Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China [Paperback]

David Hinton (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 30, 2005

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 Chü-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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The giants of T'ang Dynasty poetry-Wang Wei (701-761), Li Po (701-762), Tu Fu (712-770)-along with poets earlier and later are represented in this set of translations by Hinton, who has published 10 previous books of ancient Chinese translations, including the Tao Te Ching and The Analects. As T'ao Ch'ien (365-427) writes: "When I chant, words come clear. And in wine/ I touch countless distances."
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Translator and scholar Hinton ensures that Western readers will experience this supreme collection of Chinese rivers-and-mountains (shan-shui) poetry at the deepest possible level by succinctly explaining the cosmology inherent in this vital and profoundly influential tradition. The keys to understanding the elegant poetry of such masters as T'ao Ch'ien (365-427), Li Po (701-762), and Lu Yu (1125-1210) are realizing that they perceive no divide between the human and what we call nature, or between being and nonbeing, and recognizing that in Taoist thought existence is an ongoing process of transformation "through which all things arise and pass away." The path taken in most of these deceptively simple lyrics leads away from the clamor of the city back to life's sweet essences: the flow of water, the play of shadows and sunshine on mountain and field, the moon's phases, and the great wheel of the seasons. Oneness with life at its purest is the desired mode for these thoughtful, yet often playful, poets, and dwelling within these meditative pages is the first step on the way there. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation (May 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811216241
• ISBN-13: 978-0811216241
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #469,328 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #60 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Chinese

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mountains & Rivers - The Poetic Soul of China, March 8, 2003

By 

John W. Hicks "Vietnam Era Veteran" (Gilbert, South Carolina United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China (Hardcover)

David Hinton has given us in one volume the perfect window into the poetic soul of China. The Mountains & Rivers tradition inspired both poetry and painting in classic China for centuries and is one of the highest flowerings of human civilization. Hinton compiles all of the best poets and poems of this tradition in good translation. His commentary and mini-bios are dead on. The book would have benefited from scattered illustrations of chinese landscape painting and caligraphy which were inseparable in the Chinese cultural mind.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Misty Mountain Hop through Chinese Poetry, February 26, 2007

By 

Crazy Fox (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China (Paperback)

Ever want to just get away from it all? So did the poets featured in "Mountain Home," a fine anthology of Chinese poetry from the 5th century till well into the Sung Dynasty (ending in 1279). The poems herein all concentrate on nature and the poet's immersion within the natural landscapes of which he's a part, and are replete with subtle evocations of Taoist and Ch'an Buddhist themes and attitudes. Most of the poets were at some point government officials living in the capital who subsequently tuned in and dropped out--sometimes of their own accord, sometimes because it was time for them to retire anyway, but often making the best of ending up on the wrong side of the political ups-and-downs of the age. In any case, each brings his own individual, unique approach to China's long tradition of poetic nature reclusion and has shared that with us in wonderfully well-crafted verse.

While David Hinton's introductions and commentary do a wonderful job in explaining to the reader how each poet is distinct within the tradition, though, the different poems themselves all sort of come across sounding the same in his translation--oh, they're nice, no doubt about that, and the translation work seems mostly carefully accurate and sensitive while rendering the poems in a somewhat modernist American idiom. Still, they all sound a little more like David Hinton than themselves in terms of poetic voice, generally speaking. This is the inevitable quandary faced by most translators, though, especially of poetry, and the job overall is top-notch. And it really is a wonderful collection of poems, full of the calm and quiet of the mountains.

The book includes poems by T'ao Ch'ien, Hsieh Ling-yun, Meng Hao-jan, Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Wei Ying-wu, Han Shan, Meng Chiao, Liu Tsung-Yuan, Po Chu-i, Chia Tao, Tu Mu, Mei Yao-ch'en, Wang An-shih, Su Tung-p'o, Lu Yu, Fan Ch'eng-ta, and Yang Wan-li.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars it could be better, November 17, 2007

By 

Ruisu (NYC) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China (Paperback)

I have to agree with another reviewer that the translator, David Hinton, tends to make all his poets speak in one voice. It is a fine voice, but does not fully respect the differences among the originals. (I object also to the over-frequent use of enjambment, much rarer in Chinese poetry than the translations imply.) That much said, I am grateful for this book.