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I’m sure the translations and commentary of David Hinton’s Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology got more than adequate reviews when the book came out in hardcover, but since I seem to have overlooked them, I feel justified in using the appearance of the paperback edition to rehearse what makes the book an essential single volume on the topic for the early 21st century in the United States of America, if not the English-reading countries in general.
For reasons I have deleted from this less self-indulgent version of my review, we late-‘60s types got a wonderfully hazy vision of classical Chinese verse, not unlike our hazy vision of classical Chinese painting, which was characterized more by enthusiasm than by knowledge of anything other than Mai-mai Tze’s rendition of the Mustard Seed Garden Manual.
In 2010, it is past time to appreciate subtle historical differences, and David Hinton has provided not only an illuminating commentary but a translation in which the different poets sound like different poets in English, rather than like the same poet unaccountably covering a wide range of topics. Without imitating anybody, he draws on enough contemporary strategies of American verse to convey the stylistic differences among poets who originate certain dominant motifs—Hsiao Ling-Yün’s mountains and rivers, T’ao Ch’ien’s fields and gardens—and those who expanded and modified the traditions, or threw them away altogether in surreal ventures such as Meng Chiao’s “Laments of the Gorges.”
Of course, American poets of the late 1960s were imitating Chinese models after their own post-Beat lights, so it is difficult to tell whether Hinton’s title for a poem by Su Tung-p’o slightly echoes James Wright because Hinton has picked up Wright’s characteristic cadences, or whether it is because Wright imitated Chinese practice so flawlessly in his own titles: “12th Moon, 14th Sun: A Light Snow Fell Overnight, So I Set Out Early for South Creek, Stopped for a Quick Meal and Arrived Late.”
Hinton clearly delineates the major vectors of classical Chinese verse, and the biographic strategies that were greatly imitated so that Chinese poets came to share distinctive cultural markers: “In one mythic version of [Wang An-shih’s] ideal, a sage recluse living contentedly in the mountains recognizes that the nation is in crisis and needs his wisdom. He reluctantly joins the government after being summoned by the emperor, resolves the crisis, and then, having no interest in the wealth and renown associated with that life, returns to cultivate his simple life of spiritual depth in the mountains. This ideal was
enacted by countless intellectuals in ancient China, though in a more realistic form. They devoted themselves to public service, always watching for a chance to spend time in mountain seclusion, often at Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist monasteries, and then at some point retired permanently from government service to live as recluses.”
This ideal doesn’t have much to do with the crazed drunkenness of late-‘60s English majors, and even less to do with the realities of power in China today, where presumably nobody slips off to the mountains to meditate on the fruits of action and inaction. But it may be instructive to notice that the most assiduously spontaneous classical poets were not removed from pragmatic political opinions: Yang Wan-li, alternately in power and banished for his politics, even led a government expedition against a group of bandits and rebels before experiencing Ch’an sudden enlightenment at age fifty and subsequently turning out several thousand poems.
Hinton deals extensively with the women poets of China, to the point of including an additional survey in one of the book’s appendices. His version of Li Ch’ing Chao is as appealing as Kenneth Rexroth’s, and presumably closer to the actual structure of the poems in the few cases in which the poems’ repeated lines feel a little jarring—jarring to me, anyway.
For reasons I have deleted from this less self-indulgent version of my review, we late-‘60s types got a wonderfully hazy vision of classical Chinese verse, not unlike our hazy vision of classical Chinese painting, which was characterized more by enthusiasm than by knowledge of anything other than Mai-mai Tze’s rendition of the Mustard Seed Garden Manual.
In 2010, it is past time to appreciate subtle historical differences, and David Hinton has provided not only an illuminating commentary but a translation in which the different poets sound like different poets in English, rather than like the same poet unaccountably covering a wide range of topics. Without imitating anybody, he draws on enough contemporary strategies of American verse to convey the stylistic differences among poets who originate certain dominant motifs—Hsiao Ling-Yün’s mountains and rivers, T’ao Ch’ien’s fields and gardens—and those who expanded and modified the traditions, or threw them away altogether in surreal ventures such as Meng Chiao’s “Laments of the Gorges.”
Of course, American poets of the late 1960s were imitating Chinese models after their own post-Beat lights, so it is difficult to tell whether Hinton’s title for a poem by Su Tung-p’o slightly echoes James Wright because Hinton has picked up Wright’s characteristic cadences, or whether it is because Wright imitated Chinese practice so flawlessly in his own titles: “12th Moon, 14th Sun: A Light Snow Fell Overnight, So I Set Out Early for South Creek, Stopped for a Quick Meal and Arrived Late.”
Hinton clearly delineates the major vectors of classical Chinese verse, and the biographic strategies that were greatly imitated so that Chinese poets came to share distinctive cultural markers: “In one mythic version of [Wang An-shih’s] ideal, a sage recluse living contentedly in the mountains recognizes that the nation is in crisis and needs his wisdom. He reluctantly joins the government after being summoned by the emperor, resolves the crisis, and then, having no interest in the wealth and renown associated with that life, returns to cultivate his simple life of spiritual depth in the mountains. This ideal was
enacted by countless intellectuals in ancient China, though in a more realistic form. They devoted themselves to public service, always watching for a chance to spend time in mountain seclusion, often at Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist monasteries, and then at some point retired permanently from government service to live as recluses.”
This ideal doesn’t have much to do with the crazed drunkenness of late-‘60s English majors, and even less to do with the realities of power in China today, where presumably nobody slips off to the mountains to meditate on the fruits of action and inaction. But it may be instructive to notice that the most assiduously spontaneous classical poets were not removed from pragmatic political opinions: Yang Wan-li, alternately in power and banished for his politics, even led a government expedition against a group of bandits and rebels before experiencing Ch’an sudden enlightenment at age fifty and subsequently turning out several thousand poems.
Hinton deals extensively with the women poets of China, to the point of including an additional survey in one of the book’s appendices. His version of Li Ch’ing Chao is as appealing as Kenneth Rexroth’s, and presumably closer to the actual structure of the poems in the few cases in which the poems’ repeated lines feel a little jarring—jarring to me, anyway.
