The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (Mandarin Chinese and English Edition)

This is a beautiful edition from Copper Canyon Press of the poems of Han Shan (Cold Mountain) and a few poems of two of his companions. Han Shan was a medieval Chinese poet, often considered part of the Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist tradition. In my opinion he owes more to the Taoists, but gets his morality from the Buddhists, and morality is the subject of a lot of the poems. He is often classified as a wilderness poet, but he is more of a satirist. Many of his poems are scathing denunciations of society, including Buddhist and Taoist religious society. The poems are short, but the book is long, containing 307 poems by Han Shan, 49 by Shih Te, and four by Feng Kan. Han Shan's style is simple and straightforward, lyrical at times and rhetorical, even invective, at others. For a wilderness poet, it doesn't demonstrate love of nature so much as love of simple living. For a religious poet, he is remarkably non-pious. He also has a sense of humor, which tempers his satire. Like much Chinese poetry, his is very allusive, which makes Red Pine's footnotes most helpful. The translation is line by line, sticking close to the original (as far as my limited Chinese could detect from the Chinese text on facing pages). Red Pine's style is clear and concise, without affectations. Han Shan is considered (at least by Americans) as a classic Zen poet, but to my ear he lacks the heavy symbolism and deliberate mystification I often associate with Zen poetics. I appreciate his freshness, vigor, humor, and austere advice.

Red Pine's bilinqual translation of all the poems of Han Shan is a real treasure. He is also a very accurate translater according to a Chinese professor I know. Others has confirmed this. My own ability with Chinese is very limited, but I've had enough to sometimes use his Chinese text with a Chinese-English dictionary for some fun. It is too bad the Chinese characters are not larger in his book, for there is a lot of space on the page that could have been used for larger characters. If you want to try your hand at some translation, you need to be able to count the strokes, which is difficult with smaller characters. It is a good idea to have a couple other translations at hand, such as Burton Watson's. Red Pine provides an index that allows an easy comparison of his translation of a particular poem with other 7 published translations. Sometimes I do prefer Burton Watson. For example, Burton Watson: Who can break the snares of the world/ And sit with me among the white clouds?" Red Pine: who can get past the tangles of the world/and sit with me in the clouds." In this case, Red Pine omits the word white, which is in the original poem. His book has very good notes for the poems and an excellent introduction. Also included are poems by Feng-kan and Shih-te, two friends of Han Shan.

This book brings to life the poems of a legendary Chinese hermit in a Taoist/Buddhist era some 1100 years ago. The author is to be commended for both his translations as well as the context he gives to help contemporary audience understand each poem. Han Shan, the hermit poet, is an esoteric, eccentric, spiritual figure who shunned the religious institutions and society of his era. The poems are written as Han Shan lives his days in isolation on a mountain. Expect observations on birds, streams, and the unfolding of seasons, punctuated with ruminations on the pointless yearnings of normal civilized life. This collection reads like beat poetry from a thousand years ago in a culture with which I only have a vague, romantic understanding. I personally empathized with Han Shan, and imagined myself a Chinese hermit, alone in the wild with hardly a concern for the daily struggles and tribulations to which I currently choose to subject myself. This is Han Shan's point: you choose your dramas, you create your own suffering by clinging to the ways of the world. In this, he is the classic detached, enlightened bodhisattva. He just happens to have a knack for wry observation and a poetic yearning for the freedom found only in nature.

I ordered a bit ago and I kept getting messages the order was delayed - I was not concerned with the delay - very well worth it. I am savoring each verse and page.

This is the second time that I have purchased this book - the first I gave as a present to a friend. I love Han Shan's clear expression of the reality of what it is to be an aware human being. The verses are pared to the bone, yet brimming with insight and compassion. My one (smallish) grumble of this edition is the choice of the old and (to me) almost incomprehensible Wade-Giles romanization for the the Chinese terms in the English text. Having learnt Chinese with the modern (Chinese) Hanyu Pinyin system ( which I don't feel brutalizes the Chinese), I fail to understand why it is that US authors continue to use the linguistically inept Wade-Giles system. However, this version of the poems is a classic, and the accompanying Chinese version is tastefully presented and can be read alongside the English, enabling the reader to to sense the flavour of the original, while enjoying the skillful English Prose of Red Pine's version.

Many times I find a lot of books on Chinese poetry where the original language is missing and I would have to find the original online or looking through the university libraries for the originals. This book did it in a bilingual format and that removes all those troubles. In addition it has been translated in a way so that it is close to the original meaning of the poem and most of the footnotes help to get the deeper meanings and the definitions. I recommend this book for those who need materials to use to create calligraphic works or to simply to enjoy the poetry that Hanshan is known for.

