Chinese-English 100 Song Poems (Bilingual Edition): A Teaching-Oriented Translation with Vocabulary Lists & Notes

What is this book?

Chinese-English 100 Song Poems was published in 2018 by Northeast Normal University Press. The compiler, Yao Yuyan, is a middle school English teacher with over 30 years of classroom experience. He spent more than two years translating 100 classic Song Dynasty poems into English poetry form. The book presents each poem side by side in Chinese and English, covering poets from Emperor Huizong and Fan Zhongyan to Su Shi, Li Qingzhao, and Xin Qiji — 288 pages in total-30-.

What can it do for you?

If you love Song poetry but want to see it in a different light — this book shows you what lines like “无可奈何花落去” look like rendered as English poetry: “A peoples lifetime fleets as gone is an instant brief.”-30

If you're learning English, this offers an alternative path: use the familiar imagery of Song poems to make sense of English expressions. The built-in vocabulary lists help you pick up new words while reading poetry, which beats memorizing a word list.

If you're learning Chinese, the bilingual layout gives you an English reference for every poem, and the original-text notes help you understand the imagery and allusions unique to Song ci.