of Songs, The Book of Odes, etc.) is a good translation. Every new version will in some way reveal new facets of the work. There is, however, the narrower question of whether a particular translation is any good. This one is not. I would not recommend it to students, nor to readers interested in appreciating the Shijing. I would not cite it in research work.

The poems in this translation are accompanied by the prefaces from the “Mao Poetry” 毛詩, the only completely transmitted edition of the text. As it has taken about a thousand years for readers to throw off the yoke of this interpretative structure, which places the poems in the most tenuously concocted political narratives one can imagine, it is hard to welcome its return, although it is true that the prefaces are a crucial part of the tradition. The translator specifies in the introduction (p. xlvii) that the prefaces do not inform his translations of the poems, but this is not always the case. For instance, without the preface, there is no reason to associate the “white cap” of Poem 147 (“Su guan” 素冠) with mourning ritual. Conversely, to the extent that the prefaces do not influence the translations, they are sure to bewilder any reader who picks up the volume to read a poem or two—or the student who is assigned some for a course. For example, at Poem 28 (“Yanyan” 燕燕), the preface and the poem in translation use the word gui 歸 in two different senses, “return” and “marry.” Here and elsewhere, the prefaces need to come with some guidance.

But the real problem with the prefaces is that the translator has so often not understood them. Setting aside infelicities of wording, which not infrequently render the sense inscrutable, at least 100 of the 305 prefaces (those for the six titles without text are omitted) are wrongly translated.Footnote ¹ For example:

• • At Poem 48 (“Sang zhong” 桑中), the preface does not say that “even to the extent that when the clans were in position, they stole each other’s wives and concubines, such that one expected [qi] in the far off distance [youyuan] that the government would be dispersed and the people would flee, and it would not be possible to stop it” 至于世族在位, 相竊妻妾, 期於幽遠, 政散民流, 而不可止, but that the ministers of state were busy arranging love-affairs (qi) in secluded places (youyuan) and the people fled from such dissipated governance.

• • Poem 59 (“Zhu gan” 竹竿) is “about a woman of Wey wishing to return home” 衛女思歸也, but the translation of the preface here continues: “She had gone to a foreign state but had not been responded to, so she thought of [si] being able to use the rites” 適異國而不見荅, 思而能以禮者也. The meaning is rather that she had been married into another state but was not favored by her husband; thus, she longed (si) to return home (gui, as stated in the preface’s opening sentence), but was able to adhere to ritual propriety and remain in her land of marriage. (Such is the sense of the preface, as ludicrous an interpretation of the poem as it is.)

• • At Poem 76 (“Qiang Zhongzi” 將仲子), the meaning is not that “having little patience [buren] led to great chaos” 小不忍, 以致大亂焉, but that the lord “could not bear” (buren) to correct his brother’s behavior when it was only a minor problem, and his lenience resulted in a threat to the very existence of the state. This is not the only instance in these translations of words being read anachronistically: here ren is wrongly taken as rennai 忍耐, “to be patient.” The error is compounded when the introduction to the volume uses this passage as an illustration of how the prefaces interpret the poems (p. xxxiii); there, the poem’s title is fancifully construed as “‘Please,’ (said) Junior,” and it is incorrectly implied that the Mao commentary reads the poem as dialogue.

• • At Poem 79 (“Qing ren” 清人), “arraying his forces along the Aoxiang River” translates 陳其師旅, 翱翔河上, which means “He arrayed his forces, but then tarried along (aoxiang) the [Yellow] River.” (There is no “Aoxiang River.”)

• • At Poem 146 (“Gao qiu” 羔裘), the preface does not say the poem is about “the great officer taking to the road [dao] to leave his lord” 大夫以道去其君, but rather “the great officer leaving his lord in accordance with the Way (dao).”

Already one can find writers starting to talk about the preface interpretations using this translation, without realizing that it misrepresents them.Footnote ² Readers who wish to consult the prefaces may turn to the sturdy set in James Legge’s (1815–1897) “prolegomena” (pp. 36–81), mentioned here only ironically (p. xlv, “forbidding to most readers”).

Translation of the Shijing is a daunting task, and we should be grateful to any scholar willing to undertake it. However, the same kinds of errors found in the prefaces occur throughout the translations of the poems themselves. Examples includeFootnote ³:

• • In Poem 29 (“Ri yue” 日月), we read “How can one feel at all secure? / Would that they hadn’t looked back at me!” 胡能有定, 寧不我顧. Would the speaker rather no one looked back at her? The value of the final word, gu, is not “look back,” which is indeed a meaning the word has in the dictionary, but “take care of” or “pay attention to,” as in the lucid translation of Arthur Waley (1889–1966): “How can such a one be true? / Better if he had never noticed me.” The same problem appears in Poem 71 (“Gelei” 葛藟) (“Still no one will look at me”) and Poem 113 (“Shi shu” 碩鼠) (see below). The mistranslation of this poem’s preface invokes “the perplexities of this poem,” but those are mainly self-induced. (The ostensible phrase in the preface is kunqiong zhi shi 困窮之詩, but this has been misparsed out of a longer sentence that describes “a poem in which” [zhi shi] the speaker bemoans the hardships that have brought her to “misfortune” [kunqiong].)

