My aunt and her collaborator used this title to refer to Sunflower Splendor. This is a 1000 poem anthology from the 70s whose translators were scholars, not poets. The book itself is physically repulsive. There are no sunflowers in Chinese poetry. The translations by Chinese professors (Professors of Chinese, who may or may not be Chinese) are just kind of clunky.
The tradition of translating from Chinese poetically starts with Wale, Pound, and Bynner and goes through Rexroth and Snyder and Merwin. There is a confluence between modernist poetics and Chinese and Japanese poetry, with the imagist movement. In other words, our idea of good poetry, inherited from the imagists, is a lot of concrete imagery in economical language.
Chinese poetry is written in rhyme in lines of 5 or 7 monosyllabic words, with complex prosodic rules that nobody cares about in English. Usually, American translations do not rhyme and downplay parallelism. It's kind of the opposite of English haiku, where people know how many syllables there are (even though the units in question are not really syllables).
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