《千家诗（中英文对照）》书评

Rhyme Is Good

This is a good translation version from classical Chinese to English since some original ryhthm of English-verse can be felt in the latter. However, the proofreading is too bad, so many spelling mistakes can often be found in this book, for example, innuence(influence), (moming)moring, and so on.What is more, some ridiculous ERRORS exist. first of all, 'cause you know, the rhyme always falls on the even lines, of course the last line included,so the Pinyin(phonetic transcription) of "Look/看" appears at the end of the last line should be marked as a level tone, but it was not. Furthermore, perhaps the proofreader don't know the tonal counterpoint, for instance,''On Duty in the Jade Hall" wroten by Hong Zikui, the last but one character of the second line is 相. The Pinyin of the word is marked as xiāng, in fact, the pitch which refers to "premiership" should be departing. If the tonal counterpoint can be taken into consideration, this heptasyllabic quatrain is a pattern beginning with a level tone with a rhyme at the end of the first line, reads as "— — | | | — —",then, the following line should be "| | — — | | —" , obiviously, the character is xiàng.In a word,I love Prof Hsü's endeavor in the rhyme, the translative verse reads smooth and good. whereas, What is a pity that some classical Chinese allusion can not be translated,maybe we can think it over in the future.