For some reason, this was not love at first read. I gave up on reading the rather long "Translator's Preface" and the 'Introduction by John Blofield", and moved straight on to the poems. Took a while. Then I started being steadily drawn in. I have now re-read and re-read and re-read many of these poems. I have also really enjoyed the aforementioned Preface and the Introduction, after I had gotten an idea of what it was all about. . This book helps you (Red Pine's balanced notes are indispensable) get into the charming, funny, mischievous, witty and at times depressed, lonely, pining mind of a real flesh-and-blood mountain hermit. Who lived in the 8th century. But could walk though my door, and we would spend the night chatting away happily. Great book. Great character. And if you ask me, nothing much has changed in 1200 years. The essential human experience, the essential questioning, the basic ingredients of Life... same, same. Comforting, in many ways. Someone sighed "Cold Mountain sir your poems possess no sense" I said for the ancients poverty was no disgrace to this he answered laughing "such talk is poorly reasoned" well sir then be as you are with money your concern. Or: I reached Cold Mountain and all cares stopped no idle thoughts remained in my head nothing to do I write poems on rocks and trust the current like an unmoored boat Enjoy!

This is a really good book. The poetry is fantastic and so is the forward and introduction. One of those unique moments where forwards and introductions are worth your time. What strikes me most is that this is very accessible. You do not have to be a Buddhist or a Taoist to enjoy the writing, but if you are it serves as a great spiritual practice, reflecting on the writing regardless of your spiritual or faith background is well worth it. It is always interesting to see what wisdom can be had from older generations.

In this book of translations by 'Red Pine' (Bill Porter) of the Tang Dynasty collection of poetry attributed mostly to 'Han Shan' or 'Cold Mountain' [some are also attributed to two other figures closely associated with him] not only are there translations of the quality one would expect of 'Red Pine' and notes explaining/ clarifying allusions but also on the facing page the Chinese text. Further, I think Porter's comments about Han Shan's life, his poetry and information about what was generally accepted as the requirements for great Chinese poetry at the time are tremendously helpful - things much like what in English when I was in school were called 'prosody' {requirements for which syllables were to be accented, which not, what kinds of rhymes were acceptable, which perhaps not, etc. for a 'proper poem' in certain metric forms of English poetry - perhaps it might not be too great a distortion to compare to the 'rules' for the tennis game Robert Frost implied in his image that free verse was like 'playing tennis without a net'}. This is very much to the point in understanding some comments in Han Shan's poetry about his poetry and also in understanding some important points about the Chinese in which he wrote his poems (as well as being of interest to someone interested in classical Chinese poetry in general). Han Shan apparently 'suffered' from an inability to distinguish certain tonal differences required to write according to the accepted norms (I do not think this means he was like a foreigner from a non-tonal language like English when first learning Mandarin, for example, who may tend not to use or understand tones correctly - English has tones but not as part of important information about what word is being spoken}. This 'disability' of Han Shan's caused his poetry to be rather unconventional to the degree a number of critics would have refused to even consider it as poetry, yet his poetry it seems has always been appreciated even by a number of contemporaries honoured for their own poetry. This is one of the books I am especially delighted to have in my library. A copy from a lending library would not satisfy the wish to have something like this always available to hand.

Bilingual edition with Chinese calligraphic text on the left-hand page and very good English translations on the facing right-hand page. These poems have deeply influenced Seamus Heany's works and that is how I came to know them. The translation presented in this edition is a very fine work in itself, done by a poetic scholar of Cold Mountain who lived and followed the traces of the poet in China for many years. Each poem is 8 lines in length and there are 307 of them all of which are copiously annotated with very detailed footnotes on the left-hand page under the Chinese text. Also included are 49 poems by his colleague (Shih-te) and 4 by (Feng-kan) This edition also includes several photos of the places where the poet lived and worked and a graphic map of China of the time of the poet. Many of these poems are little gems of insight and wit or of sarcasm and bitter irony. They are like seeds, seminal works which I think caused Seamus Heany's mind to take off in poetic flight. They may do the same for any serious poet who discovers them.

Une bien belle édition du pseudo-moine fou mais authentique poète et l'un des plus grands de la Chine ancienne. On peut s'interroger sur certains parti-pris romantiques du traducteur. Au regard du texte chinois, il semble qu'une version plus sèche pourrait imposer de manière plus flagrante encore le génie souverain, et tellement moderne, de l'irascible Han Shan. En l'état, un livre de chevet.

Bel libro di poesie di un uomo che ha vissuto a lungo nel silenzio della vita religiosa e a contatto con la natura. Di solito do 4 stelle a Red Pine ma qui mi sento di darne 5 perché è un buon testo e per l'impegno profuso nel far conoscere queste perle a noi "occidentali"

just what I was lookin for