This book offers a rare opportunity for contact with human beings who lived and loved almost three thousand years ago. At that time, when civilization was barely awakening in isolated parts of Europe, China was already a flourishing, literate culture. From one of the earliest monuments of Chinese literature, Geoffrey Sampson has selected 58 poems relating to the theme of love; on facing pages, these are presented in straightforward prose translation (cutting through the misleading complications introduced by commentators down the centuries), and also in their original Old Chinese pronunciation - which sounded very different from any modern dialect of Chinese. Unusually for such ancient literature, most of these poems are written from the woman's standpoint.
We hear the rhymes and rhythms which the original singers heard; because Old Chinese was a very simple, grammar-free language, by looking up the words of a line in the glossary provided one can easily grasp how the line says in few words what the translation needs more words to express. This may be the only case on a world scale where modern readers can readily understand women and men speaking to us, in their own voices, across several millennia. The physical circumstances of their lives were utterly different from ours; these matters are explained in an Introduction, and in brief notes accompanying the poems. The various aspects of love, on the other hand, are universal.