Tang Yun唐韵
Buy a print

About

A reading edition, not a museum

There are excellent scholarly translations of Tang poetry, and there are free websites that give you the Chinese and a machine translation. What is missing is the middle: a place where a curious reader can open a poem, understand every line, and be told what to look at.

Tang Yun is that place. Each poem gets the original Chinese, a line-by-line English translation, and a short note — usually about structure, because structure is what survives translation.

How the translations were made

Every translation here was written for this site rather than copied. The priorities, in order: be accurate about what the character says; keep the line breaks so the two languages stay face to face; then, where possible, let it sound like English. Where those three conflict, accuracy wins and the note explains what was lost.

About the calligraphy

The prints are typographic, not photographed ink: brush-style characters set vertically on a paper tone, with a vermilion seal. We say so plainly because a hand-painted original is a different object and should be bought from a calligrapher. These are for reading walls, classrooms and gifts.

About us

Tang Yun (唐韵) is owned and operated by Beijing Hadonglobal Technology and Trade Co., Ltd. (北京哈东国际科贸有限公司), an independent company based in Beijing, China.

Corrections

If a line is wrong, we want to know. Write to peter.wu@hadonglobal.com with the poem and the line, and it will be fixed and credited.