The Book of Songs - Paperback

by The Arthur Waley Estate (Author), Arthur Waley (Author)

First published in 1937 this volume is a collection of ancient Chinese songs, dating from 800 to 600 B.C. Until it was published in 1937 it had not been translated into English since the middle of the nineteenth century.

Back Jacket

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".