The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-Jan by Meng Hao-jan

Twelve other T’ang and Sung poets appear here in addition to selections from the seven just named. His greatest gift appeared in 2002, and has now happily come out in a New Directions paperback – “Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China” (New Directions, 295 pages, $17.95).

Since then we have had from him, besides Taoist texts and even some contemporary poetry: Meng Hao-jan, the first great T’ang dynasty poet, the first to take the maturing fusion of Taoism and Buddhism and infuse its consciousness into the wilderness tradition Li Po, Tu Fu’s older friend and rival for poetic pre-eminence Meng Chao, who reinvented poetry for the late T’ang, abandoning the tradition of response to immediate experience for a new, more symbolist world of inner imaginings and Po-Chu-i, whose “interiorization of wilderness,” in a voice that presents the poet’s own ego “egolessly” among the other “ten thousand things,” came to define the second great age of Chinese poetry in the Sung. This was followed byT’ao Ch’ien, founder of “fields and gardens” poetry, and Hsieh Lingyun, founder of “mountains and rivers” poetry the two together,in the fifth century, set in motion the great tradition of wilderness poetry Mr. Hinton’s first gift was Tu Fu, China’s Shakespeare, in 1988. In the cumulative insight into Chinese poetics to be found in his introductions,he also takes his place alongside Wai-lim Yip, Francois Cheng, Eliot Weinberger, and Stephen Owens.

Hinton has established himself as the premier Chinese translator of our generation, taking his place in a line that includes both pure poets – Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder – and scholar-poets – Arthur Waley, Burton Watson, A.C. Meng’s poetic descendents revered the wisdom he cultivated as a mountain recluse, and now we too can witness the sagacity they considered almost indistinguishable from that of rivers and mountains themselves.In his combination of quantity and quality Mr. This is the first English translation devoted to the work of Meng Hao-jan.

And as a lifelong intimacy with mountains dominates Meng’s work, such innovative poetics made him a preeminent figure in the wilderness (literally rivers-and-mountains) tradition, and that tradition is the very heart of Chinese poetry. This made Meng Hao-jan China’s first master of the short imagistic landscape poem that came to typify ancient Chinese poetry. The result was a strikingly distilled language that opened new inner depths, non-verbal insights, and outright enigma. Deeply influenced by Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism, Meng was the first to make poetry from the Ch’an insight that deep understanding lies beyond words.

The first full flowering of Chinese poetry occurred in the illustrious T’ang Dynasty, and at the beginning of this renaissance stands Meng Hao-jan (689-740 c.e.), esteemed elder to a long line of China’s greatest poets.

The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-Jan by Meng Hao-jan