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"It is impossible to translate poetry, but worth the effort."

A trilingual translation work with side-by-side Classical Chinese, Modern Vernacular Chinese, and English makes this a valuable study guide. The translator, by his own confession in the preface, was less interested in having literal meaning translated than in keeping a hint of the beauty of the original language. This is a tension that all translations of poetry must resolve, and in this translator's view other English translations fall on the literal side of the equation so he thought to counter with a translation that keeps as close as possible to the core meaning while highlighting the beauty of the language as it is used in the original work, choosing the latter when the goals conflicted.

The translation is solid, from my own paltry efforts to read the Chinese, but it features an error that is bothersome to me, hence the loss of a star. The original work makes use of the character 兮 (xī), which is a meaningless symbol pronounced that was used in ancient texts in much the way that 啊 (ā) is used in modern texts or "uh" or "oh" or the like is used in English.

There's a problem with this.

This symbol was pronounced "xī" in Classical Chinese ... but it wasn't meant to be read aloud like that in poetry. Classical Chinese lacked punctuation, so pauses in text had to be indicated in some way when writing it, and 兮 was the character chosen since it had no meaning. When reading the original work, upon seeing 兮 the reader is expected to briefly pause: 兮 is, for all practical purposes, a comma in this work!

But the translation inserts "oh" wherever 兮 appears in the original text which is, well, literally every line or every second line (it varies) depending on the poem. And I just found it a bit distracting.