Classical Chinese Poems Research Articles

Crossing boundaries in an age of post-translation studies

Abstract The cycle of symphonic songs Das Lied von der Erde was based on Die Chinesische Flöte, a German version of classical Chinese poems. As a result, Die Chinesische Flöte crossed the boundary between literature and music, encompassing intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translations. While comparative textual analysis reveals that these two works made changes to the original Chinese texts, intersemiotic translation illustrates that the borders between verbal texts and nonverbal works are fluid. This post-translation study traces the translation context of Das Lied, maps Die Chinesische Flöte’s transitions between literary and musical polysystems, and traces Das Lied’s afterlife in the creation of new artworks. It concludes that poetry, music, and other art forms can mutually translate, complement, and become afterlives of one another.

Exploring Thematic Diversity in Classical Chinese Poetry: A Novel Dataset and a BERT-enhanced Ensemble Learning Approach

Classical Chinese poetry, as an essential aspect of cultural heritage, exhibits rich theme diversity often overlooked in natural language processing research. To address this gap, we aim to explore the classification of thematic categories within this literary domain. We curate a dataset of 2,918 annotated poems spanning seven common themes and propose a BERT-based ensemble learning approach for effective classification. Although this method integrates existing models, it achieves an accuracy and F1 score of over 72% in the 7-class task, surpassing established baselines, and providing a baseline for future research. The experimental findings reveal the effectiveness of ensemble strategies in improving individual base model performance and highlight the potential of the MLP-based ensemble technique. The study contributes to a deeper understanding of thematic categories and textual features in classical Chinese poetry, and offers an automated classification system for classical Chinese poems.

A relational background knowledge boosting based topic model for Chinese poems

Classical Chinese poetry has been increasingly popular in recent years, and modeling its topic is quite a promising area of research. Chinese poems have the characteristic of short in length, but traditional topic models perform poorly when faced with short texts due to the text sparsity. Therefore, topic model should be improved to satisfy the scenario of classical Chinese poems. In this paper, a relational background knowledge boosting based topic model (RBKBTM) was proposed to overcome the text sparsity of Chinese poems. We incorporated background information into the model, which expanded the text content from the semantic perspective. The background knowledge was combined using word embedding and TextRank and was then fed into the core computing process. Subsequently, a new sampling formula was derived. Our proposed model was tested on three different tasks using three different datasets. The results demonstrate that the incorporated background knowledge can effectively overcomes text sparsity, improving the performance and effectiveness of the topic model.

Study on Translation of Tourism Texts from Perspective of Skopos Theory:ACase Study of Beautiful Shaanxi

Given their long histories, tourist attractions in Shaanxi draw many foreign visitors. Signifcant historical and cultural information can be discovered in tourism texts. They serve as vital tools for promoting tourism and are highly effective. Good translations can help inter-national readers comprehend Shaanxi culture. Utilizing the English translation of the text Beautiful Shaanxi, this paper conducts a Sample analysis of proper nouns, cultural-loaded words, and classical Chinese poems. It also explores the English translation techniques of tourism texts, transliteration, annotation, and more. The province translation approach and the supplemental approach can both assist in translating tourism documents more accurately.

A Strategy to Build Humanistic Cultural Content through Shinjae Choi San-du’s Classical Chinese Poems

A Strategy to Build Humanistic Cultural Content through Shinjae Choi San-du’s Classical Chinese Poems

Chinese esthetics through language in poetry: A comparative study of the Chinese wényán and modern báihuà

China was greatly transformed in its encounters with the imperial West in the 19th and 20th centuries, where its ways and traditions that were authoritative for thousands of years were challenged and pushed to evolve toward modernity. Among things that were made to change, the classical written Chinese – wényán – was replaced by the modern báihuà, prioritizing efficient information transformation over the expression of semantic and esthetic depth. However, classical Chinese esthetics continued to inspire modern Chinese literati, in their exploration and discovery of means to express their Chineseness in a modern reality. Through examining the literary form of poetry, this study investigated the differential characteristics of the classical and modern Chinese esthetics through the appreciation of classical and contemporary Chinese poems, as mediated by the written languages: wényán and modern báihuà. Presented with four comparable pairs of classical and contemporary poems, 48 participants indicated their preference and rated their poem-reading experience based on language esthetics, imaginativeness, precision, complexity of imageries, profundity of meaning, and the intensity of emotions and resonance elicited. Compared to contemporary poems, classical poems were perceived as significantly more beautiful in their language, more imaginative, more precise, more complex in their imagery, more profound in their meanings, and more effective in eliciting emotions and resonance. Reasons for poem type preference suggested that classical and contemporary poems were both appreciated for their differential expressions of the highest Chinese esthetic standard – the White Bì (贲), through effortless precision or purity.

