Dancing with the Dead: The Essential Red Pine Translations - Red Pine

nAn essential collection from the leading figure of Chinese poetry translation, presenting work of insight, humor, and musicality that continues to resonates across thousands of years. n nn 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.

nn 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. nn 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.

nn 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. nn our luggage is full of river travel poems nn may we ride forth together again. nn - Wei Yingwu n nn n nn