The Late Poems of Meng Chiao
The Late Poems of Meng Chiao

Author: Meng Chiao

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 103

ISBN-13: 0691217726

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Late in life, Meng Chiao (A.D. 751--814) developed an experimental poetry of virtuosic beauty, a poetry that anticipated landmark developments in the modern Western tradition by a millennium. With the T'ang Dynasty crumbling, Meng's later work employed surrealist and symbolist techniques as it turned to a deep introspection. This is truly major work-- work that may be the most radical in the Chinese tradition. And though written more than a thousand years ago, it is remarkably fresh and contemporary. But, in spite of Meng's significance, this is the first volume of his poetry to appear in English. Until the age of forty, Meng Chiao lived as a poet-recluse associated with Ch'an (Zen) poet-monks in south China. He then embarked on a rather unsuccessful career as a government official. Throughout this time, his poetry was decidedly mediocre, conventional verse inevitably undone by his penchant for the strange and surprising. After his retirement, Meng developed the innovative poetry translated in this book. His late work is singular not only for its bleak introspection and "avant-garde" methods, but also for its dimensions: in a tradition typified by the short lyric poem, this work is made up entirely of large poetic sequences.

Poems of the Late T'ang
Poems of the Late T'ang

Author:

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2008-01-22

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 9781590172575

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Classical Chinese poetry reached its pinnacle during the T'ang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.), and the poets of the late T'ang-a period of growing political turmoil and violence-are especially notable for combining strking formal inovation with raw emotional intensity. A. C. Graham’s slim but indispensable anthology of late T’ang poetry begins with Tu Fu, commonly recognized as the greatest Chinese poet of all, whose final poems and sequences lament the pains of exile in images of crystalline strangeness. It continues with the work of six other masters, including the “cold poet” Meng Chiao, who wrote of retreat from civilization to the remoteness of the high mountains; the troubled and haunting Li Ho, who, as Graham writes, cultivated a “wholly personal imagery of ghosts, blood, dying animals, weeping statues, whirlwinds, the will-o'-the-wisp”; and the shimmeringly strange poems of illicit love and Taoist initiation of the enigmatic Li Shang-yin. Offering the largest selection of these poets’ work available in English in a translation that is a classic in its own right, Poems of the Late T’ang also includes Graham’s searching essay “The Translation of Chinese Poetry” as well as helpful notes on each of the poets and on many of the individual poems.

The Late Poems of Wang An-Shih
The Late Poems of Wang An-Shih

Author: Wang An-Shih

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2015-03-17

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 0811222640

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A selection of poems by the ancient Chinese poet and statesman Wang Ah-Shih, translated by David Hinton. Wang An-shih (1021-1086 C.E.) was a remarkable figure—not only one of the great Sung Dynasty poets, but also the most influential and controversial statesman of his time. Although Wang had little interest in the grandeur of high office and political power, he took the responsibility of serving the people seriously. He rose to become prime minister, and in this position he instituted a controversial system of radically egalitarian social reforms to improve the lives of China’s peasants. Once those reforms were securely in place, Wang retired to a reclusive life of artistic and spiritual self-cultivation. It was after his retirement, practicing Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism and wandering the mountains around his home, that Wang An-shih wrote the poems that made his reputation. Short and plainspoken, these late poems contain profound multitudes–the passing of time, rivers and mountains, silence and Buddhist emptiness. They won him wide acclaim in China and beyond across the centuries. And in Hinton's breathtaking translations, Wang feels like a major contemporary poet with deep ecological insight and a questioning spirit.

