How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology was generously funded by the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and the Research Board of the University of Illinois.
In addition to acknowledging the financial support of these institutions, I wish to express my gratitude to my colleagues, my students, and the staff at the University of Illinois. In particular, I wish to thank Professor George T. Yu, former director of the center, for his valuable guidance and support. My special thanks also go to my friends Leon Chai and Cara Ryan for their illuminating comments on some parts of the manuscript, to Jerome Packard and Chilin Shih for their advice on issues of linguistics and sound recording, to Li Tonglu, Li Liyu, and Cui Jie for producing the sound recording, and again to Cui Jie for her meticulous editorial assistance. I would like to thank Professor William H. Baxter of the University of Michigan and Professor David Branner of the University of Maryland for providing advice and assistance with the phonetic transcriptions of entering-tone characters. The project has also benefited from the valuable participation and support of Professor Dore J. Levy of Brown University, Professor John Timothy Wixted of Arizona State University, and other outside scholars at its different stages.
The contributors to this volume wish to thank three anonymous readers for their insightful comments and suggestions. We are deeply indebted to Jennifer Crewe, associate director and editorial director of Columbia University Press, for her enthusiastic support and professional guidance. We are also very grateful to Irene Pavitt for overseeing the production process and to Mike Ashby for his meticulous copyediting.
Finally, I owe the deepest debt of gratitude to my wife, Jing Liao, for encouraging me to continue the project despite our extreme difficulties in the months before the conference, and to my daughter, Serena, for countless evenings and weekends devoted to the project instead of her.
Chapter 2 includes excerpts from “On Encountering Trouble,” in The Songs of the South: An Anthology of Ancient Chinese Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets, ed. and trans. David Hawkes (New York: Penguin, 1985). Chapters 5, 12, and 13 contain material from Zong-qi Cai, The Matrix of Lyric Transformation: Poetic Modes and Self-Presentation in Early Chinese Pentasyllabic Poetry (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1996); Maija Samei, Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice: The Abandoned Woman in Early Chinese Song Lyrics (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2004); and Xinda Lian, The Wild and Arrogant: Expression of Self in Xin Qiji’s Song Lyrics (New York: Lang, 1999), respectively. We are grateful to the editors and publishers for their permission to reprint from those works.