DAVID HINTON Profile
Hinton's newest book is a large anthology of classical Chinese poetry, from its beginnings (c. 15th B.C.E.) through the Sung Dynasty (13th c.), the period during which virtually all of the tradition's landmark developments took place . It will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in October.
Hinton's work as a poet and translator falls into three categories:
1. Poetry
Innovative poetry in a graphic format printed on large map-like sheets, informed especially by a deep ecological approach to consciousness and landscape.
2. Chinese Philosophy
Hinton's landmark translation series is the first time in well over a century that the four masterworks of ancient Chinese thought have been translated as a unified series by a single tanslator. Hinton's experience translating a wide range of ancient Chinese poets makes these books sing in English as never before. But these new versions are not only inviting and immensely readable, they also apply much-needed consistency to key terms in these texts, lending structural links and philosophical rigor heretofore unavailable in English. No previous translation of these works, whether scholarly or literary, has taken pains to recreate the Chinese philosophical worldview on its own terms. In fact, they have failed even to translate the key philosophical terms in a consistent way. In translating these texts, Hinton has maintained styles and terminology consistent with his poetic translations.
3. Chinese Poetry
Hinton's long-term project is to translate China's major classical poets, recreating each one as a singular and compelling poetic voice in English. With an unbroken history approaching three thousand years in length, the Chinese poetic tradition is arguably the longest and richest in world literature, and in spite of what may seem to be a vast cultural and temporal distance from us, this poetry feels utterly contemporary. Although each of Hinton's translations is based on a close scholarly reading of the original text and includes a thorough apparatus, his primary intent is to make convincing English poems that will engage general readers. By translating a large number of poets in this way, he is establishing a new literary tradition in English, a tradition with a coherent "voice" within which the distinct voices of individual poets are clear and consistent.
At the heart of Hinton's translation project is an attempt to render the worldview, the deep cultural insights that make Chinese poetry so profound. This, in combination with their strength as English poetry, is what makes his translation project unique. Previous translations have made little attempt to locate the poetry in its philosophical context. But the cosmology of ancient China is central to its poetry, for each of China's major poets uniquely embodies the day-to-day experience of that cosmology in all its complexity, and they are all philosophical poets, often referring to that cosmology explicitly. Employing unique apparatus and translation strategies, Hinton strives to recreate the poetry complete with its native cosmological context. And however foreign this cosmology may seem, it is remarkably contemporary and kindred and beautifully relevant to our own cultural situation: it is secular, and yet profoundly spiritual; it is thoroughly empirical and basically accords with modern scientific understanding; it is deeply ecological, weaving the human into the "natural world" in the most fundamental way; and it is radically feminist: a primal cosmology oriented around earth's mysterious generative force and probably deriving in some sense from Paleolithic spiritual practices.