• • Poem 35 (“Gu feng” 谷風) features the oddity “If my body’s not worth viewing, / At least have pity on our kids” for 我躬不閱, 遑恤我後. The meaning of yue 閱 is either “accommodated” (rong 容; thus Legge: “My person is rejected”) or “happy” (i.e., 悅). All of this is detailed in the glosses of Bernhard Karlgren (1889–1978). Has the translator gotten the meaning “view” from a dictionary definition? Or might the bizarre “my body’s not worth viewing” be due to a misapprehension of Waley, who has “Though for my person you have no regard, / At least pity my brood,” using “regard” in the abstract sense of “respect”? Yet this phrase is translated correctly (“Even without regard for me”) when it appears in the final couplet of Poem 197 (“Xiao pan” 小弁).

• • Poem 49 (“Chun zhi benben” 鶉之奔奔) says “There is no one good enough, / That I can take as my brother” 人之無良, 我以為兄. Surely these lines cannot grammatically mean that. Waley: “Evil are the men / Whom I must call ‘brother.’” Karlgren: “A man who has no goodness I have to regard as my brother.”

• • The final stanza of Poem 54 (“Zai chi” 載馳) here reads: “I am traveling through its wilds, / So very lush is its wheat. / Reaching out to the great country, / Who props it up, who stands so tall? / The great officers and the lord. / It’s not I to blame. / The hundreds of things you’re thinking, / Are not as good as where I’m going” 我行其野, 芃芃其麥。控于大邦, 誰因誰極。大夫君子, 無我有尤。百爾所思, 不如我所之. From line 4, the translator invents the meaning “stands so tall,” then breaks the couplet structure, then ends in obscurity. Waley: “I walk in the wilderness; / Thick grows the caltrop. / Empty-handed in a great land, / To whom could I go, on whom rely? / Oh you great officers and gentlemen, / It is not I who am at fault; / All your many plans / Are not equal to what I propose.” Waley emends mai 麥 to lai 萊 for “caltrop,” takes a little liberty in turning kong 控 from “appeal (in vain)” into “empty-handed,” and reads zhi 志 (intent, purpose) for the final zhi 之 (to go)—a choice also made by some other interpreters, apparently including the Mao commentary, though deemed unnecessary by Karlgren, who directly construes “the way I am going” to mean “my purpose.” Leaving it as “where I’m going” is not a sensible option.

• • In Poem 134 (“Wei yang” 渭陽) the term luju 路車 (Waley: “a big chariot”; Karlgren: “a great carriage”) is given as “a road cart.” We may accept that lu here means “great,” or we may take luju (i.e., 輅車) to be a certain kind of (great) chariot, but here, as elsewhere, the translator seems to be looking words up in a dictionary, heedless of the well-accepted fact that the character forms written down in the Shijing often stand for words that would be “correctly,” or later, written with other characters.

• • Poem 153 (“Xia quan” 下泉), “The four countries have their kings” 四國有王. The ideological point of the Zhou dynasty was that they had only one king at a time. Waley, reading wang 往 for wang 王: “All the lands must march.” Without Waley’s emendation, we have “All the lands are busy with [the affairs of] the king.”

• • Poem 156 (“Dong shan” 東山) has a soldier recalling “Heavy were those lonely nights, / Even underneath the cart” 敦彼獨宿, 亦在車下. Compare Waley: “Staunch I bore the lonely nights, / On the ground, under my cart.” There may be uncertainty about the meaning of dun (Waley’s “staunch”), but no one doubts that it describes the people, not the night, and to say “even” under the chariots, as if it were worse elsewhere, is exactly the opposite of the intended meaning. (Throughout this book we find a clumsy handling of the emphatic yi 亦, which appears ninety-some times in the Shijing and does not simply convert to “even” or “also.”) The errant focalization here perhaps has to do with a misunderstanding of the preface, which frames the poem as a response to the “commendation for your service” (lào) of the Duke of Zhou for soldiers returning from his campaign 勞歸士,大夫美之; here the translator understands the relevant passage with the ordinary sense of lao, in a way that is grammatically impossible: “the weary (láo) returning sires and great officers admired him.”

• • Poem 185 (“Qifu” 祈父) translates “Minister of War, / I am the claws and fangs of the king. / Why do you turn away from me, / Leaving no place to stop and rest?” 祈父,予王之爪牙。胡轉予于恤, 靡所止居. The third line means “Why should you roll us on from misery to misery” (Waley), which is totally different; the sense of the word zhuan here has been misunderstood.

