Welcome
Welcome to Jean and Vickie’s Chinese Poetry Substack! Our goal is to introduce Chinese poetry, put it into some historical context, and to discuss some of the many ways a poem may be viewed and translated. We also provide a word for word translation of each poem and encourage our readers to comment, disagree, and try their own hand at giving these complex poems new life in English.
Why Read This Substack
There are many reasons to study ancient Chinese poetry: its beauty, its insight into the human condition, its intellectual challenge. We provide literal word for word translations so that you can try your own poetic interpretations and compare them with ours and others that we link to. Finally, these poems give us a glimpse into the world’s oldest and largest civilization. Our first post consists of three poems about China’s first emperor. When a Chinese executive recently quoted one of these ancient poems, stock in his company dropped by $26 billion. These poems are still very meaningful to the Chinese people.
Who We Are
Jean Yuan is a Chinese American woman whose great great grandfather was the last emperor of the Chinese Empire and the first President of the Republic of China, though as emperor he only ruled for 83 days. Jean has been interested in classic Chinese poetry since her childhood. She still remembers the time her grandparents taught her how to recite the Tang dynasty poem Lou Shi Ming (On My Humble Home) when she was four. She competed in poetry recitals in mainland China when she was a school-aged child, and received first place awards several times. She is now an economist based in DC. During her leisure time though, on average, holding all else constant, she prefers doing poetry translations to running economic models.
Vickie Fang is an American born woman who has no idea who her great great grandfather was. She is also a reformed lawyer who now writes full time and studies classical Chinese poetry, particularly that of the T’ang dynasty. She published a short story in The Bellevue Literary Review about a man living during the T'ang era who had learned to survive the aftermath of the catastrophic An Lushan rebellion by stealing treasure from the ruined aristocracy. Vickie relished the opportunity to contrast the great refinement and artistic accomplishment of that time with the grim realities of an 8th century nation devastated by war and disease because it is this same tremendous range of emotion and subject that Vickie loves most about classical Chinese poetry. Vickie has also published fiction in Pleiades, The Baltimore Literary Review, Scribble, and an anthology titled Bad News and Bullshit. She recently received the Kinder/Crump award for short fiction and has received first place awards for short fiction and novel-in-progress from the Maryland Writers’ Association, as well as Maryland’s largest grant for excellence in writing.
