Classical Asian Literature

Up until the 17th century, the bulk of Korean poetry was written in Chinese, the language of poets, scholars, and monks. This work became an integral part of Korean literary tradition. Among the Flowering Reeds, which introduces this important poetic tradition to the English-speaking audience, includes 100 poems spanning more than 1,000 years. Lovers of Chinese and Japanese poetry will delight in these translations, which capture both the elegant simplicity and the emotional complexity of the originals.

Kim Jong-gil is a Professor Emeritus of English at Korea University in Seoul and is a member of the Korean Academy of Arts. His works of translation include The Snow Falling on Chagall's Village: Poems of Kim Ch'un-Su. He is presently completing an anthology of modern Korean poetry.

What is consciousness but the Cosmos awakened to itself? This question is fundamental to the Taoist and Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist worldview that shapes classical Chinese poetry. A uniquely conceived biography, Awakened Cosmos illuminates that worldview through the life and work of Tu Fu (712-770 C.E.), China's greatest classical poet. Tu Fu's writing traces his life from periods of relative normalcy to years spent as an impoverished refugee amid the devastation of civil war. Exploring key poems to guide the reader through Tu Fu's dramatic life, Awakened Cosmos reveals Taoist/Ch'an insight deeply lived across the full range of human experience.

Each chapter presents a poem in three stages: first, the original Chinese; then, an English translation in Hinton's masterful style; and finally, a lyrical essay that discusses the untranslatable philosophical dimensions of the poem. The result is nothing short of remarkable: a biography of the Cosmos awakened to itself in the form of a magisterial poet alive in T'ang Dynasty China.

Thirty years ago, David Hinton published America's first full-length translation of Tu Fu's work. Awakened Cosmos is published simultaneously with a newly translated and substantially expanded version of that landmark translation: The Selected Poems of Tu Fu: Expanded and Newly Translated (New Directions).

Duo Duo began to write poetry in the early 1970s when the Cultural Revolution was still in full swing. He was obliged to write clandestinely, never imagining he would have readers. He continued to write throughout the 1980s, publishing in samizdat publications, and then more openly as the authorities relaxed their grip. Duo Duo left China for a reading tour of England June 4th 1989, the morning after the Tiananmen massacre that he had witnessed.

Duo Duo's poetic vision embraces a historical and political vision that is much more diverse, more global than that circumscribed by the confines of the last third of China's twentieth century. The context of China, Duo Duo's lived experience, is necessarily present in the poet's imaginary, but it is diffused in a world-view that embraces all of modern humanity's dilemmas, our increasing separation from nature, and our alienation from one another. The exile, like the hybrid and other in between subjects, writes of China with the benefit of critical distance, but also writes with an exceptional perspective of wherever he finds himself.

Before leaving China, Duo Duo worked as a journalist. His writing has been widely translated and published throughout the world, including two small selections of his work--in English--published in the UK and Canada. Generally associated with the other menglong (ambiguist) poets, such as Bei Dao and Yang Lian. Duo Duo currently lives and teaches in the Netherlands.

Gregory Lee currently lives in France and teaches at l'Université Jean Moulin Lyon III. He has also taught at the Universities of Cambridge, London, Chicago and Hong Kong. His translations of Duo Duo and other Chinese poets have appeared in numerous publications, including Fissures: Chinese Writing Today (Zephyr Press), and Abandoned Wine (Wellsweep Press).

Also available
Fissures: Chinese Writing Today

TP $14.95, 0-939010-59-3 - CUSA

Born into the burakumin--Japan's class of outcasts--Kenji Nakagami depicts the lives of his people in sensual language and stark detail. The Cape is a breakthrough novella about a burakumin community, their troubled memories, and complex family histories. Includes House on Fire and Red Hair.

Kenji Nakagami (1946-92) was a prolific writer admired for his vigorous prose style.