• • At Poem 262 (“Jiang Han” 江漢), in a poetic representation of an investiture ceremony, the present translation has the Zhou king saying to a descendant of Duke Shao: “I honor you with a jade ladle, / One bucket of black millet beer. / I announce to the cultured men / I award mountains, lands and fields. / Zhou’s receiving of the mandate / Stemmed from the Shao ancestor’s command” 釐爾圭瓚,秬鬯一卣, 告于文人, 錫山土田, 于周受命, 自召祖命. But the Zhou mandate did not “stem from” Duke Shao. Thus Waley: “Announce it to the Mighty Ones [i.e., the ancestors] / That I give you hills, lands and fields; / That the charge which you receive from the house of Chou / Is as that which your ancestors received.” Karlgren and Stephen Owen agree; Legge has the king doing the announcing, but the direction of the mandate certainly works only one way. This interesting poem is subjected to a particularly woeful treatment here; readers should look at Waley or Owen.

The most eye-scarring error comes in Poem 114 (“Xishuai” 蟋蟀), which here opens: “A cricket comes into the hall, / The year-star is just about dark. / Now it is that we’re unhappy, / The sun and moon will be removed” 蟋蟀在堂, 歲聿其莫。今我不樂, 日月其除. Whatever in the world that might mean, this is one of the most famous poems in the Chinese tradition, and that is not what it is saying. Forget Owen in 1996: “Cricket in the hall, / the year draws to its end. / If we don’t take our joy now, / the days and months will pass us by.” Forget Pound in 1954: “Cricket in hall, the year runs to its close, / Rejoice and now, ere sun and moon subtract.” Forget Karlgren in 1944: “The cricket is in the hall, the year draws to a close; if we do not now enjoy ourselves, the days and months will be passing by.” Forget Waley in 1937: “The cricket is in the hall, / The year is drawing to a close. / If we do not enjoy ourselves now, / The days and months will have slipped by.” Forget Herbert Giles in 1898: “The cricket chirrups in the hall, / The year is dying fast; / Now let us hold high festival / Ere the days and months be past.”Footnote ⁴ Forget Legge in 1871: “The cricket is in the hall, / And the year is drawing to a close. / If we do not enjoy ourselves now, / The days and months will be leaving us.” Even Alexandre de La Charme (1695–1767), the first European to translate the Shijing in full, nearly three hundred years ago, did not introduce such an error into this poem: “Now the crickets have crept into the houses; and now the end of the year is approaching, so let us now indulge ourselves, lest the sun and moon seem to have completed their course in vain.”Footnote ⁵ Meanwhile, in an earlier study, our translator has already rendered this poem wrongly, but in an opposite fashion: “A cricket is in the hall, / The year-star is about to be dark. / Now we are greatly amused [i.e., taking bu 不 as pi 丕], / The sun and moon will be removed.”Footnote ⁶ A recent article by another authority features a translation similar to that one: “The cricket is in the hall, / The year-star is about to vanish. / Now we are greatly pleasured, / As days and months dissolve.”Footnote ⁷ These two scholars, whose views of the nature of the Shijing are said to be so divergent, are neglecting the protasis-apodosis structure of the poetic statement. Compare Poem 126 (“Ju lin” 車鄰): “If to-day we are not merry, / In time to come we shall be too old” 今者不樂, 逝者其耋 (Waley). In doing so, they are perhaps influenced by a poetic parallel in a recently emerged manuscript, but even people who think the Shijing poem is a corruption of that manuscript version do not take the “received text” of the Shijing to mean anything other than what it has always been taken to mean.Footnote ⁸

The foregoing are examples of objective errors. A somewhat different class is formed by readings that may or (more likely) may not be viable, depending on how an interpreter argues for them. Here, however, readers have no way of knowing how the translator has arrived at his decisions, because the book—understandably and even admirably, but to too extreme a degree—eschews footnotes and endnotes. A good example is this couplet from Poem 61 (“He guang” 河廣): “Who says that the River is wide? / It doesn’t even hold a knife [dao]” 誰謂河廣, 曾不容刀. For over two thousand years, readers of the Shijing have taken this dao to mean “a small boat” (i.e., 舠). The rare exception is Qu Wanli 屈萬里 (1907–1979), whose argument for “knife” is simply that the old reading is “somewhat pedantic” 舊以刀為小船, 未免太泥.Footnote ⁹ While it is permissible for a translator to follow a new reading, and while a translator is under no obligation to justify every interpretive decision, it should not come down to a reviewer to note that an extremely non-consensus reading has been silently adopted, even before considering whether or not the choice is a good one. Similar instances include the following:

• • In Poem 3 (“Juaner” 卷耳), the lines 嗟我懷人, 寘彼周行 are translated as “Sighing for the one I cherish, / Stuck on that road to Zhou,” a reading advanced (only?) by the modern scholar Yu Peilin 余培林 (1931–2018).Footnote ¹⁰ The standard reading, which is supported by the use of zhi 寘 in Poem 126 (“Fa tan” 伐檀), is (Waley): “Sighing for the man I love, / I laid it [my basket of cocklebur] there on the road.” (The translation of Poem 13 [“Cai fan” 采蘩] also seems to draw on Yu’s original interpretation, while taking it in a newer direction still.)

