Three Hundred Tang Poems may very well have been the best selling, the most avidly read, and the most diligently studied, of any poetry book in history anywhere in the world, from the moment in 1763 or 1764 when it first appeared in bookshops throughout China, until well after the start of the twentieth century. Educated readers of Chinese all over the world continue to enjoy its very broad and representative selection of poets, including great names like Li Bai (Li Po), Du Fu (Tu Fu), and Wang Wei, as well as a splendid sampling of poems by the rest of the poets who helped to make the Tang the “Golden Age” of Chinese poetry.

The instant success of Three Hundred Tang Poems isn’t surprising, since its contents were, after all, the essence refined from the best of many earlier collections and anthologies, the finest poems from the greatest poets. If you’re an avid reader of Chinese poetry you will be delighted to find old favorites here. All the forms of poetry as it was practiced in the Tang were represented, as well as its best and its most famous poets, a fact that certainly contributed to its success among readers who were aspiring writers.

Geoffrey Waters received a PhD in Classic Chinese from Indiana University and worked most of his life in international banking. He died in 2007. His other books of translation include Broken Willow: The Complete Poems of Yu Xuanji , White Crane: Love Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama, and Three Elegies of Ch'u.

Michael Farman is a  retired Electronics Engineer. Early in his career he studied Mandarin at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, but began translating Chinese classical and ancient poetry comparatively late in life. His translations have since appeared frequently in literary and translation journals and several anthologies. His chapbook Clouds and Rain  was published by Pipers’ Ash in 2003. As an active member of ALTA, he has organized and contributed to conference panels and workshops and also published articles and book reviews in Translation Review.            

David Lunde is a poet and translator. His most recent books include: Blues for Port City, Heart Transplants & Other Misappropriations, Nightfishing in Great Sky River, Instead, and The Carving of Insects, Bian Zhilin's collected poems co-translated with Mary M.Y. Fung, which won the 2007 PEN USA Translation Award. He is also the translator of Breaking the Willow: Poems of Parting, Exile, Separation, and Reunion.

“The road to Shu is hard, but harder still is to convey the spirit with which these poems were first written over a thousand years ago. And yet Geoffrey Waters has done just that.  Joined by his friends Michael Farman and David Lunde, he has given us translations that feel alive, as if they were more like a dance between poet and translator, both of whom live on through the beauty of these poems.   The night is young, and this book is full of music.” 

—Red Pine

“Three Hundred Tang Poems are three hundred gold birds singing in mountains, in mist, outside his brushwood gate. Three canny mellifluous translators, Waters, Farman & Lunde, have carried Tang song into English songs. I must pause at Geoff Waters, my favorite student, my later master in Chinese thought and verse, and now horribly disappeared in midstream. In Wang Wei, Geoff's gold birds are "singing madly in front of Five Willows' gate. On his exquisitely recreated "Mountains empty after a fresh rain," I ask, with tears, "Will you be staying longer my fine young friend?"”

—Willis Barnstone