Machine learning and data analysis for word segmentation of classical Chinese poems: illustrations with Tang and Song examples

Abstract Words are essential parts for understanding classical Chinese poems. We report a collection of 32,399 classical Chinese poems that were annotated with word boundaries. Statistics about the annotated poems support a few heuristic experiences, including the patterns of lines and a practice for the parallel structures (對仗), that researchers of Chinese literature discuss in the literature. The annotators were affiliated with two universities, so they could annotate the poems as independently as possible. Results of an inter-rater agreement study indicate that the annotators have consensus over the identified words 93 per cent of the time and have perfect consensus for the segmentation of a poem 42 per cent of the time. We applied unsupervised classification methods to annotate the poems in several different settings, and evaluated the results with human annotations. Under favorable conditions, the classifier identified about 88 per cent of the words, and segmented poems perfectly 22 per cent of the time.

The Use of Polysemy and Footnote in Preserving the Artistic Conception in English Translations of Classical Chinese Poems

The Use of Polysemy and Footnote in Preserving the Artistic Conception in English Translations of Classical Chinese Poems

松齋 李堣의 淸凉山 絶句에 대한 영남 문인들의 화운시 작성 태도와 그 이유

The sightseeing in Mt.Cheongnyang and the creation of literature about it were one of the most important acts for writers in Yeongnam region. Through research on literature based on the sightseeing of Mt.Cheongnyang, the works of writers including JJu Sebung and Lee Hwang have been dealt with. Among them, in the creation of a series of Chinese poems based on Mt.Cheongnyang, it was introduced in outline that there existed a sightseeing of in Mt.Cheongnyang and literary creation by Songjae Lee Woo before Ju Sebung and Lee Hwang. However, this was also dealt with as the background of Lee Hwang's penchant for Mt.Cheongnyang and literary creation, but it did not receive much attention.
 In response, this paper focused on Lee Woo's Mt.Cheongnyang Poetry, ｢Jo Hyoyeon and O Eonuis two sons-in-law and nephew Hae, send them to Mt.Cheongnyang to read.(送曺吳兩郞, 與瀣輩, 讀書淸涼山)｣. Through this process, based on Ju Sebung's Classical Chinese poems on Mt.Cheongnyang, it suggested the possibility that Lee Hwang's Classical Chinese poems on Lee Woo and Mt.Cheongnyang may have been pleasant to Lee Woo's disappeared Classical Chinese poems on Mt.Cheongnyang. In addition, as mentioned in the existing research on Mt.Cheongnyang and Lee Woo, It was confirmed that Lee Woo's Classical Chinese poems on Mt.Cheongnyang were not actively inherited by Lee Hwang and Yeongnam's writers as Mt.Cheongnyang literature, but were somewhat passive in harmony and acceptance due to their Buddhist colors.
 It is hoped that this review will be the beginning of future research on the process of change in Mt.Cheongnyang and Yeongnam literature and the aspect of the literature of Lee Woo, while making it a task to reveal the full picture of Mt.Cheongnyang literature more specific.

