Five Seasons of a Golden Year: A Chinese Pastoral
Five Seasons of a Golden Year: A Chinese Pastoral
Translated by Gerald Bullett
Calligraphy by T. C. Lai
1980
156 pages
ISBN 962-201-246-9
The "Five Seasons" of the title are Early Spring, Late Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter—as represented by Fan Ch'eng-ta (1126–1193) in a sequence of sixty poems depicting the rural year in all its toil and tranquility. Rendered into English by Gerald Bullett, the work was first published in England more than thirty years ago by the Cambridge University Press, in a slender volume that has been long out of print.
In this new edition we present Mr. Bullett's sensitive interpretation in a fresh format along with the original Chinese text in T. C. Lai's handsome calligraphy, and amply illustrated with Chinese landscape paintings. Included for the first time is an introductory essay in which the translator, a poet in his own right, explains step by step his method of recreating in English verse a Sung dynasty poet's picture of rustic life in age-old China.
This book won the AAUP Design Award in 1982.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Preface — ix
An Experiment in Translation — xiii
Early Spring — 1
Late Spring — 29
Summer — 57
Autumn — 85
Winter — 113
Notes by Ts’ui Chi — 141
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TRANSLATOR(s)
Gerald William Bullett (1894–1958), English poet and novelist, was editor of The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems (1939) and Silver Poets of the Sixteenth Century (1947), both published in the Everyman's Library.