This is the very finest translation of Chinese poems I have seen. I have over one hundred books of translations of Chinese poets.

Hinton is able to catch the feel of a Zen religous life by a famous civil servant of the late Tang Dynasty. He captures the bitter sweet character of the life many Chinese poets chose where they were two totally different people -- mystics and civil servants. We can find few people in world history on which to model our lifes with more real depth than Po Chi I, Su Tung Po, and Wang Wei.

A Servant Girl Is Missing

From the low walls of our small courtyard to the notice-board outside our district gate,

I've searched and searched, ashamed our love proved meager, wishing I could do it all over.

But a caged bird can't bear a master for long, and the branch means nothing to a blossom

freed on the wind. Where can she be tonight? Only the moon's understanding light knows.

This was written in the 9th century C.E. by the famous Chinese Tang dynasty poet Po Chu-I. Po's beautiful lines are Taoist and Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist in influence, but something about them sings transcendent and is not easily categorized. Consider how much is contained in this poem: worry, a confession of wrongdoing, an admission of love, something about nature and the need for human freedom, and a tiny fragment of intuitive (mystic) insight when he adds: "Only the moon's understanding light knows." Whew! How did he do it, all carefully wrapped in deceptively simple rhyming couplets in the Chinese? I'm awed by this work, as I am by Po's modern English translator, David Hinton. This book is recently available in trade paperback by New Directions Publishing. Any of these Chinese poets (Hinton translates Meng Chiao and my favorite, T'ao Ch'ien, too, as well as others) will radically change your view of life, for theirs was a powerful and elegant civilization when Rome was still fighting off its hordes. These are beautiful, poignant, often sad, but very wise reflections about existence, metaphysics, and how to live a rich life.

I have to commend David Hinton's ability to change translation styles to match the style of the poets he translates. Po Chu-i's poetry is very simple and straightforward, and in response, Hinton sticks very close to the original Chinese in his translation. This works very well most of the time, but at times it is taken too far, and the gammar can seem awkward taken in English. Nevertheless, the essentially beauty of the poetry shines through, and the selection is well chosen. I would have preferred that the original Chinese be included, but this omission is unlikely to bother most readers. All in all, the collection is a credit both to poet and translator. I highly recommend it.

This book is a well-chosen cross-section of Chinese Zen poetry. It also supplies one of my favorite items in translations of foreign poetry - the original text. The strength of this book is the broad stretch of time covered, as indicated by the organization of the index: pre-T'ang dynasty, T'ang, Sun, Yuan, Ming, Ch'ing. This breadth also means, however, that not all the poetry is of the quality one find's in more focused collections ephasizing the masters Wang Wei, Han Shan, Li Po... Several of these collections appear as "selected sources" in this book.

My favorite in this volume is The Flow and Seed Sequence, a series seven poems written by the Zen Patriarchs beginning with Bodhidharma (d. 536) with poems added to the series nearly 2 centuries later. The translations do an excellent job of retaining the concrete imagery typical of Zen poetry e.g. from Liu Chang Ching "All along the trail of moss, / I follower your wooden shoeprints". We find inventive descriptions of concret images in Liu Fang-Ping "The Big Dipper slopes; / the Great Bear bends down". There are also unusual mentions of doubt from Wang An Shih "Often I doubt the Buddhist way, / that nothing truly exists".

Despite its many good attributes, this collection failed my ultimate test: rarely was I enticed to read and reread a poem. I would still recommend A Drifting Boat or Cold Mountain first. But to even be worthy of comparison to those volumes is strong praise.