Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei

Reviews

"Essential reading for anyone interested in translation." — M. A. Orthofer, Complete Review

"There is a great profusion of Chinese poetry in English, and this fact is significant. It suggests that, despite all the barriers, this poetry does communicate, even urgently, to modern Western readers. Both the difficulty and the urgency are elegantly demonstrated in Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. Weinberger collates and comments on a series of translations of Wang Wei’s famous poem ‘Deer Park,’ allowing the reader to see how even this brief poem—twenty characters, in four lines—contains endless shades of meaning and implication." — Adam Kirsch, The New Republic

"Weinberger’s sensitivity to words and gift for clear thinking underlie nearly every page in Nineteen Ways...and he writes with erudition and charm. He sees lines of Wang Wei’s poems as 'both universal and immediate,' and he sees much else in human cultures in that same spirit, which I think is wonderful." — Perry Link, The New York Review of Books

"Nineteen cheers to New Directions for reissuing Eliot Weinberger's Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, first published in 1987 and hard to find since then. In this tiny volume, Weinberger examines nineteen different translations of a classic four-line poem by the eighth-century poet Wang Wei. The result is the best primer on translation...also the funniest and most impatient." — Lorin Stein, The Paris Review

"Weinberger is like an ancient Chinese zither player, tuning lonely in the mountain overlooking the world." — Bei Dao