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David Young, trans. Five T'ang Poets. 1990. 181 pp.


These are nice translations, in a contemporary American free verse idiom. i still prefer Witter Bynner--oddly the one translator to whom Young never refers in his introductions. The book is a little insubstantial. You don't get that many poems considering the length of the collection. And Young translates only a certain kind of poem.

I also disagree profoundly with his contention that the translator should camouflage the syntactic parallelism in order to make the English-speaking reader happy. After all, we have forms of poetry in English that use parallelism.