The Book of Songs
Subtitle: The Ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry
Contributors: Stephen Owen (Foreword); Arthur Waley (Translator)
Edition: Subsequent edition
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: September 13, 1996
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 400
ISBN-13: 9780802134776
Subjects: Works by individual poets: from c 1900 -; Poetry; Chinese; Anthologies (multiple authors); Poetry / Asian; Chinese Poetry
First sentence: The Book of Songs opens with the youngest and most celebrated part of the collection: "The Airs of the States" (Guo feng).
Description: Joseph R. Allen's new edition of The Book of Songs restores Arthur Waley's definitive English translations to the original order and structure of the two-thousand-year-old Chinese text. One of the five Confucian classics, The Book of Songs is the oldest collection of poetry in world literature and the finest treasure of traditional songs that antiquity has left us.

Arthur Waley's translations, now supplemented by fifteen new translations by Allen, are superb; the songs speak to us across millennia with remarkable directness and power. Where the other Confucian classics treat "outward things, deeds, moral precepts, the way the world works," Stephen Owen tells us in his foreword, The Book of Songs is "the Classic of the human heart and the human mind."