Sound and Sense – A Musical Look at Chinese Poetry in 1916

Abstract

This essay examines two contributions related to “Chinese poetry” from Eunice Tietjens, an early editor of and contributor to the Chicago-based magazine Poetry. In the first, Tietjens uses western musical notation to transcribe the “tunes” of two Chinese scholars chanting a short poem. The second is a group of Tietjens’s own poetic sketches of the China she witnessed on her 1916 visit. Taken together, these projects provide a useful commentary on the translation of Chinese poetry in the early 20th century.