This website is a joint project of Zeb Raft (Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica) and Thomas Mazanec (Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Santa Barbara). We're interested in how Chinese poetry has been translated, and how it might be, and we hope the information gathered here will be useful to others with similar interests. The site's coverage remains limited, but it currently catalogs about 90 sources, and we continue to work on expanding it.
The original site went online in 2010, when Zeb was at the University of Alberta. Kamal Ranaweera built it, with design by Megan Meredith-Lobay, and generous support from the Killam Research Fund. The 2026 redesign and rebuild is by Ktrees Design (www.ktrees.com), made possible by funding from the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy. The new site offers some improved search features, including a quick way to compare the publications of two or three different translators, and a revised data structure will allow us to (gradually and partially) include translations that appear in journal articles and edited volumes, in addition to anthologies and monographs.
If you appreciate this resource, consider supporting it indirectly by donating to or becoming a dues-paying member in a scholarly society that supports the study of classical Chinese poetry. For instance:
Contributors: Zheng Cai, Danqing Wang, Dawn Wong, Li Yang, Lulu Yu, Ya-hsuan Lo, Linshan Jiang, Hanna Dashchenko, Vivian Kung, Kou Che-yu.
Coverage is not complete. Most of the major anthologies are cataloged here. Monographs are selectively included, and work on edited volumes and journal articles is just starting. There are, in addition, an increasing number of complete translations of Chinese poets, not included here. We hope to incorporate ways of pointing users toward these resources. For now, the working bibliography linked to below will refer readers to older material, and search engines etc. should turn up newer works.
The data that appear on the landing page more or less accurately reflect what is listed here, but the number of translations cannot be calculated perfectly. If a translation was published and then later collected in an anthology, we generally consider this as a single translation with two appearances, counting it once. But sometimes a translator has published two different versions of the same poem, in which case these are considered two discrete translations, counted twice. The difficulty is that it is not always immediately easy to determine if a translation has changed. We err on the side of caution, with the result that the total number of discrete translations may be several hundred lower than the number shown.
To make a suggestion, a correction, or a comment, we welcome you to click the link at the bottom of the page.
Click here for a working bibliography on the study and translation of Chinese poetry.
This website is the most recent effort to catalog Chinese poetry in translation, but it is neither the first nor the most complete. For an account of some still useful predecessors, see here.