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26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Cold cliffs, more beautiful the deeper you enter...", June 20, 2001
Burton Watson has always struck me as an eminently civilized scholar and as a fine translator. He wears his scholarship lightly, and doesn't overburden the text with extraneous matter. His many translations from Chinese and Japanese Literature are of uniformly high quality, and are well worth having as they are books one often returns to. What little is known of the eccentric hermit Han Shan will be found in Watson's brief, interesting and informative Introduction. The book then goes on to offer a selection of one hundred of Han Shan's 8-line poems which provide us with glimpses of the poet's life on 'Cold Mountain,' and his thoughts and feelings about reality, life, and the world in general. Here is a brief example, with my obliques added to indicate line breaks : "Cold cliffs, more beautiful the deeper you enter - / Yet no one travels this road. / White clouds idle about the tall crags; / On the green peak a single monkey wails. / What other companions do I need ? / I grow old doing as I please. / Though face and form alter with the years, / I hold fast to the pearl of the mind" (p.73). The first line here reminds me of a famous haiku by Santoka Taneda, one of Japan's best loved poets and also a Zen-man like Han Shan. A translation of it will be found in John Steven's marvelous edition of Santoka, who translates: "Going deeper / And still deeper - / The green mountains." I think that both Han Shan and Santoka were getting at the same thing. Stevens comments: "Deeper and deeper into the human heart without being able to fathom its depth. . . ." ('Mountain Tasting,' p.37). The human heart, yes, but also self, nature, time, reality, the mystery of existence, "the pearl of the mind," and, ultimately, the world of Buddha, or, for others, God. And deeper into the poems too as, to borrow the words of Robert Bly, "Baskets that Hold God." Although Watson's 'Han Shan' is an early work, it's wonderfully readable and his translations are of a quality that put him pretty well on a level with US poet Gary Snyder, who has also done a translation of Han Shan's poems. They will be found in his book, 'Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems,' and readers might find it interesting to compare the versions of these two very different translators, one an academic and the other a Zen adept. Both Watson and Snyder are excellent in their different ways, and either would serve the needs of anyone who hasn't yet had the good fortune to read Han Shan. Read him once and you'll love him and never forget him. He's a fount of wisdom and very human, and his poems can be read with enjoyment by anyone. And if you like Han Shan, as I'm sure you will, take a look at Santoka as you'll almost certainly like him too. In Han Shan and Santoka we see life and truth as reflected in two very special sensibilities, and we can all learn a lot from both. Details of John Stevens' book are as follows : MOUNTAIN TASTING : ZEN HAIKU BY SANTOKA TANEDA. Translated by John Stevens. 126 pp. New York and Tokyo : Weatherhill, 1980 and Reprinted.
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