My China in Tang Poetry

CRITICAL PRAISE for My China in Tang Poetry:

Susan Wan Dolling compares translation to performance art—and this is a virtuoso performance. Combining fresh translations of China’s greatest poets with vivid context and engaging personal anecdotes, Dolling’s work interprets the Tang dynasty and its literary luminaries for a new generation of readers.

— Kevin Peraino, author of A Force So Swift: Mao, Truman, and the Birth of Modern China, 1949.

“Susan Wan Dolling has lived with Tang poetry for decades, and like the best teachers she knows how to make her familiarity ours. She tells the stories behind the poems, and her translations, clear and natural and fluid, have a sure sense of how emotions build and shine. Far more than an anthology, this series is a comprehensive tour of Tang poetry and culture with a genial, expert and witty guide.”

                 —James Richardson, Poet and Professor of Creative Writing, Emeritus, Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton

“This book makes me want to drop everything and do nothing but learn about Chinese poetry! Dolling brings poets Li Bai and Du Fu vividly to life, both in her translations and in the stories she tells about 8th-century China, along with her own memories about growing up in Hong Kong. The notes to the poems cover poetics, wordplay, proverbs, history, geography, legends, folk songs, festivals, food, flowers, and more—everything you need to fall in love with these poems, these poets, and their world.”

                       —Laura Gibbs, author of Aesop’s Fables:  A New Translation, Oxford World's Classics

"It makes a certain sense to ask me, a “literary friend,” to comment on this wonderful voyaging book of translations of poems about literary friendship by Susan Wan Dolling, a scholar/poet who has breathed and danced these poems every day of her life. Susan would walk into the translation workshops we attended together as students with what appeared to be a handkerchief of a poem. On the page, the Chinese characters were aligned in neat rows, sometimes forming a perfect square, other time the lines of equal length would proceed for a few pages. But it is the short poems I remember best, and the way Susan would start unfolding them character by character – like a magic trick, the poems would yield meanings, stories, echoes to other poems, digressions that spread before us like opportunity and treacherous winding paths.  And then, for the second part of the magic trick, Susan, faced with all this wealth, would bring the poem home and sound a note so true that it put all doubts to bed. These beautiful translations are proof positive that translation is never a matter of just translating words. Thank you, Susan, for this gift of poetry.  

                  -- Nadia Benabid, translator of Return to Painting, by Nobel Laureate, Gao Xingjian

“Susan Wan Dolling’s My China in Tang Poetry is surprisingly easy and entertaining reading. Susan’s scholarship as well as vivid imagination shine through her storytelling and educated postulations, informative for both Tang poetry aficionados and neophytes. Her resplendent translations of the Chinese poetry are brilliant.”

                      —Diana Lin, Hong Kong Journalist

“These volumes are a must for anyone who is interested in the Tang poetry which is the heart of the literature and culture of China.”

            —Margaret Sun, author of Betwixt and Between, Earnshaw Books

“In China, past and present, most kids grow up reciting Tang poems, and some even try their hand at writing these five or seven character lines when they feel inspired. Writing in the genre, usually poems of four or eight lines, might sound simple, but in fact it is not. As one grows older and read more and more of the annotated texts, one becomes more and more appreciative of the details of both the artistry and historical richness of these poems. As translator and annotator of these Tang poems, Susan Wan Dolling has done a fantastic job. The meticulousness of her annotations should be appreciated, and her renderings, accurate and smoothly readable (both script-wise and sound-wise) are definitely enjoyable.”

                  —Diana Yue, Honorary Associate Professor, Hong Kong University, translator of Flying Carpet by Xixi

Susan Wan Dolling has given readers, from academics to lovers of poetry, a refreshing and innovative staging of Tang poetry. Informed personal readings accompanied by stories behind the poets and poems capture the enduring appeal of Tang poetry. In my many years of teaching Classical Chinese poetry, this series is a fresh take that is accessible to the general audience unfamiliar with Chinese as well as being delightful for the audience steeped in the tradition (and everyone in between).

 — Chiu-Mi Lai, Ph.D., Professor of Instruction, University of Texas at Austin

Wang Wei Poem in Poetry Magazine  (September 2023) , from FLOATING ON CLOUDS, Volume II, My China in Tang Poetry:

Thanking Master Zhang with a Poem

By Wang Wei

Translated By Susan Wan Dolling

I tend to love quiet now in my evening years,

not caring much about much in the world.

Making no long-term plans, I just keep to myself.

Emptied of knowledge, I have returned to the woods.

A breeze blows through the pines, loosening my robe.

The mountain moon is my lamplight for playing the qin.

You ask for the secret of transcending all worldly matter:

just listen to the fisherman’s song coming down the river.

From Patrick T. Reardon's April 1, 2025 Review of FRIENDS AND LOVERS, Volume III, My China in Tang Poetry :

“Greedy and generous”

In her epilogue, Dolling writes about the responsibility of the translator, “obliged to be true to the original even as they make the most of their own resources.” She sees her role as translator

not to give my voice to the original poet, but to borrow as I lend, that is, to reproduce in English with my ventriloquist’s skill the voice I hear in the Chinese, and to place again in the poem where I found it, in its historical and cultural contexts as best I can.

This, it seems to me, is what makes her such a delightful tour leader through the art museum of Tang poetry.  And one other thing: Dolling brings to the art of translation a deeper sense of communication of all sorts:

Still, the more I wrote and translated the more I came to realize the understanding translation demands is not so different from the discoveries that grow out of my own writings.

In other words, all writing is translation, from thoughts to words, and all translations, especially of poetry, are works of creative writing even though reading and understanding some other person’s work and his or her culture precede the translator’s creation. Translation is both greedy and generous, it wishes to appropriate as it wants to share and disseminate.

My life is richer for having the benefit of Dolling’s greed and generosity, her respect of her sources and her willingness to do her part to bring their poetry to me.