Fu Hao’s new book contains a selection of 89 poems by W. B. Yeats in the original, each accompanied by a Chinese version, and a detailed commentary in Chinese, with intention to provide Chinese readers with an understanding of Yeats’s poems and some knowledge of their backgrounds. Adopting the method of textual analysis to read the works closely, striving for every detail, while finding external evidence from secondary information such as biographies of the poet, memories by family and friends, literary traditions, and historical facts, as well as primary sources such as the poets’ autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, letters, essays, novels, plays, and radio broadcast scripts, this book aims at discovering the authorial intention for every poem concerned, and attempting to “read out” its original meaning rather than read in any imposed significance, rejecting the so-called intentional fallacies. Chinese and Western traditions of exposition and commentation are blended in this book to achieve a balanced effect that may be more acceptable to the Chinese audience. The author has made a few unique discoveries, especially about some poems with Chinese elements in them, and when necessary, he has also pointed out some errors made by Yeats scholars at home and abroad.
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Fu Hao is research professor at the Institute of Foreign Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China. He has published over 30 books of poetry, essays, literary criticism and translation, including A Critical Biography of W. B. Yeats (in Chinese) and The Complete Lyrical Poems of W. B. Yeats (into Chinese).
Find the link to his new book here!
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