With this groundbreaking collection, translated and edited by the renowned poet and translator David Hinton, a new generation will be introduced to the work that riveted Ezra Pound and transformed modern poetry. The Chinese poetic tradition is the largest and longest continuous tradition in world literature, and this rich and far-reaching anthology of nearly five hundred poems provides a comprehensive account of its first three millennia (1500 BCE to 1200 CE), the period during which virtually all its landmark developments took place. Unlike earlier anthologies of Chinese poetry, Hinton's book focuses on a relatively small number of poets, providing selections that are large enough to re-create each as a fully realized and unique voice. New introductions to each poet's work provide a readable history, told for the first time as a series of poetic innovations forged by a series of master poeets. From the classic texts of Chinese philosophy to intensely personal lyrics, from love poems to startling and strange perspectives on nature, Hinton has collected an entire world of beauty and insight. And in his eye-opening translations, these ancient poems feel remarkably fresh and contemporary, presenting a literature both radically new and entirely resonant.

Popularized in the West by Beat Generation writers Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, T'ang-era rebel poet Han Shan is an icon of Chinese poetry and Zen. He and his sidekick, Shih Te, are known as the laughing, ragged pair who left their poetry on stones, trees, farmhouses, and monastery walls, calling others to the Cold Mountain way of simple, honest, joyful living.

J. P. Seaton takes a fresh look at these laughing madmen as well as at Wang Fan-chih, who followed in the outsider tradition a few centuries later. Forceful and wry, all three capture the poverty and gritty day-to-day reality of the common people along with condemning the excesses of mind and matter that prevent people from attaining true enlightenment. With a comprehensive introduction and commentary throughout, this collection points to where, in a world that's always moving and so full of suffering, stillness and clarity can be found.

Li He is the bad-boy poet of the late Tang dynasty. He began writing at the age of seven and died at twenty-six from alcoholism or, according to a later commentator, "sexual dissipation," or both. An obscure and unsuccessful relative of the imperial family, he would set out at dawn on horseback, pause, write a poem, and toss the paper away. A servant boy followed him to collect these scraps in a tapestry bag.

Long considered far too extravagant and weird for Chinese taste, Li He was virtually excluded from the poetic canon until the mid-twentieth century. Today, as the translator and scholar Anne M. Birrell, writes, "Of all the Tang poets, even of all Chinese poets, he best speaks for our disconcerting times." Modern critics have compared him to Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Keats, and Trakl.

The Collected Poems of Li He is the only comprehensive selection of his surviving work (most of his poems were reputedly burned by his cousin after his death, for the honor of the family), rendered here in crystalline translations by the noted scholar J. D. Frodsham.

This book is a straightforward guide to a complex classic that was written at a time when readers had plenty of leisure to sort through the hundreds of characters and half a dozen subplots that weave in and out of the book's 120 chapters. Each chapter of the companion summarizes and comments on each chapter of the novel. The companion provides English-speaking readers--whether they are simply dipping into this novel or intent on a deep analysis of this masterpiece--with the cultural context to enjoy the story and understand its world.

The book is keyed to David Hawkes and John Minford's English translation of The Story of the Stone and includes an index that gives the original Chinese names and terms.

Out of thousands of setsuwa, Shirane has selected thirty-eight of the most powerful and influential, each of which is briefly introduced. Recounting the exploits of warriors, farmers, priests, and aristocrats, and concerning topics as varied as poetry, violence, power, and sex, these tales reveal the creative origins of a range of literary and dramatic genres, from court tales and travel accounts to no drama and Kabuki. Watson's impeccable translations relay the wit, mystery, and Buddhist sensibility of these protean works, while Shirane's sophisticated analysis illuminates the meaning and context of their compact stories. Capped by an extensive bibliography, this collection fully immerses the reader in the thrilling world of secular and religious tales.

Deploying thematic categories, the editors sketch the period in a novel way for students and, by featuring many texts translated into English for the first time, recast the era for specialists. Thematic topics include regional definitions and tensions, governing mechanisms and social reality, ideas of self and other, relations with the unseen world, everyday life, and cultural concepts. Within each section, the editors and translators introduce the selected texts and provide critical commentary on their historical significance, along with suggestions for further reading and research.