Chinese Sources for AfterWards: From Premodern Poetry, Paintings, and Medical Texts to Modern Novels, Film, and Documentaries

This paper focuses on Chinese sources suggested for a narrative medicine (NM) program, called AfterWards. Dr Lauren Small established AfterWards in 2014 and has been coordinating it since out of the Pediatrics Department at Johns Hopkins Medicine. In early 2019, she started giving a series of lectures and workshops about AfterWards to Chinese medical educators and clinicians in Beijing and Shanghai. She created an AfterWardsFacilitator’s Guidebased on Western-language sources for workshop participants. She also started to organize with Jiang Yuhong (Peking Union Medical College) a workshop for Chinese colleagues to be held at Johns Hopkins Medicine in October 2019. They invited the author to participate. The idea was hatched then to develop Chinese source materials following the AfterWards structure for an updatedFacilitator’s Guidethat Dr Small had initially written. A typical one-hour AfterWards session consists of a specific five-part structure: a literary text or artwork, an associated theme, discussion topics, a writing exercise, and shared reflection. While the content of the program always changes from session to session, the basic structure remains the same. This paper summarizes the types of Chinese sources and their related narrative-medicine themes that were originally selected for inclusion in the updated AfterWardsFacilitator’s Guideintended for Chinese colleagues. These sources about coping with sick family members, aging, and illness ranged from the textual (classical Chinese poems on aging and diagnostic forms for training students) and visual (premodern Chinese paintings and murals of medical encounters) to the fictive (novels) and performative (contemporary Asian-American film in English and Chinese-language film and documentaries).

근대 전환기 한시의 역할

Although 374 classical Chinese poems were published in Samcheonri, which is known as the core of the colonial modern culture of colonial Joseon, it has not been well explored. To comprehend the meaning of Korean literature’s ‘modern transition,’ it is essential to grasp the characteristics of classical Chinese poetry in magazines during the modern period. From this viewpoint , this paper outlines classical Chinese poems in Samcheonri, and pays particular attention to independence activists, Gim Rip(金笠), and women’s poetry. The exposure of traces of censorship strengthened the meaning of independence activists’ poems in Samcheonri. The translation and commentary of Gim Rip’s poems attempted to soothe readers’ anger with laughter and resentment. Finally, by introducing female Chinese poetry and emphasizing its importance, it accentuated the emotions of minorities. The characteristics of Chinese poetry published in Samcheonri are significant in this study because they provide a basis for understanding the multilayer aspects of Korean poetry during the “modern transition period.”

Translation as Rewriting in the Rendering of Classical Chinese Poetry: Pound’s Cathay

The concept of translation as a form of rewriting, developed by André Lefevere, identifies translation as a textual adaptation based on a series of social and cultural factors. Therefore, the act of translating means rewriting a foreign text on the basis of local cultural and poetic norms. The purpose of this article is to apply the concept of rewriting in translation to the approach employed by Ezra Pound in his collection Cathay (1915), which has been chosen as a model to conceptualize the writer’s approach to the translation of Chinese texts. The first section of this article will focus on the different approaches employed in the translation of classical Chinese poems. Following a brief historical overview, two diametrically opposed translation methods developed at the turn of the 20th century, namely the Victorian method and Pound’s method, will be compared. The investigation on Pound’s translation methodology will be then discussed through the analysis of some of the poems included in Cathay. The findings of such analysis will allow for a deeper understanding of Pound’s method, and finally identify to what extent Pound translations (or rewritings) succeeded in painting a clear and unbiased picture of Chinese culture for his Western readers.

Translation as Rewriting in the Rendering of Classical Chinese Poetry: Pound’s Cathay

The concept of translation as a form of rewriting, developed by André Lefevere, identifies translation as a textual adaptation based on a series of social and cultural factors. Therefore, the act of translating means rewriting a foreign text on the basis of local cultural and poetic norms. The purpose of this article is to apply the concept of rewriting in translation to the approach employed by Ezra Pound in his collection Cathay (1915), which has been chosen as a model to conceptualize the writer’s approach to the translation of Chinese texts. The first section of this article will focus on the different approaches employed in the translation of classical Chinese poems. Following a brief historical overview, two diametrically opposed translation methods developed at the turn of the 20th century, namely the Victorian method and Pound’s method, will be compared. The investigation on Pound’s translation methodology will be then discussed through the analysis of some of the poems included in Cathay. The findings of such analysis will allow for a deeper understanding of Pound’s method, and finally identify to what extent Pound translations (or rewritings) succeeded in painting a clear and unbiased picture of Chinese culture for his Western readers.

