That said, what’s included here is striking, poetic, and conveys the sense of strange beauty that’s often associated with the original text. I’ve only read portions of the 1999 translation by Anne Birrell, and nothing of Richard E Strassberg’s 2008 version, so I don’t know how these selections compare to what’s included in the full translations available. This is, in essence, a bestiary of ‘fantastic creatures’ mentioned in the famous Chinese text ‘The Classic of Mountains and Seas’. I can’t say enough about Siyu Chen’s contribution to this project. Simply incredible stuff, which reflect the mystery and wonder of the ancient classic while also feeling modern and graced with the artists’s unique vision my personal favorites are Fusang shu, Tianwu, Jingwei, and Sanzu shu. The monochromatic illustrations by Siyu Chen are, without fail and on every single page, awe inspiring. Their work has been rendered into English by the foremost translator of modern Chinese literature in the West.īefore I praise the text itself, I wanna say that this book is stupidly gorgeous. They include spirits and deities and all sorts of strange creatures-dragons and phoenixes, hybrid beasts, some with human features, some hideous or with a call like wood splitting, or that portend drought or flood or bounty others whose flesh cures disease or fends off nightmares, or whose pelt guarantees many progeny.ĭrawn from The Classic of Mountains and Seas, Fantastic Creatures is the work of two members of China's millennial generation, a young scholar and writer once known as the youngest "Genius of Chinese Cultural Studies" and an inspired illustrator trained in China and the United States, who together managed to communicate with the soul of a 4,000-year-old beast and have brought forth its strange beauty. The beings catalogued within these pages come from the regions of the known world, from the mountains and seas, the Great Wastelands, and the Lands Within the Seas that became China. Illustrated throughout with more than 180 two-color drawings that are so sinuous they move on the page, it is a work for lovers of fantasy and mythology, ancient knowledge, fabulous beasts, and inspired art. The gorgeously illustrated contemporary edition of an ancient Chinese text-for fans of fantastic beasts everywhereįantastic Creatures of the Mountains and Seas is a new translation for contemporary readers of a classic Chinese text that is at once the geography of an ancient world, a bestiary of mythical creatures, and a book of cultural and medicinal lore.
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