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Year
Endless defeat, endless capture—
words in Chinese dungeons:
you can’t taste what is buried
in fallow fields, untilled.

Once I found the Tang,
till now a fairy tale
hinted only in my native tongue.

But one-by-one I uncover
their terracotta secrets, and found
the three hundred somewhat known
are from fifty thousand—still in dust.



Note: this refers to my translation of the classic Chinese poetry anthology, 300 Poems from the Chinese Tang Dynasty. However, the Tang Dynasty was one of the world’s cultural golden ages, producing nearly 50,000 poems, available in Chinese via the Complete Tang. However, nearly all of this has not been translated into English. As it is, the 300 Tang Poems have not been translated often into English in their entirety.
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