Translations into English
The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons translated Vincent Shih (NYRB Calligrams 2015). The best-known and most widely-used translation of the Wenxin diaolong. It’s the version of the text to which we refer the most. Thanks to NYRB’s Calligrams series, it is now widely-available.
The Book of Literary Design translated Siu–kit Wong, Allan Chung–han Lo and Kwong–tai Lam (Hong Kong University Press 1999). We love the title of this version. This translation is both much more idiomatic, and also much wilder, than the Vincent Shih edition. It reads strangely at times, but has the virtue of boldness, and is unafraid of extravagance.
There’s also Dragon-Carving and the Literary Mind (Wenxin diaolong), translated by Yang Guobin with an Introduction and Annotations, from the Library of Chinese Classics in English Translation (2003). It’s as impossible to get hold of as a real-live dragon (when working at Sichuan University, Wind&Bones’s Will Buckingham searched all over for it), but is supposed to be a good, clear translation.
There are some translated chapters in Stephen Owen’s monumental Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Harvard University Press 1996). The translated chapters read very well, and the book is an incredibly rich resource for those wanting to read more broadly about the Chinese literary tradition.
Scholarly Books
A Chinese Literary Mind: Culture, Creativity, and Rhetoric in Wenxin diaolong edited by Zong-Qi Cai (Stanford University Press 2002) is a terrific series of essays. It was how Wind&Bones’s Will Buckingham first stumbled across Liu Xie’s book, when he picked this essay collection up in a secondhand bookstore in the northeast of England some time in the early 2000s.
Scholarly Papers
This survey of the Wenxin diaolong in the English-speaking world, by our friend Professor Ying Liu, is terrific: Ying Liu (2008) “A Dialogue across Space and Time: A Survey of Wenxin diaolong Scholarship in the English-Speaking World”, Comparative Literature: East & West, 10:1, 89-105, DOI: 10.1080/25723618.2008.12015583 [Get the paper here]
Will has written some scholarly papers on the Wenxin diaolong.
- “Cultivation and the Arts of Writing: Liu Xie” by Will Buckingham, in Cultivating a Good Life in Early Chinese and Ancient Greek Philosophy: Perspectives and Reverberations, ed. Karyn Lai, Rick Benitez and Hyun Jin Kim (Bloomsbury 2018).
- “Participation, Pattern and Change: Creativity in Liu Xie and Lucretius” (文與通、變：論劉勰與盧克萊修的創作觀) by Will Buckingham, NTU Studies in Language and Literature 29期 (2013 / 06 / 01), p 1 - 23
- “Intricacies：What Liu Xie Taught Me About Writing”, Will Buckingham, 中外文化與文論 47.
The Chinese Text
You can find the full Chinese text over at the brilliant CText project. Click here.