David Hinton

The Selected Poems of Yang Wan-li

 

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The last giant from classical Chinese poetry’s golden age, Yang Wan-li (1127-1206 C.E.) practiced poetry as a method of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist enlightenment. A typical Yang 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. Yang traveled a great deal, and his poems are full of vast rivers-and-mountains landscape as the engine of enlightenment. At the same time, he often makes poems out of nothing more than a crystalline attention to the most mundane aspects of life, poems capable of finding enlightenment in nothing special: a fly, for instance, sunning on a windowsill.

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                        — from the book jacket

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Praise for David Hinton's Translations:

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Hinton’s austerely beautiful translations . . . have always gone against the grain. He has been building, translation by translation, an English language for the Chinese conceptual world. . . In the twentieth century, Chinese poetry was translated into the American idiom by modernists like Ezra Pound and later poets including Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder with a lightness of touch, a beguiling simplicity. Hinton is after the opposite: depth and boundlessness.

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                          (The New York Review of Books)

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A gift to our language.​

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                           (W.S. Merwin)​

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Shambhala (Summer 2026)