Anne Birrell – författare

This book, first published in 1982, was the first translation of the Chinese classic Yü-t-‘ai hsin-yung – the unique anthology of love poems, compiled in AD 545. This traces the development of love poetry from the second century BC to its full flowering in the fifth and sixth centuries AD. Dr Birrell’s incisive introductory essay provides a concise survey of the historical and literary setting to the poems and explains the conventions governing courtly love poetry. In particular, the reader’s attention is drawn to the many and varied artistic uses of imagery in the poems. Major poets are noted for their artistic achievement and for their contribution to the development of the genre. Dr Birrell also supplies a valuable section of notes on the poems to guide the reader through unfamiliar historical events, legends, anecdotes and famous places and people, and there is a similar section of notes on the poets offering biographical details.

This book, first published in 1982, was the first translation of the Chinese classic Yü-t-‘ai hsin-yung – the unique anthology of love poems, compiled in AD 545. This traces the development of love poetry from the second century BC to its full flowering in the fifth and sixth centuries AD. Dr Birrell’s incisive introductory essay provides a concise survey of the historical and literary setting to the poems and explains the conventions governing courtly love poetry. In particular, the reader’s attention is drawn to the many and varied artistic uses of imagery in the poems. Major poets are noted for their artistic achievement and for their contribution to the development of the genre. Dr Birrell also supplies a valuable section of notes on the poems to guide the reader through unfamiliar historical events, legends, anecdotes and famous places and people, and there is a similar section of notes on the poets offering biographical details.

This book, first published in 1988, compiles 77 songs and ballads (yüeh-fu) of early imperial China (200 BC – AD 300). Each song-text is newly translated and fully annotated and explicated. Dr Birrell deals systematically with problems of the earliest sources, dating, attribution, textual variants, multiforms, metre, generic title, song title and structure. This careful and thorough treatment is especially necessary for a corpus of anonymous popular texts which are often corrupt, structurally confusing, laconic and full of nonsense words and colloquialisms. Her introductory essay provides a socio-historical context for this material and charts its literary transmission, while singling out special characteristics of the genre, such as musical, oral and dramatic elements. The main text, arranged into eleven chapters plus an introduction, is supplemented by notes, appendices, maps, chronology, bibliography and index.