• • Poem 11 (“Lin zhi” 麟之趾), where lin 麟 is translated not as “unicorn” (or some such fantastic or ritual beast, traditionally the symbol of an age of benevolence), as is common, but as an ordinary “doe.” A realistic reading is possible, but it would be helpful to the reader of the Shijing in translation if this difference were noted. Given line 1 of stanza 3 (here, “The antlers of the doe” 麟之角), the choice of “doe” over the more likely “buck” should also be explained.

• • In Poem 32 (“Kai feng” 凱風), is there a source for the opening epithet in “Frightfully bright the yellow bird, / But so beautiful is its song” 睍睆黃鳥, 載好其音? This reading barely seems plausible: the first two characters have been universally understood as either the appearance or the sound of the bird, and the inflection is positive, not contrastive. (Mao commentary: “a good appearance” 好貌也; Waley: “Pretty is that yellow oriole / And pleasant its tune.”)

• • In Poem 43 (“Xin tai” 新臺), the opening lines of the first two stanzas, respectively, read “The New Terrace has been besmirched” and “The New Terrace has been splattered” 新臺有泚, 河水瀰瀰 … 新臺有洒, 河水浼浼. This interpretation of the descriptive elements is nowhere, as far as I can determine, attested: ci does not appear to mean “besmirched”—the Han dynasty dictionary Shuowen jiezi defines it as “clear” qing 清—nor does sa—Shuowen “washed” di 滌, i.e., xi 洗—mean “splattered.”

• • In Poem 62 (“Bo xi” 伯兮), “Wishing and hoping for the Elder; / A sweet heart but a head ache” 願言思伯, 甘心首疾. Indeed, some readers have taken the word gan directly as “sweet,” with efforts to have it make convoluted sense. But there are good explanations of the original gloss (Mao: yan 厭, “surfeited”), especially from Wen Yiduo 聞一多 (1899–1946).Footnote ¹¹ Waley: “All this longing for Po / Brings weariness to the heart, aching to the head.” Karlgren: “My heart is (satiated =) weary, my head aches.” Has the translator considered these understandings of the word that gan represents here, or simply taken the character at face value? Also in this poem, the final stanza will not be intelligible to any reader without Chinese, because the “day-lily” is not explained as the famous “grass of forgetting”—even though that is literally what the text calls it (xuancao 諼草).

• • In Poem 77 (“Shu yu tian” 叔于田), and again at Poem 103 (“Lu ling” 盧令), the quality ren 仁, often translated as “benevolence,” “humaneness,” and so on, is rendered “manly.” Pound has the similar “he-man” in the first instance. It would be interesting to know why the translator has made this choice, if not solely to save syllables. Waley, who is generally very cautious with “Confucian” terms in early texts, translates “good,” while Karlgren has “kind.”

• • Poem 156 (“Dong shan” 東山) opens “We marched off to the eastern mountains, / Row upon row not returning” 我徂東山, 慆慆不歸. Is there some source for “row upon row,” when taotao seems universally understood as “for a long time”? I cannot find one. Waley: “I went to the eastern hills; / Long was it till I came back.”

• • The opening lines of Poem 179 (“Ju gong” 車攻) stanza 3 do rhyme nicely in this translation: “This prince going off through the sprouts, / The picked runners shouting shouts” 之子于苗, 選徒囂囂—but on what grounds is the early gloss of “sprouts” as “a (summer) hunt” (i.e., akin to 田/畋/佃 etc.) discarded? Waley: “My lord follows the chase / With picked footmen so noisy.”

• • Poem 266 (“Qing miao” 清廟): “Oh stately is the Pure Temple, / Harmonious the lustrous images” 於穆清廟, 肅雝顯相. What are these “images”? Xiang is normally taken to refer to people “assisting” in the ceremony. It is not the same as xiang 象, which does mean “image.” Waley: “Solemn the hallowed temple, / Awed and silent the helpers.”Footnote ¹²

Some of these choices seem possible, others not. None are noted or justified in a way that will help the reader navigate the Shijing, and in many cases the translator does not appear to have consulted the relevant Shijing scholarship.

