Customer Reviews

The Late Poems of Meng Chiao

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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...

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.