Dancing With The Dead: The Essential Red Pine Translations

Featuring a preface by National Book Award winner Ha Jin, and selected translations of Chinese poetry ranging from Red Pine's work on Hanshan to Tao Yuanming, the anthology is filled with insight, humor, and musicality that continues to resonate thousands of years later. Red Pine is one of the world's finest translators of Chinese poetic and religious texts. His new anthology, Dancing with the Dead: The Essential Red Pine, gathers over thirty voices from the ancient Chinese past--including Buddhist poets Cold Mountain (Hanshan) and Stonehouse (Shiwu), as well as Tang-dynasty luminaries Wei Yingwu and Liu Zongyuan. Featuring a preface by National Book Award winner Ha Jin and selected translations of Chinese poetry ranging from Red Pine's earliest work (1983) to his forthcoming work on Tao Yuanming, the anthology is filled with insight, humor, and musicality that continues to resonate thousands of years later. Dancing with the Dead also includes translations from such religious texts as Puming's Oxherding Pictures and Verses and Lao-Tzu's Daodejing, as well as poems and woodblock illustrations from Su Po-Jen's Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom, one of the world's first printed books of art. Throughout the book, poems are accompanied by footnotes providing historical context, and each section includes a new and illuminating introduction chronicling Red Pine's relationship to the poet--discovery, travel, scholarship. Dancing With The Dead is more than a book, it is a journey: part travel essay, part road map, part guided meditation. It is a history translated in poem. For Red Pine, "translating the words in a Chinese poem isn't that hard, but finding the spirit that inspired those words, the music of the heart, and asking it to inspire [his heart], that is how, and why, [he] translates." "our luggage is full of river travel poems may we ride forth together again." - Wei Yingwu

• | Author: Red Pine
• | Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• | Publication Date: Apr 11, 2023
• | Number of Pages: 344 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1556596456
• | ISBN-13: 9781556596452