An Appraisal Analysis of the English Versions of “Qiang Jin Jiu”

Appraisal meanings, as a crucial feature of classical Chinese poetry, are often conveyed implicitly. Such resources can be misinterpreted due to translators’ subjectivity, and thus mistranslation occurred, which deserves greater attention. “Qiang Jin Jiu”, a classical Chinese poem written by Li Bai, covers rich appraisal resources reflected in multiple images and themes. This study attempts to apply the attitude and engagement systems of the Appraisal Framework developed by Martin and White to analyze the classical Chinese poem “Qiang Jin Jiu” and its three English versions. It aims to investigate the reasons for their appraisal differences and explore their translation quality, hoping to further enrich studies on the translation of classical Chinese poetry.

Generate classical Chinese poems with theme-style from images

• An image-based Chinese poetry generation network. • Poetry theme and style control module aims to meet the theme and style requirements of poem. • Constructed a theme-based Chinese classical poetry dataset. The automatic generation of poems from images is a classic task in natural language processing. Recently, it has gained tremendous research interest due to the help of neural sequence-to-sequence networks. The current methods are not qualified to generate poems under the joint control of the theme and style conditions, while these two key factors are critical to the quality of Chinese poetry. This paper proposes an image-based Chinese poem generation network (ICPGN), which can obtain the holistic content and sentiments in images and transform them into theme and style representations. A poem theme and style control module (PTSC) is designed to ensure that the generated poems meet the theme and style requirements simultaneously. A new dataset CQC2020 is constructed for training and testing of the proposed network and other related methods. Extensive manual and machine experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed method.

Developing a Learning Module 唐诗 (Tangshi)

Poetry is a critical element of literature which must be studied. The language in poetry is a parable language and difficult to understand because the language is rarely used in everyday life. Similarly, classical Chinese poetry preserves ancient Mandarin （文言文） [Wén yán wén] which was used in the past in China. This study is based on the findings of students’ difficulties in understanding the meaning of classical Chinese poetry. The research aimed to develop a learning medium in the form of a famous Chinese classical poetry learning module during the Tang Dynasty. There are three classical Chinese poems in this module, namely, the 静夜思 [ Jìngyè sī] by 李白 [Li Bai]; 春晓 [Chūnxiao] by ̌ 孟浩然 [Meng Haoran]; and 春夜 喜雨 [Chūnyè x ̌iyu] by ̌ 杜甫 [Du Fu], which are accompanied with an explanation of the poetry, learning activities, formative assignments, and evaluation. This study uses the Five Phases of Instructional Design Model developed by Cennamo and Kalk (2005). The results of this study indicate that the module is excellent and suitable for learning.
 Keywords: learning module, 唐诗 (Tangshi), literature Study, R&D

19세기 말~20세기 초 기행 한시집에 나타난 이국 체험과 서술 시각 - 김득련의 『환구음초(環璆唫艸)』와 박영철의 『구주음초(歐洲吟草)』를 중심으로

19세기 말~20세기 초 기행 한시집에 나타난 이국 체험과 서술 시각 - 김득련의 『환구음초(環璆唫艸)』와 박영철의 『구주음초(歐洲吟草)』를 중심으로

Exploring Chinese Poetry using Adobe Spark Video

This tutorial offers Chinese learners from lower-intermediate to advanced level a digital approach to exploring Chinese language and culture through poetry, using a free educational tool: Adobe Spark Video. Based on a multimodal (verbal, visual and textual) and transmedia (from abstract text to digital production) approach, it provides learners with a step-by-step guide to synchronising a selected Chinese poem with recorded recitation as well as corresponding images and music. Grounded in the concept of digitally mediated learning, this activity aims to enhance learners’ autonomy, creativity and participation in the process of foreign language acquisition (Hourigan & Murray). In following this process, learners will have the opportunity to improve not only precision in their reading, listening and speaking skills, but also their understanding of the aesthetics of Chinese literature. Such an approach is particularly relevant to the learning of Chinese, given that tone, prosody and melodic movements are considered distinctive and crucial in Chinese speech, notably in literary genres such as poetry, making poetry recitation an important cultural and pedagogical (though not often practised) aspect of studying the language. Furthermore, in producing an audio-visual illustration, learners are engaged in a process of cultural decoding and recoding linguistically and digitally, thus also deepening their understanding of Chinese cultural and historical traditions in which this poetry is embedded. While this tutorial makes its demonstration through a classical Chinese poem, ‘A Quatrain’ by Du Fu (712–770 ce), the digital tool and method can be applied to other types of Chinese literary text or to the learning of other languages and cultures. This tutorial can be used by learners independently for self-study or by teachers to complement other learning activities. It is adaptable for either university courses or non-accredited lifelong learning. The tutorial will explain the detailed technical process step by step and provides a demo video to showcase the product. It is recommended that the activity is further facilitated by input on the language and background of Chinese poetic traditions where appropriate.

