Description: An expansive selection of poems from the last giant of classical Chinese poetry's golden age, Yang Wan-li (1127-1206 c.e.), masterfully translated by David Hinton.
A typical Yang Wan-li poem attends to immediate experience with profound clarity, and this attention usually leads to a moment of sudden awakening: a startling image or turn of thought, a surprising imaginative gesture, a twist of humor. As a government official, Yang undertook many long and arduous journeys that exposed him to both breathtaking landscapes and hardships of hunger, exhaustion, bitter weather, and dangerous rapids in stark gorges. It is in this crucible of tranquil beauty and existential danger that he forged a poetry of self-realization deeply informed by Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist insight. With nothing more than a crystalline attention to the present moment, Yang's poems find enlightenment everywhere: in a fly, for instance, sunning on a windowsill. Hinton's translations give a remarkably modern voice to Yang's journeys through the perennial mysteries of consciousness, revealing for a new generation why his poetry has captivated readers for nearly a millennium.Review Quotes: Praise for David Hinton's Chinese poetry translations
"He continues to enlarge our literary horizon."―Rosemary Waldrop, citation for the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award "Given the magnitude of his ability and his overall project, Hinton is creating nothing less than a new literary tradition in English, an event of truly major importance not only to English literature but also to the literature of my own language. I cannot recommend the value of his work too highly."
―Bei Dao "Hinton's achievement is a gift to our language."
--W. S. Merwin "David Hinton is the best English-language translator of classic Chinese poetry we have, and have had for decades."
--The American Academy of Arts and Letters "He has been building, translation by translation, an English language for the Chinese conceptual world."
--The New York Review of Books