Lois Fusek

I got this because it was mentioned in Marsha Wagner's The Lotus Boat.. It is a translation of the first collection of tzu with a preface by Ou-yang Chiung in AD 940 describing and defending the use of the t'zu ("song" form of verse, in which poems were written as lyrics to a group of then-well-known (now lost) tunes associated with entertainment by the "singing girls." The book is interesting as Fusek's translations try to use the number of words in the line to represent the number of syllables in the original verses, showing the varying line-lengths characteristic of this t'zu form in contrast to the "balanced" style of the more conventional "shih" form. The romantic content of the verses is also agreeable, especially to someone like me who came to Chinese poetry through Poems of the Late Tang.… (meer)