Musical training improves rhythm integrative processing of classical Chinese poem

Musical training improves rhythm integrative processing of classical Chinese poem

Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media by Jacob Edmond

Reviewed by: Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media by Jacob Edmond Anatoly Detwyler Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media. Jacob Edmond. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. 360. $65.00 (cloth); $64.99 (eBook). In Make It the Same, Jacob Edmond weaves discussions on the meaning and interpretability of copying into an original study of the cultural and historical development of literary copying. [End Page 420] The study is motivated and made urgent by the centrality of copying in culture today, where copying has come to dominate not just the elevated world of experimental writing and art, but cultural expression, production, and circulation more generally. The central contribution of Edmond's book is the articulation of this cultural "iterative turn" by tracing its development in poetry through the last sixty years. This iterative turn coincides with significant changes in the availability and usage of read-write media: technologies such as tape machines and personal computers that not only "read" the information embedded in a media object, but also make it possible to record new information over the original. As such, media have become increasingly mobile and affordable, they have collectively lowered the threshold for reproducing words, sounds, and images. Coupled with technologies such as mimeographs or digital devices, these read-write media have ushered in an era of remix culture and small run publishing. The proliferation and impact of these media on cultural experimentation, Edmonds shows, is inseparable from the contexts of globalization that largely shape postwar history, such as postcolonialism, Cold War geopolitics, and the spread of late capitalism, under which consumption has famously become a form of production. This global scope is necessary, Edmond emphasizes, not just for the sake of continuing the critique of Eurocentric conceptions of modernity, but more specifically for demonstrating the multivalent and cotemporal development of copy culture. The device of copying has emerged as a cultural glue that holds different contexts together, where repetition is repurposed in different-but-similar ways for the sake of reflecting and even actively establishing different-but-connected subjectivities. To illustrate this point, the book's case studies invite a number of poignant comparisons, for example, in the deployment of repetition to explore bodily and linguistic difference foregrounded in the experience of migration and diaspora (addressed in chapters three and four). The material and social conditions that make the iterative shift a global phenomenon also contribute directly to its aesthetics of multiplicity, helping to engender a "conceptual shift from the inviolate work born in one language, nation, and medium, to the multimedia, multiversion, multiauthor text" (6). According to Edmond, the patterning that constitutes poetry at every level of the text makes it the literary avatar of the iterative turn. In the period of high modernism, repetition and copying were already influential parts of the literary scene: Borges's copyist character, Menard, or, to my mind, Lu Xun's startling opening to his prose-poem, "Behind the wall of my backyard you can see two trees: one is a date tree. The other is also a date tree."1 Make It the Same acknowledges these predecessors—and gestures to their legacy with its title, playing on the anxiety over sameness underlying Ezra Pound's famous (and unoriginal) injunction to "make it new"—while drawing important contrasts with our current era. Whereas earlier modernists adopted copying as a form of innovation that could unsettle its audience by defamiliarizing its object of representation, thereby ultimately reflecting the authorial genius of its creator, post– 1950s copying by and large sidesteps any fetishization of originality and innovation. The poet now works "not [as] the originator but the remixer of words, text, and traditions" (60). As a result, repetition itself is foregrounded as the main point in many poems. An example of this change in emphasis may be found in the contemporary Chinese poet, Yi Sha's "remix" of one of the most famous and oft-reproduced classical Chinese poems, "Quiet Night Thoughts." The lines of the original Tang era poem, "Before my bed there is a bright moonlight/So that it seems like frost on the ground/Lifting my head I watch...