David Hinton’s Wilds of Poetry

The Wilds of PoetryShambhala announces The Wilds of Poetry, a study of American poetry by Chinese poetry translator David Hinton.

Hinton takes Henry David Thoreau’s description of “a moment on Mount Ktaadin when all explanations and assumptions fell away for him and he was confronted with the wonderful, inexplicable thusness of things” as “the starting point for his account of a rewilding of consciousness in the West: a dawning awareness of our essential oneness with the world around us.”

The press release explains,

Because there was no Western vocabulary for this perception, it fell to poets to make the first efforts at articulation, and those efforts were largely driven by Taoist and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist ideas imported from ancient China. Hinton chronicles this rewilding through the lineage of avant-garde poetry in twentieth-century America—from Ezra Pound and Robinson Jeffers to Gary Snyder, W. S. Merwin, and beyond—including generous selections of poems that together form a compelling anthology of ecopoetry.

Having, as a translator, “recreated ancient Chinese rivers-and-mountains poetry as modern American poetry,” Hinton in The Wilds of Poetry “reenvisions modern American poetry as an extension of that ancient Chinese tradition: an ecopoetry that weaves consciousness into the Cosmos in radical and fundamental ways.”

Read a sample here. Click on the image above for ordering information.

Burton Watson Obituary in NYTimes Books Section

The New York Times books section has published an obituary of Burton Watson, over a month after he passed away. William Grimes writes:

Burton Watson, whose spare, limpid translations, with erudite introductions, opened up the world of classical Japanese and Chinese literature to generations of English-speaking readers, died on April 1 in Kamagaya, Japan. He was 91.

He rendered the poems of such classic Chinese writers as Su Tung-p’o, Po Chu-I and Du Fu and the Japanese poets Ryokan and Masaoka Shiki in a contemporary idiom informed by his wide reading in modern American poetry. In “Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei” (1987), the essayist Eliot Weinberger described Mr. Watson as not only “a prolific and particularly fine translator” but also “the first scholar whose work displays an affinity with the modernist revolution in American poetry: absolute precision, concision, and the use of everyday speech.” His admirers included the poets Gary Snyder and W. S. Merwin.

In 2015, the literary organization PEN awarded Mr. Watson its Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, calling him “the inventor of classical East Asian poetry for our time.”

Click on the image for the article in full.