Shijing (詩經), or the Book of Odes, is China's earliest collection of poems. It offers invaluable material for the study of Chinese history, literature and linguistics. In terms of historical linguistics, the Odes are an important key to revealing the pronunciation of Old Chinese. As a result, an English translation of the Odes, along with the original Chinese texts and more importantly the pronunciation from some 3,000 years ago, must have long been yearned for. Sampson's new book accomplishes this wish, with a combination of text in traditional Chinese characters, Old Chinese transcriptions, and a free translation of all 305 poems from the Odes.

The book is divided into three parts. The first is an introductory essay stating the purpose of the work, commenting on Chinese history, and presenting the Old Chinese system used in the book. The main body of the book is the poems. For each volume of the Odes, the author writes a brief introduction, explaining the title and providing some background information on history and culture. For each stanza, the author aligns a free translation on the top, and underneath an Old Chinese transcription on the left, and Chinese texts on the right. At the end of each poem, the author adds a short commentary about further cultural background and his own thoughts. The book is accompanied by a glossary.

The strengths of this book are manifold. Not only does it introduce some of the most important classical texts of ancient China to Western readers in a readable and pronounceable way, it also popularizes historical linguistic results by integrating them into a non-academic publication. The translation is generally literal rather than metaphorical, and it seems good practice not to rely on alternative interpretations by Chinese scholars throughout history. The author allows readers to interpret the poems themselves.

There are several shortcomings that are sometimes alarming, ranging from the wordings, which many may consider inappropriate, via subjective explanations and emendations to the text, to problematic phonetic transcriptions of Chinese characters.

The author cites Maspéro's claim from 1927 that Zhou society was “demi-sauvage”, and describes it as a mixture of “advanced culture” and “real barbarism” (p. 4). The wording of this passage is inappropriate and even misleading in that the author uses modern, or rather subjective standards to evaluate an ancient society of 3,000 years ago. Given that anthropology has long since abandoned the idea that cultures can be ranked by their degree of “civilization”, such language will leave many readers not only puzzled, but potentially even disturbed.

Some commentaries at the end of poems seem ungrounded. For example, the author identifies the plant 卷耳 juǎn-ěr as Cerastium vulgatum (p. 49), but this is not the accepted name of the species. Yang Congwei, a botanist colleague from the Yunnan University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, confirmed that the accepted name should be Cerastium fontanum subsp. vulgare. It is suspicious that the author came up with such precision based merely on several lines of an ancient text. The author also finds evidence that the mythical beast, 麟 lín, was real, mainly according to an anecdote in 春秋 Chūn-qiū (Spring and Autumn Annals) stating that Confucius identified an animal, captured by the coachman of the 叔孫 Shū-sūn family, as lín (p. 55). This piece of evidence, however, does not prove that lín was real. There exist passages in 左傳 Zuǒ-zhuàn (The commentaries of Zuǒ) with eyewitness accounts of 龍 lóng (Chinese dragon), which surely do not prove that lóng existed.

Some text emendations are baseless. The author replaces the character 右 yòu in 道阻且右 dào-zǔ-qiě-yòu “the track is difficult and leads to the right hand side” with 艽 qiú “wilderness” (p. 151). This change, coming from nowhere, seems careless and irresponsible. Admittedly, the use of 右 yòu “right hand side” here does not have a satisfactory explanation, but good practice is to find an explanation rather than surrender to the problem.

The Old Chinese transcription, which might appear convenient for non-linguists, is problematic and misleading. The author does not clarify the source of the Old Chinese system used for reconstructed character readings. Attributing it to Axel Schuessler (Minimal Old Chinese and Later Han Chinese: A Companion to Grammata Serica Recensa, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009) and ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007) is unsatisfactory, given that Schuessler's work barely covers all rhyme words which occur in the Odes, while the two dictionaries contain substantial inconsistencies. For reasons that mostly seem to reflect what the author considers convenient, the transcription system further deviates drastically from that adopted by Schuessler, using many ad hoc decisions with respect to the representation of tones and other structural features of Old Chinese phonology. Consider the different ways in which the author writes the Chinese medial *-r-. After fricatives and affricates, such as *sr-, *tsr-, *tsʰr- and *dzr-, in William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart (Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Schuessler (2007 and 2009), the medial is dropped, resulting in initials such as sh-, ch-, j-, and dj-, while in other cases it is retained. The consequences of this unfortunate decision are best shown in the reading for 瑟 *srit in Schuessler's system, which must be spelt “shit” in Sampson's system: the author tries to avoid this by turning to Baxter's system in this single case and writing the character reading as “sprit”. Another example of inconsistency is aspiration, which is shown by the fact that the author uses tz- and ts- to write *ts- and *tsʰ-, while retaining the letter h for other aspirated consonants. A further surprising decision is the spelling of what would be a glottal stop in all recent reconstruction systems. Here, the author uses, -mp, -nt, and -nk for what would be traditionally transcribed as *-mʔ, *-nʔ and *-ŋʔ and -c elsewhere. This collection of largely inconsistent and ad hoc decisions results in a transcription system full of ambiguities, with a symbol like h indicating both aspiration and retroflexion, s indicating aspiration, z occurring in both voiced and voiceless onsets, and p/t/k representing a glottal stop in addition to their values in traditional phonetic transcription systems. While this system is a nuisance for experts on Old Chinese phonology, given that it makes it extremely difficult and impractical to use the book as a reference or to look up words in the glossary, it is at best misleading for lay people who might easily take what looks like sounds in this transcription system at face value.

Since at least Bernhard Karlgren (1950) and Wáng Lì (1980), editions of the Book of Odes with commentary, translations, and reconstructions have been considered the “royal discipline” of Sinology giving scholars the possibility of illustrating their individual treatment of Old Chinese with respect to both grammar and phonetics. Its future reception by experts in the field will show if this edition of the Odes can compete with its predecessors.