Synopsis
Winner of PEN Award for Poetry in Translation 2007 Wang Wei (701-761 AD) is often spoken of, with his contemporaries Li Po and Tu Fu, as one of the three greatest poets in China’s 3,000-year poetic history. He was the consummate master of the short imagistic landscape poem that came to typify classical Chinese poetry, with poems of resounding tranquillity whose style and substance can be traced to his practice of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism. But in spite of this philosophical depth, Wang is not a difficult poet. He may in fact be the most immediately appealing of China’s great poets, and in Hinton’s masterful translations he sounds utterly contemporary. David Hinton’s translations have earned wide acclaim for recreating the classical Chinese tradition as compelling contemporary poetry. His many honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. As William Mullen wrote in The New York Sun, “Mr. Hinton has established himself as the premier Chinese translator of our generation… He is a national treasure”. Anvil has also published his selections of the T’ang Dynasty poets Li Po, Tu Fu and Po Chü-i, and Mountain Home, his anthology of Chinese wilderness poetry.
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