Customer Reviews

Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China

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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.

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.

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.

I'm afraid all I wrote about David Hinton's Wang Wei translations applies to this collection: mannered, affected literal translation of place and personal names, Chinoiserie: Ezra Pounds meets Arthur Waley with 60s real zen somewhere in the background. I don't understand why a man who translates every proper name into quaint English leaves wú tóng (wu t'ung) tree (p.219) when "parasol tree" or even "plane tree" would do. Perhaps H.
thinks Firmiana simplex (Sterculia platanifolia) - the only tree on which the phoenix will next - must be left
alone.

Christopher Busby