Chinese Literature in Translation

Database of Translations

• Zeb Raft’s Database of Chinese poetry in existing translation, a comprehensive finding list where you can search poems by title, poet, dynasty and translator
• Lucas Klein’s website on modern Chinese poet Xichuan’s poetry

Major Anthologies

• The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature, edited by Victor Mair and Mark Bender (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
• Hawai’i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture, edited by Victor H. Mair, Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, and Paul R. Goldin (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2005).
• The Shorter Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
• Classical Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Translations (New York: Columbia University Press; Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2000).
• An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911, translated and edited by Stephen Owen (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).
• The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
• The Book of Songs: the Ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry, translated by Arthur Waley.(New York: Grove Press, 1987).
• The Chinese classics, translated by James Legge (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960).
• Ballads and Stories from Tun-huang: An Anthology, translated by Arthur Waley (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1960).

Library of Chinese Humanities Translation Series (scholarly translation, free and open access)

• Stephen Owen, The Complete Poetry of Du Fu, a complete scholarly translation of Chinese literature alongside the original text in a critical edition
• Stephen Owen and Wendy Swartz, The Poetry of Ruan Ji and Xi Kang
• Paul Rouzer, The Poetry of Hanshan (Cold Mountain), Shide, and Fenggan
• Ronald Egan, The Works of Li Qingzhao

Dictionaries for Translating Chinese Texts

• Web version of Chinese Characters from Yale Press
• Hanyu dacidian 漢語大詞典 (available for add-on purchase on Pleco app)
• Paul M. Kroll, A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese (Leiden: Brill, 2015) link on amazon This is a Chinese-English dictionary covering texts and history of words of the period from approx. 500 BCE to 1000 CE
• CJKV-English Dictionary of Confucian, Daoist, and Intellectual Historical Terms 漢日韓越-英辭典
• Digital Dictionary of Buddhism 電子佛教辭典
• Dictionary of Chinese Characters Variants 台灣教育部異體字字典