Yet the biggest problem with this translation is that it is strewn with nonsense. Sometimes the failure to make good sense is due to errors (though errors sometimes make sense), but the translation strategy announced in the book’s introduction also appears to be a factor. The translations, we are told, cleave to a “standard English iambic tetrameter” (p. xlii). But as with rhyme, a designated meter will tempt the translator to pad or cut the line, as seems to occur quite often here. (The iambs are barely perceptible, interaction with the natural rhythms of the English language being so scant.) A second fateful choice is to avoid specification in the verb forms and in gendered pronouns. Framed as a preference to “leave the choice to the reader” (p. xlvii), in practice this often merely leaves the reader with verses that do not clearly convey the poems’ narratives. A third feature, albeit one of lesser impact on the poems, is the decision to translate out the honorary names of the kings and dukes. This is all right when it comes to Kings Wen and Wu—though the semantic range of those epithets extends beyond “Cultured” and “Martial.” (For the latter, see Poem 243 [“Xia wu” 下武], here translated under the improbable title “Descending Martially.”) But in other instances, the translator chooses ordinary dictionary definitions over glosses that are specific to posthumous titles. For example, Lord Qing 頃公 is called “the Slanted Lord” (e.g., Poem 26, “Bo zhou” 柏舟), even though the Yi Zhoushu 逸周書 chapter on posthumous names, a Warring States text that one would think should be the first point of reference for translating such titles, glosses it positively (e.g., “alert and respectful” 敏以敬順). “Slanted” cannot be correct. Lord Xiang 襄公 is the “Helpful Lord” here (e.g., Poem 127, “Si tie” 駟驖), but the Yi Zhoushu connects this title specifically with military achievement. Lord Xian 獻公 is the “Presented Lord” (e.g., Poem 125, “Cai ling” 采苓), but as a posthumous name it is associated with sagacity. King Li 厲王 becomes the “Sharp King” (e.g., Poem 253, “Min lao” 民勞), but that title is glossed as “slaughtering innocent people” (致)[殺]戮無辜—that is, something like “Depraved.” Even when an ordinary definition comes close, the translator finds the wrong connotations, as with the “Mournful Lord” 哀公 (e.g., Poem 97, “Xuan” 還), which refers to a leader who was (supposedly) “mourned” for having died before his time.Footnote ¹³ These titles are very difficult to translate with confidence, though footnotes could have explained some of them.

No matter their cause, examples of nonsense include:

• • Poem 10 (“Ru fen” 汝墳): “Following that bank of the Ru, / Chopping up its twigs and stems.” 遵彼汝墳, 伐其條枚. You “chop” firewood; you “chop up” vegetables. Compare the translator’s own version in an earlier study: “Walking along the bank of the Ru, / Cutting the slender stems.”Footnote ¹⁴ Continuing, “Having not yet seen Milord’s son, / I yearned like the hunger at dawn.” 未見君子, 惄如調飢. Hunger does not yearn. Thus Waley: “I have not yet seen my lord. / I feel a pang as of morning hunger.” Then: “Now that I have seen Milord’s son, / He did not leave me after all” 既見君子, 不我遐棄. That is tautology, to Waley’s narrative: “At last I have seen my lord; / He has not left me forever.” Finally, “The royal chamber’s as if ablaze” 王室如燬. Has the old king strung the Christmas lights up already? Rather, either “royal chamber” is metonymy for “the kingdom,” as Chinese readers generally take it, or the ru here has a quasi-reduplicative function, as Waley understood it: “The royal house is ablaze.” This short poem is enigmatic, but it is not abstruse. Waley also footnotes a key image, connecting the red-tailed fish of the third stanza with Zuozhuan Ai 17.

• • Poem 17 (“Hang lu” 行露) here begins “Damp wetness of dew on the road; / Who would not from morning to night / Say that the road is full of dew!” 厭浥行露, 豈不夙夜, 謂行多露. It would be a weird person, saying that all day long. There is no consensus on the narrative of this poem, but the opening can be clarified with some attention to Shijing philology: while it is true that some readers take wei 謂 (“to say”) at face value, Ma Ruichen 馬瑞辰 (1782–1853) makes a strong argument, citing multiple parallel constructions (e.g., Poem 73, “Da ju” 大車), that the intended word in line three is actually wei 畏 (“to fear”).Footnote ¹⁵ Thus Owen: “The dews are soaking the way; / of course I would go in the dark before dawn, / but I dread so much the dew on the way.”

• • Poem 26 (“Bo zhou” 柏舟): “It’s not as if I have no ale, / To divert me, to play with me” 微我無酒, 以敖以遊. That makes a fanciful figure—but ale does not play. Karlgren: “It is not that I have no wine, to amuse and divert myself.” Below, “My heart is not a mat; / It can’t just be rolled around” 我心匪席, 不可卷也. A mat is rolled “up,” not “around”; nor is “roll around” the meaning of the word in the text, juan. Waley: “My heart is not a mat; / It cannot be folded away.”

• • Poem 54 (“Zai chi” 載馳): “A girl is good at holding it in, / But each still has a trip to make” 女子善懷, 亦各有行. Is this supposed to be funny? For Waley, the good woman is leaving her unhappy marriage (“A woman of good intent / Has always the right to go”). For Karlgren, she is leaving, but recalling the time when, in love, she came to be married: “young girls are prone to have love feelings, and each of them makes her journey [to be married].” Whichever we choose, or some other alternative, these readings make sense, where this translation simply strings together the signifiers of the first line.

