David Hinton
The Selected Poems of Yang Wan-li
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. Yang undertook many long and arduous journeys as a government official, journeys that exposed him to both breathtaking landscapes and to hardships of hunger, exhaustion, bitter weather, and dangerous rapids in stark gorges. It is in this crucible of tranquil beauty and existential danger that Yang Wan-li forged a poetry of self-realization deeply informed by Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist insight. But he also crafted 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. Hinton’s translations give a remarkarkably modern voice to Yang’s journeys through the perennial mysteries of consciousness, and reveal why his poetry has captivated readers for nearly a millennium.
— from the book jacket
Praise for David Hinton's Translations:
A gift to our language.
(W.S. Merwin)
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.
(The New York Review of Books)
“David Hinton is the best English-language translator of classical Chinese poetry we have, and have had for decades.”
(The American Academy of Arts and Letters)
Shambhala (Summer 2026)