An expansive selection of poems from the last giant of classical Chinese poetry’s golden age, Yang Wan-li (1127–1206 c.e.), masterfully translated by David Hinton.
A typical Yang Wan-li poem attends to immediate experience with profound clarity, and this attention usually leads to a moment of sudden awakening: a startling image or turn of thought, a surprising imaginative gesture, a twist of humor. As a government official, Yang undertook many long and arduous journeys that exposed him to both breathtaking landscapes and hardships of hunger, exhaustion, bitter weather, and dangerous rapids in stark gorges. It is in this crucible of tranquil beauty and existential danger that he forged a poetry of self-realization deeply informed by Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist insight. With nothing more than a crystalline attention to the present moment, Yang’s poems find enlightenment everywhere: in a fly, for instance, sunning on a windowsill. Hinton’s translations give a remarkably modern voice to Yang’s journeys through the perennial mysteries of consciousness, revealing for a new generation why his poetry has captivated readers for nearly a millennium.
