An essential collection from the leading figure of Chinese poetry translation, presenting work of insight, humor, and musicality that continues to resonates across thousands of years.
Red Pine is one of the world''s finest translators of Chinese poetic and religious texts. His new anthology, Dancing with the Dead: The Essential Red Pine, gathers over thirty voices from the ancient Chinese pastincluding Buddhist poets Cold Mountain (Hanshan) and Stonehouse (Shiwu), as well as Tang-dynasty luminaries Wei Yingwu and Liu Zongyuan.
Dancing with the Dead also includes translations from such religious texts as Pumings Oxherding Pictures and Verses and Lao-Tzus Daodejing, as well as poems and woodblock illustrations from Su Po-Jens Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom, one of the worlds first printed books of art.?
Throughout the book, poems are accompanied by footnotes providing historical context, and each section includes a new and illuminating introduction chronicling Red Pines relationship to the poetdiscovery, travel, scholarship. Dancing With The Dead is more than a book, it is a journey: part travel essay, part road map, part guided meditation. It is a history translated in poem.
For Red Pine, translating the words in a Chinese poem isnt that hard, but finding the spirit that inspired those words, the music of the heart, and asking it to inspire [his heart], that is how, and why, [he] translates.
our luggage is full of river travel poems?
may we ride forth together again.
Wei Yingwu
