Yuan Haowen (1190-1257) is one of the greatest Chinese poets of the past eight hundred years. He is especially famous for his poems lamenting the death and disorder that accompanied the decline, fall, and aftermath of the Jin dynasty, when the Mongols took over North China. Reading Yuan’s poems, one feels his intense pain at the demise of the dynasty and his deeply felt need to preserve the historical and cultural record of civilization as he knew it. The poems are distinguished by breadth of learning, linguistic creativity, and allusive depth. They also reveal an abiding sense of irony, and occasional self-directed wry humor. John Timothy Wixted’s treatment of 150 of Yuan Haowen’s poems distills available scholarship on the poet in Chinese, Japanese, and Western languages. The poems-lucidly introduced, interpreted, and explicated-are presented in romanization and translation as well as in the original.
