Reasons for Reading Ancient Love Poems

Poetry is a language’s dance. Just like dancing, which is not as necessary as walking but more exhilarating than walking, poetry is not as functional as prose but more expressive than prose. With fewer words, a poem can amazingly express much more than a piece of prose. That makes poetry the best medium for the expression of love.

Despite technological advancements throughout human history, love poems don’t expire. As human nature never changes, we can still relate to all the emotions arising from the love of someone who existed thousands of years ago. So, why not read some marvelous love poems that have passed the test of time through millennia?

Timeless Passion is a book that presents 50 love poems selected from the oldest anthology of Chinese poetry, The Book of Songs or phonetically translated as Shijing (詩經). The 50 poems are placed in the same sequence in this book as they are in The Book of Songs, along with English
translations that preserve the rhyme schemes of the originals. The anthology compiled
by the ancient sage Confucius (551–479 BC) comprises 305 poems in total, all dating back to an ancient period from the 11th to the 6th century BC.

Instead of taking all the 305 poems from the anthology, this book has collected only 50 of them, because it is not meant for academic purposes. Illustrated with captivating color photos, this book targets the general public. It is supposed to be a leisure read or a gift for a loved one.

However, it doesn’t hurt to inform the reader that The Book of Songs has been heavily studied as a textbook through most of Chinese history. As pointed out in a feature story that belongs to a series published by BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), The Book of Songs served as “part of the elite curriculum that gradually solidified in the form of the Five Classics of imperial Confucianism.” The other four classics are The Book of Documents (尚書), The Book of Changes (易經), The Book of Rites (禮記), and The Spring and Autumn Annals (春秋).

Just because The Book of Songs was a textbook in China for millennia, Chinese scholars tended to read too much into it.

Numerous Confucian scholars worked very hard to discover multiple meanings in each line of the book. Then they came up with a range of different interpretations for each poem in the anthology. Some of the scholars even politicized the themes of certain love poems.

It was not until the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which began as anti-imperialist cultural and political protests sparked by students, when Chinese intellectuals started looking upon The Book of Songs as purely innocent folk poetry. More than a century has passed since then. It is now widely accepted in Greater China to embrace the charming simplicity of the Chinese folk songs from antiquity.

The relatively new approach (though being more than 100 years old) is what this book takes. All of this book’s English translations reflect the literal meanings of the Chinese love poems, without taking any symbols or references brought up by scholars into account. None of those scholars’ interpretations will be mentioned. Footnotes will only appear when some Chinese words in the ancient poems mean something different from their current definitions, given the linguistic evolution of the Chinese language through the millennia.

In brief, this book showcases 50 ancient love poems simply as what they are. The English translations are faithful to their gists, only with a little poetic license taken in order to follow the rhyme schemes of the originals. Please note that the translations are intended to be as close to the originals as possible, for the reader to feel their primeval passion, which hasn’t perished after thousands of years.

Envision a pristine river along which people walked, sang, and confessed love. That river, carrying timeless messages of love from generation to generation, will flow into eternity.

Note: Crystal Tai is a Stanford alumna and the author of Timeless Passion: Love Poems from the Oldest Anthology of Chinese Poetry, available for pre-orders on Amazon (https://shorturl.at/9OsbA).