[autarch]

One of the things I've noticed with my very limited knowledge of Chinese is that it's a fantastic language for poetic expression. Each Chinese character is a single syllable, so you can have a poem that consists of 4 lines, each with 6 syllables, and convey a huge amount of meaning.

In a language like English, 6 syllables won't get you nearly as much meaning.

I've noticed that Chinese pop music seems to have much more expressive, poetic lyrics, even in stuff aimed at a mass audience. A good example is Faye Wong's song "Sky". For a puff pop song the lyrics are quite poetic when translated into English. It's hard to think of an equivalently poetic English language song aimed at such a large audience.

[cleaver]

I'd add that the composition of Chinese characters makes possible poetic structures that are impossible in other languages. A famous poem by Tang dynasty poet Li Bai:

床前明月光 疑是地上霜。 舉頭望明月， 低頭思故鄉。

(Apologies if you can't see the characters on your system.) The key radical "月" (moon) repeats itself as a character on its own and also as a radical making up other characters. Thus, Chinese poems can have a measure of visual resonance as well as audible.

A sad fact is that the PRC government altered the written language to make it easier to learn writing and a lot of this subtle beauty was lost. Today, kids learn to type on a computer phonetically, so the complexity of the traditional characters is no longer an issue.

[Jun8]

Great example! Here are ~40 translations of his "Drinking Alone with the Moon" poem, one of my personal favorites: http://clatterymachinery.wordpress.com/2007/01/26/li-bai-dri.... The image of the moon and loneliness always reminds me of a well-known fragment of Sappho: http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/usappho/sph49.htm. About 1400 years and thousands of miles apart, yet resonating with the same emotion.

On the funnier side, the famous Lion-Eating Poet must be mentioned: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D.... Hilarious and beautiful example of constrained writing.

[autarch]

You could probably do something similar in English by using words that incorporate smaller words - "the sum of summer" or something like that.

I'm sure there must be examples of poems that do exactly that.

[Jun8]

You bring up a very interesting point. In addition to the syllable feature you mention the fact that Chinese (i.e. Mandarin) lacks many grammatical features (e.g. past tense) creates a timeless quality, praised by many translators to English.