• • Poem 82 (“Nü yue ji ming” 女曰雞鳴). “Whatever you hit at fowling, / I will make them ready for you. / Once they’re ready, I’ll drink some ale, / And grow old together with you” 弋言加之, 與子宜之。宜言飲酒, 與子偕老. Does she drink alone, and grow old so immediately? There is no need for a reader to puzzle through such things. Thus Waley: “And when I have dressed them we will drink wine / And I will be yours till we are old.”

• • Poem 93 (“Chu qi dong men” 出其東門). “Going outside the Eastern Gate.” You “go out” a gate; Waley writes “Outside the Eastern Gate,” which is fine. This would seem to be the result of the translator’s metrical quest. And where does the idea come from, in the rare footnote, that the “Eastern Gate led to the red-light district in ancient Chinese cities”?

• • Poem 113 (“Shi shu” 碩鼠): “For three full years I slept with you, / You never deigned to look at me” 三歲貫女, 莫我肯顧. As noted above, the last word, gu, does not mean “look at” (Waley: “You take no notice of us”), and the reading of guan as “slept with” is idiosyncratic; it is dealt with in Karlgren’s glosses and means “served” (Waley: “Three years we slaved for you”; Owen “… I’ve fed you”; cf. huan 宦, an attested variant). The metaphorical object in this poem is a “big rat,” so perhaps it does make some sense in an American idiom where a former lover could be addressed as “You rat!”

• • Poem 130 (“Zhongnan” 終南). “Milord gets there and then he stops” 君子至止. One should assume. No one takes the concluding zhi as a verb: this is false literalism, perhaps as padding for the translation’s prescribed meter. Waley: “My lord has come.” At Poem 182 (“Ting liao” 庭燎) the same phrase is handled correctly (“Milord arrives”); at Poem 213 (“Zhan bi Luo yi” 瞻彼洛矣) the problem reappears in a new form (“Our lord has come to it”).

• • Poem 159 (“Jiuyu” 九罭). “The lord goes back without a place / To extend the stay with you” 公歸無所, 於女信處. What could this possibly mean? Words are merely being lined up into sentences. While the specific construal will depend on the narrative frame chosen by a given interpreter, it comprises two phrases, as in (Waley) “The prince has gone off and we cannot find him. / He must be staying with you,” or (Legge) “The duke is returning—is it not to his proper place? / He was stopping with you [and me] but for a couple of nights.”

• • Poem 162 (“Si mu” 四牡). “There’s no time to get up or stay” 不遑啟處. No time to get up? For qi Waley has “tarry,” while Legge and Karlgren stick to the gloss, “kneel.” Perhaps the translator is reading it as qi 起.

• • Poem 163 (“Huanghuang zhe hua” 皇皇者華). “Swiftly swiftly go the marchers, / Each one afraid not to get there” 駪駪征夫, 每懷靡及. What are they afraid of? The travelers are (Karlgren) “afraid of lagging behind.” The translator gets this sense right at Poem 260.

• • Poem 168 (“Chu ju” 出車). “How could we not wish to return, / We fear the writing on the slips” 豈不懷歸, 畏此簡書. Few readers will get what that means. Waley (“We do indeed long to return; / But we fear the writing on the tablets”) adds a footnote to explain: “The king’s command.”Footnote ¹⁶

• • Poem 186 (“Bai ju” 白駒) gives the closing couplet as “Don’t make your tone as bronze or jade / And yet having a distant heart” 毋金玉爾音, 而有遐心. It scans as iambic tetrameter, but will a reader who does not already know this poem understand what this means? I doubt it, and taking yin as “tone” and er in a contrastive sense is not a common interpretation of the couplet. Compare Waley: “Do not let the news of you be rare as gold or jade, / Keeping your thoughts far away.”

• • Poem 201 (“Gu feng” 谷風) reads “When we’re nervous, when we’re afraid, / There we are, you and I. / When we’re content, when we’re happy, / You turn around and discard me” 將恐將懼, 維予與女。將安將樂, 女轉棄予. A most curious situation, this makes for an intriguing poem in English, but it is not good translation. The meaning is (Waley): “In days of peril, in days of dread / It was always ‘You and I.’ / Now in time of peace, of happiness, / You have cast me aside.” Even the ancient Chinese were not without verb tenses.

• • In Poem 217 (“Kui bian” 頍弁), the stanza openings sound like some demented riddle: “There are pointed leather bonnets, / Really what is their point? / Even though your wine is fine, / Even though your food is good, / Might they be for other people? / For brothers, those that aren’t others” 有頍者弁, 實維伊何。爾酒既旨, 爾殽既嘉。豈伊異人, 兄弟匪他. What it means is (Waley): “A cap so tall, / What is it for? / Your wine is good, / Your viands, blessed. / Why give them to other men? / Let it be to brothers and no one else.” Karlgren and Legge vary slightly from this, and we could discuss who is right, but even Pound’s reinvention delivers the basic meaning: “Leather caps, sound wine, good food, / where all be kin, / Here is no outer man, / all be of our father’s clan.” Then the poem concludes, in this translation, “Enjoy the wine of this evening, / It is for Milord’s son’s (junzi) banquet” 樂酒今夕, 君子維宴, a dead statement of fact for what is actually an exhortation: “Enjoy wine to-night; / Our lord holds feast!” (Waley). The version here may not be nonsense, but it does not convey what the Shijing is saying. As for the rendering of the term junzi (often “gentleman,” “lord,” etc.), the introduction (p. xliv) specifies that it will be translated “Milord” when it has the sense of a sovereign and “Milord’s son” when it denotes an object of romantic affection. The former is intelligible enough, but “Milord’s son” will be impenetrable (and unpronounceable) to most readers, and this poem is a good instance of the impossibility of imposing such a rigid distinction.

