18 books like The Story of the Stone

The book is dedicated to his three students from Princeton’s translation workshop, “Madeleine, Nadia, and Susan, and their faith in the art of translation.” And yes, that last is me. This dedication has not biased my love for these poems even though I recognize his tutelage in their lines: he taught us to be bold, true and simple, as in Ritsos’s famous poem, “The Meaning of Simplicity,” which begins, “I hide behind simple things, so you’ll find me...” which is placed smack in the middle of this volume.

Many of these poems are short but not simple, as in simplistic. Their references to ancient myths give us another chance to relive the meaning of those myths through the senses; as Ritsos said in one of his interviews, “Human beings develop through their senses, not through their brains.”

Stanley Kunitz, with Max Hayward’s translation of Poems of Akhmatova from Russian, is another book that I find myself going back to over and over again.

This is a poet’s translation of a poet, and not only that, but a poet who is willing to give himself entirely to the art of translation in order to bring another poet’s voice in another language back to life, as he puts it in his Translator’s Note, “...to record what we have heard, and to try to give it back in the language that we love.”

This is why I love these translations; I love that I can hear her through him, the translator as a medium, and the result is pure and uncontrived, hitting me right in the heart as I read and taste these poems out loud. This is a poet-translator who has “walked through many lives” (from Kunitz’s poem, “The… show more.

I am recommending this collection of eight essays from the immense Historical Records primarily for Chapter 7, “The Story of the Rebel Xiang Yu.” This is a rebel who didn’t win – Xiang Yu was defeated by the man who went on to found the Han Dynasty in 202 BCE, which makes this perhaps China’s most famous tale of personal failure. The Grand Historian Sima Qian veered from his format to write this biography because he had so much to say about Xiang Yu. As I work on my own novels about the founding of the Ming, I keep Xiang Yu in mind as a reminder of how generals can achieve glorious victories and then lose everything over a few casual mistakes, and of how storytellers decide how a hero gets remembered.

On July 28, 1372, a group of high officials presented the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty with two melons on a lacquer tray. The melons grew from the same stalk – an anomaly that was judged a lucky omen. Schneewind uses this seemingly minor matter to study the daily workings of court life and the complex relationships between rulers and subjects. I had the great luck to travel with the author to Nanjing, the first Ming capital, and visit some of the locales she analyzed for this book, including the tomb complex where the founder and his empress are buried.  Schneewind’s short and readable study of two melons offers a sense of the high stakes and grand scale of imperial life, and I admire how she was able to connect so much to such a small gift of ripe fruit.

Brooks is a Canadian scholar of Chinese history who specializes in the Ming Dynasty. In this work, he offers an overview of the transition from the Mongol Yuan to the Chinese Ming Dynasty, which is the setting for my own writing, and so is a period I consider to be of unrivaled appeal! Brooks studies, among other things, how extreme weather caused political upheaval and why emperors needed to worry when the locals started reporting dragon sightings. He also offers perspective on the autocratic rule of the Ming founder, “the brilliant and ruthless Zhu Yuanzhang,” and how his example impacted the rest of the dynasty.

Jin Yong is the greatest of martial arts novelists. Like Charles Dickens, he serialized his novels in a newspaper, though unlike Dickens, he owned the Hong Kong newspaper that carried his series. But Jin Yong’s popularity might even have outstripped that of Dickens, with his tales of heroism and swordsmanship selling over 100 million copies. 

I like to tell myself that I read this book to better understand the Chinese imagination. But who am I kidding? The first in the Legend of the Condors series is just a great story, and Anna Holmwood's new translations bring it to life.

Though I love to read Homer’s Odyssey in the original Greek, I also appreciate translations that allow particular themes to emerge in new ways.

All translations of the ancient epic are necessarily inventive recreations of the ancient Greek Homeric story, and I like the way this translation employs a quick-paced poetic meter and updates the tale to suit modern sensibilities on uncomfortable aspects of the Odyssey (e.g., misogyny, slavery).

The introduction also provides an authoritative explanation of the Homeric Odyssey.

That I would love a poem written/translated by Seamus Heaney did not come as a surprise to me, but that it is Beowulf, a poem/story steeped in the Germanic warrior culture and soaked in blood that enthralled me, did surprise me.

I do not remember the occasion that prompted my reading, but even as I opened the book to its Introduction, and read “...And now this is ‘an inheritance’ --/Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked/ In the long ago, yet willable forward...Again and again and again,” I could not put it down.

In fact, you might say, it is not the story but the voice of the poet and how he brought this ancient language and people back to life that compelled me to read on. Of course, the voice is that of the poet of “Digging,” as he traces his roots back to these unlikely ancestors.

The unyielding Fragrant Princess who rejects the Emperor’s advances left an indelible mark on my mind. Although she is not portrayed as a heroine, it is her ultimate sacrificial act of defiance, made in order to alert her lover (rebel leader of the Red Flower Society) of the Emperor’s trap, that deeply moved me.

This was the first novel written by Jin Yong, the wuxia fiction icon and my literary idol. It was also the first novel that I came across and read as a child during one summer vacation. The thrilling martial arts fight scenes and the addictive plot certainly had me enthralled and would send me down the wuxia rabbit hole in ensuing summers! Recently, I re-read this novel, and I still adore it.

The grumpy, shrewd, and open-minded Ling Taishi, the mentor of the spoiled hero Jian, certainly steals the spotlight in this novel. The initial uncomfortable master-apprentice relationship gradually turns into a warm and lasting bond as the two face a world of danger, assassins, and revolution together.

The badass image of this older war artist is quite striking, while the other two female leads (one is an idealistic revolutionary and the other a brutal assassin) are also nicely fleshed out in their respective separate plotlines. The martial arts action scenes are cinematic and well-written.