Provides translations of more than two hundred-fifty poems by over forty poets, from early anonymous poetry through the T'ang and Sung dynasties.

Provides translations of more than two hundred-fifty poems by over forty poets, from early anonymous poetry through the T'ang and Sung dynasties.

This rich compendium of translations is the first to look at Chinese poetry through its enormous influence on American poetry. Starting with Ezra Pound's Cathay (1915), it includes translations by three other American poets (William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder) and a translator-scholar-poet (David Hinton), all long associated with New Directions, the great New York literary publishing house founded just over 70 years ago. The collection gathers some 200 poems by nearly 40 poets, from the anonymous early poetry to the great masters of the T'ang and Sung dynasties. Also included are previously uncollected translations by Pound, a selection of essays (some also not previously collected) by all five translators and biographical notes that are a collage of poems and comments by both the American translators and the Chinese poets themselves.

The earliest and most extensive literary engagement with wilderness in human history, Mountain Home is vital poetry that feels utterly contemporary. China's tradition of "rivers-and-mountains" poetry stretches across millennia. This is a plain-spoken poetry of immediate day-to-day experience, and yet seems most akin to China's grand landscape paintings. Although its wisdom is ancient, rooted in Taoist and Zen thought, the work feels utterly contemporary, especially as rendered here in Hinton's rich and accessible translations. Mountain Home collects poems from 5th- through 13th-century China and includes the poets Li Po, Po Chu-i and Tu Fu. The "rivers-and-mountains" tradition covers a remarkable range of topics: comic domestic scenes, social protest, travel, sage recluses, and mountain landscapes shaped into forms of enlightenment. And within this range, the poems articulate the experience of living as an organic part of the natural world and its processes. In an age of global ecological disruption and mass extinction, this tradition grows more urgently important every day. Mountain Home offers poems that will charm and inform not just readers of poetry, but also the large community of readers who are interested in environmental awareness.

Nearly a hundred poets are represented, a number of them in Pound's translations, with emphasis on the Greek, Latin, Chinese, Troubadour, Renaissance, and Elizabethan poets.

Cathay is a compilation of traditional Chinese poems translated into English by poet Ezra Pound. These fifteen poems are seen less as strict translations and more as new pieces in their own right.

A new expanded edition of the classic study of translation, finally back in print

“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 lyrical world of Chinese poetry in faithful translations by Kenneth Rexroth.

"The poetry proves again that stereotypes mislead. Chinese verse is supposedly cool and distant, detached and dispassionate. The opposite seems true; poets are exalted or downcast, drunk with wine or, in the case of women, frankly sensuous....Nothing stands still in this poetry: the wind blows the trees, the lake water ripples and the ever-present road runs in and out of the hills." --America