Stephen H. West

Here Idema and West, two noted scholars of Chinese traditional drama, collect eleven lesser-known plays from the Yuan Dynasty for the first time in English translation. The plays are well-translated into readable and idiomatic English; there are scholarly introductions to each as well, which provide useful information on the environment, both social and literary, in which the plays were produced and staged.

With a number of useful appendices and an excellent introduction, this scholarly volume is excellent for further study of Chinese drama, and also of interest to educated lay-readers. I used it, in part, for my undergraduate dissertation and found its translations extremely useful.… (mais)

These translators win: for me the highly lyrical ‘A Lone Goose in Autumn over the Palaces of Han’ achieves real poetry. It’s a historical love & duty story, and thought to be a riposte to another here, ‘Rain on the Wutong Tree’, set around the rebellion of An Rokshan (An Lushan). In the first, the Han emperor’s concubine sacrifices herself to maintain peace with the barbarians – since his court and soldiers can’t; in the second, the Tang emperor’s decadent concubine is lynched at the demand of his soldiers. Both emperors are distraught but helpless.… (mais)