Classical Chinese Poetry
Classical Chinese Poetry

Author: David Hinton

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2014-06-10

Total Pages: 597

ISBN-13: 1466873221

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“A magisterial book” of nearly five hundred poems from some of history’s greatest Chinese poets, translated and edited by a renowned poet and scholar (New Republic). The Chinese poetic tradition is the largest and longest continuous tradition in world literature. This rich and far-reaching anthology of nearly five hundred poems provides a comprehensive account of its first three millennia (1500 BCE to 1200 CE), the period during which virtually all its landmark developments took place. Unlike earlier anthologies of Chinese poetry, Hinton’s book focuses on a relatively small number of poets, providing selections that are large enough to re-create each as a fully realized and unique voice. New introductions to each poet’s work provide a readable history, told for the first time as a series of poetic innovations forged by a series of master poets. “David Hinton has . . . lured into English a new manner of hearing the great poets of that long glory of China’s classical age. His achievement is another echo of the original, and a gift to our language.” —W. S. Merwin

The Selected Poems of Li Po
The Selected Poems of Li Po

Author: Bai Li

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 9780811213233

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There is a set-phrase in Chinese referring to the phenomenon of Li Po: "Winds of the immortals, bones of the Tao." He moved through this world with an unearthly freedom from attachment, and at the same time belonged profoundly to the earth and its process of change. However ethereal in spirit, his poems remain grounded in the everyday experience we all share. He wrote 1200 years ago, half a world away, but in his poems we see our world transformed. Legendary friends in eighth-century T'ang China, Li Po and Tu Fu are traditionally celebrated as the two greatest poets in the Chinese canon. David Hinton's translation of Li Po's poems is no less an achievement than his critically acclaimed The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, also published by New Directions. By reflecting the ambiguity and density of the original, Hinton continues to create compelling English poems that alter our conception of Chinese poetry.

The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-Jan
The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-Jan

Author: Meng Hao-Jan

Publisher: Archipelago

Published: 2012-08-01

Total Pages: 97

ISBN-13: 1935744097

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The first full flowering of Chinese poetry occurred in the illustrious T’ang Dynasty, and at the beginning of this renaissance stands Meng Hao-jan (689-740 c.e.), esteemed elder to a long line of China’s greatest poets. Deeply influenced by Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism, Meng was the first to make poetry from the Ch’an insight that deep understanding lies beyond words. The result was a strikingly distilled language that opened new inner depths, non-verbal insights, and outright enigma. This made Meng Hao-jan China’s first master of the short imagistic landscape poem that came to typify ancient Chinese poetry. And as a lifelong intimacy with mountains dominates Meng’s work, such innovative poetics made him a preeminent figure in the wilderness (literally rivers-and-mountains) tradition, and that tradition is the very heart of Chinese poetry. This is the first English translation devoted to the work of Meng Hao-jan. Meng’s poetic descendents revered the wisdom he cultivated as a mountain recluse, and now we too can witness the sagacity they considered almost indistinguishable from that of rivers and mountains themselves.

Sunflower Splendor
Sunflower Splendor

Author: Wuji Liu

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 1975

Total Pages: 708

ISBN-13: 9780253355805

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A comprehensive anthology of Chinese poetry from the 12th century B.C. to the present. "This magnificent collection has the effect of a complete library rather than of an anthology of poetry.... A lyric quality comes through into our own language... Every page is alive with striking and wonderful things, immediately accessible." -- Publishers Weekly "Sunflower Splendor is the largest and, on the whole, best anthology of translated Chinese poems to have appeared in a Western language." -- The New York Times Book Review "This remarkably fine anthology should remain standard for a long time." -- Library Journal ..". excellent translations by divers hands. Open to any page and listen to the still, sad music... " -- Washington Post Bookworld

A Drifting Boat
A Drifting Boat

Author: Jerome P. Seaton

Publisher: White Pine Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 9781877727375

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Poetry. This anthology gathers together over 1500 years of Chinese Zen (Ch'an) poetry from the earliest writing, including the Hsin Hsin Ming written by the 3rd Patriarch, to the poetry of monks in this century. Poets include Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Yuan Mei, the crazy hermits Han-shan and Shih-te, as well as many anonymous monks and hermits.