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Three Chinese Poets is a 1992 collection ofVikram Seth's English translations of poetry byWang Wei,Li Bai andDu Fu.[1]
These three poets were contemporaries and are considered to be among the greatest Chinese poets by many later scholars. The three have been described as aBuddhist recluse, aTaoist immortal and aConfucian sage respectively. Though this trichotomy has been criticised as simplistic and artificial, it can act as a guiding approximation. They lived in theTang dynasty and the political strife at that time affected all of their lives very much and this impact is evident in the poetry of all three. It is not clear whether Wang Wei and Li Bai ever met, but they had a mutual friend inMeng Haoran. Li Bai and Du Fu did meet and Du Fu greatly admired Li Bai.[citation needed]
In the introduction toThree Chinese Poets, Seth, who has a Stanford ABD in Chinese studies and has translated other Chinese works,[1] talks about the influence of translations on his life and work. He highlightsCharles Johnston's translation ofAleksandr Pushkin'sEugene Onegin,Richard Wilbur's translation ofMolière'sTartuffe andRobert Fitzgerald's translation of theIliad. He writes that he wanted to avoid the approach taken byEzra Pound, which was to prioritise creating a good poem, using an approximate translation based on the translator's deep understanding of the poem. Seth preferred to follow the example of the translators he admired, prioritising fidelity and preserving formal features such as rhyme. He stresses the difficulty of preserving meaning and word associations when translating poetry. He also notes that any satisfaction derived from the tonality of the original poems is necessarily lost because of the non-tonality of English.
Eleven of Seth's translations of Du Fu from this volume were later included in the first section ofThe Rivered Earth (2011), a collection of libretti written by Seth and set to music byAlec Roth.[2]