The Late Poems of Meng Chiao [Hardcover]

Chiao Meng (Author), David Hinton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 23, 1996 | Series: Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation

Late in life, Meng Chiao (AD 751-814) developed an experimental poetry that anticipated landmark developments in the modern Western tradition by a millennium. This text contains a translation of these works, poetry which may be the most radical in the Chinese tradition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

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-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Chinese

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 104 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr; First American Edition First Printing edition (December 23, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691012377
• ISBN-13: 978-0691012377
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,466,584 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars tremendous, January 21, 2009

By 

echoes of empires (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Late Poems of Meng Chiao (Paperback)

I love Hinton's translations of Meng Chiao's poems. Others are great (Stephen Owen and A.C. Graham), but Hinton's language is less direct, more suggestive, and in that way more impressionistic. This seems 'right' to me because I feel this is the style in which mountains and streams tradition artists painted landscapes - it was not so direct, was full of allusion, and certainly impressionistic. Meng Chiao's writing itself is among the most internal or 'non-objective' of T'ang period poetry, often carrying an undertone of loss or grief. Buddhist ideas of emptiness and compassion are there, though usually very subtley. His poetry feels very personal, which is a great deal of what I so like about it - he expresses human complexity amazingly well, and I think Hinton does a tremendous job of expressing that through his translations...

2 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Late Poetry of Meng Chiao, October 10, 2007

By 

Frank A. Doonan "shunyadragon" (Hillsborough, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Late Poems of Meng Chiao (Paperback)

I bought this book on the rcommendation that it is a good sample of translated Meng Chiao poems to use as a guide, because I translateJade Culture of China, and Chinese poetry that relates to the Jade Culture. But I found the translations poor for the high standards of a published work.

Translated works on Chinese Poetry need more commentary, and show the Chinese. This work did not.

If need be I can provide an example or two of a translation problem with this work.

Frank

Go with the flow the river knows.