• • Poem 244 (“Wen wang you sheng” 文王有聲). The sixth stanza here reads: “Hao City has the Jade-Disc Pond / Coming from west, coming from east, / Coming from south, coming from north, / There is no thought not to obey: / The august king, splendid indeed” 鎬京辟廱, 自西自東, 自南自北, 無思不服, 皇王烝哉. Count it out: it scans. But it is incomprehensible. Compare Waley, emphasis added: “To the capital at Hao, to the Moated Mound, / From west, from east, / From south, from north— / There were none that did not surrender. / Oh, glorious the great king!”

• • Poem 255 (“Dang” 蕩): “Heaven gave birth to all the people, / Its commands are not trustworthy. / No one doesn’t have a beginning, / Rare are they who can have an end” 天生烝民, 其命匪諶。靡不有初, 鮮克有終. We all have an end, and must the reader furnish the connection between lines 1 and 2? This is translation as travesty. Waley’s version (emphasis added) shows how the lines connect as thought: “Heaven gives birth to the multitudes of the people, / But its charge cannot be counted upon. / To begin well is common; / To end well is rare indeed.”

• • Poem 260 (“Zheng min” 烝民). “The king commands Junior Shanfu / To wall off that eastern country” 王命仲山甫, 城彼東方. Building a wall and walling something off are different. Waley: “The king charged Chung Shan Fu / To fortify that eastern land.” Unless the translator actually understands the poem this way, this would seem due to the iambic tetrameter: “To wáll off thát eastérn countrý.”

There are poems in this book that come off reasonably well. Poem 95 (“Zhen Wei” 溱洧), for instance, stands out as a good translation in an American colloquial style. But the reader’s rule of thumb can only be that whenever something sounds curious or vague or confusing or just “interesting,” it is likely to be wrong or ill-considered. Nor will a reader find the deficiencies recompensed by many positive features. I cannot think of a single instance where this translation advanced my understanding of a passage that puzzles me, or led me to understand a familiar one differently. In particular, despite the translator’s expertise in Zhou history, surprisingly little effort is made to integrate the Shijing poems into their historical context. An informative exception is Poem 243 (“Xia wu” 下武), where the translator takes the word ying 應 (Mao: “meeting with” 當) as a proper noun, Ying, invoking the fief of a member of the royal family.Footnote ¹⁷ Since the received chronological sequence places this poem squarely in the reign of King Wu, while Ying was founded for one of his sons, this reading implies that some early editors of the Shijing took a specific occasional poem to be a more general hymn, or adapted it to that purpose. Overall, however, a reader will learn more about the Zhou dynasty from Waley’s translation. Compare, for example, Poems 227 (“Shu miao” 黍苗) and 262 (“Jiang Han” 江漢) here with numbers 135 and 136 in Waley’s sequence. Waley makes greater use of bronze inscriptions, too. As to the fifteen poems Waley omitted from his book, it is not exactly the case that he found them “uninteresting,” as the translator says here (p. xvi). Waley left them out, as he explained in a brief article, because they “are all political, and are of little interest unless we can approximately fix their date.”Footnote ¹⁸ Establishing the political circumstances of those poems is a task the present volume does little to advance.Footnote ¹⁹

