A monumental volume, with over a thousand translations by people such as Ezra Pound, Cyril Birch, and Burton Watson sampling over 2,000 years of a venerable literary tradition. Some of the pieces have forms recognizable to westerners lyric verse, prose tales, and the like while others oracles, chronicles, philosophical writings, and hagiographies have not been common for a long time in the west either. The anthology sometimes selects one of the many translations of a piece, but sometimes juxtaposes then, such as the 20 versions of a poem from the Book of Songs arranged chronologically. There is a guide to pronunciation, a conversion table for different transcriptions, and an index of translators. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)