The translation comes with an introduction, an appendix, and some textual notes. The most valuable part of the thirty-seven-page introduction is its discussion of manuscript sources discovered over the past half-century. With more such materials certain to emerge, the author rightly observes (p. xxx) that our understanding of the Shijing could be thoroughly renewed in coming years. Otherwise, readers will find a serviceable overview of some basic Shijing knowledge along with the feature that marks the rest of the book: translations that are either unjustified or incorrect. Analects 3/8 has universally been understood to quote a “lost” line of poetry, but here that line is presented as Confucius’s comment on Shijing Poem 57 (“Shi ren” 碩人, p. xix). This is the proposal of one modern scholar, and seemingly no one else, but no explanation or footnote signals to the reader that a rare choice has been made.Footnote ²⁰ The most famous pronouncement in the Great Preface (詩者, 志之所之也, literally something like “The poem is where the heart’s intentions go [when they are put into words]”) gains no clarity through its rendering here as “Poetry is how intentions move” (p. xx). Is there a source for this reading, which apparently takes suo 所 as suoyi 所以? I think it is just wrong. Moving from translation to interpretation, the account of the poetic technique of xing 興 (“arousal”) proposes that the famous “osprey” in Poem 1 (here presented in four stanzas, not the standard five or three) actually stands for the fish that ospreys hunt, those fish in turn symbolizing the theme of marital relations (p. xxxix). This is an inventive interpretation worthy of the hermeneutic tradition, but novice readers are likely to suppose that this really is the significance of the figure, when it probably is not, nor should they give too much credence to the notion that the sound of the osprey’s call (guanguan 關關) invokes the meaning of the characters used to represent it in writing (“Join join”). Overall, scholars looking for an introduction to the Shijing will do better to start with the very rich Oxford Bibliography entry.Footnote ²¹ For students, I am not sure what introduction to the Shijing to recommend. The account in Burton Watson’s Early Chinese Literature (1962) is outdated, but it is considered, cogent, and, most of all, written with the purpose of presenting the Shijing to a reader who does not already know it. Perhaps the best introduction, and an excellent resource for classroom use, is the well-tuned selection of sixty-some poems, with comments and contextual material, in Stephen Owen’s Anthology of Chinese Literature (1996).

The appendix is an identification list (not an index, as no references to the poems are provided) of the flora and fauna that appear in the Shijing. This may help readers use the Shijing to understand the natural world of the Zhou dynasty, but they would benefit much more from an apparatus that helps them understand the Shijing itself: indexes to themes and key words in the poems. The book closes with twenty-five textual notes, mainly showing how the translator used newly-excavated manuscripts. Selecting variants out of manuscripts is a minefield and readers may be interested to see how the translator has navigated it, but the view here is not very illuminating. In particular:

• • The word fu 服 in Poem 1 (寤寐思服; Karlgren: “waking and sleeping he thought of her”) is likely part of a two-character expression meaning “to pine,” but possibly something else. The translator emends it, stating: “I here follow the Anhui University manuscript in reading pei 配 ‘to pair,’ as the earliest attested wording.” As the translator’s own earlier study allows, however, that manuscript does not in fact read 配, but 伓, a graph generally unknown in transmitted texts. “To pair” is his own provocative proposal for the word that graph might stand for.Footnote ²²

• • Accepting the manuscript’s shang 觴 (a goblet, here metonymically as “to offer”) in Poem 3, the translator claims of the received reading, shang 傷 (“pain,” though the note here translates it as “wound”), that “interesting though this might be, [it] is quite anomalous.” In fact, shang-pain, glossed by Mao as a kind of “longing” si 思, is a standard Shijing topos, appearing at sixteen other places (e.g., Poem 14, “Cao zhong” 草蟲).

• • One of epigraphy’s most interesting revelations has been that the received text of the Shijing ordered many of its stanzas differently. (The sequence of the poems is also different, but little can be done with that until more complete manuscript evidence emerges.) This translation adopts manuscript stanza order for poems 22 (“Jiang you si” 江有汜) and 127 (“Si tie” 駟驖), but leaves unexplained its decision to follow the (programmatically edited) Mao-Zheng text in the other dozen or so known cases.

In sum, this translation does not give readers a fair or even intelligible picture of the Classic of Poetry, nor does it engage with scholarship in a way that will aid further study and discussion of the work. Readers are far better off with the older translations, beginning with Waley’s, which is worth consulting in an edition that retains his original thematic format. (Consider, for instance, the coherent effect on a reader of poems 100 to 110 in Waley’s sequence, plaints of married women that in the received order are scattered throughout the work.) Scholars of Chinese literature will likely continue to consult various resources and produce their own translations, as suit their specific research needs. As to the possibility of replacing Waley as a first reference, there are good reasons why his version has lasted almost ninety years now: the Shijing is hard to pin down, and Waley was a great scholar. Yet Waley is not perfect, and even where he is right, other interpretations are often admissible: it would certainly be possible for a new version to succeed, if imperfectly. Such a work would build on Waley’s translations and textual notes, giving full consideration to the choices he made and reconsidering (but not dismantling, without another in place) the framework he used to understand the poems. It would use Karlgren as a guide to traditional glosses, drawing to a reasonable extent on modern East Asian scholarship and, as it emerges, manuscript evidence. It would grapple with the fearsome certainty of the piecemeal translations of W. A. C. H. Dobson,Footnote ²³ and it would make some progress on the work’s textual difficulties, highlighting those places where still no good solution has been proposed and acknowledging its own uncertainties. It would pay an occasional visit to the shrine of Legge, and once in a while stop by Pound’s asylum. Most of all, it would, as one recent discussion of the art of translation reminds us, “translate utterances, not words.”Footnote ²⁴ The voice of the Shijing is bound in a tight meter and frozen in ancient diction, but it is not at all so muddled as the one readers will find here.

The volume, which includes the Chinese text, is handsomely designed, printed, and bound, and adorned with endorsements that belie the actual quality of the translations.