Dancing with the Dead The Essential Red Pine Translations
Dancing with the Dead: The Essential Red Pine Translations by Red Pine is a significant anthology published by Copper Canyon Press in 2023, featuring 323 pages in English. This collection showcases the work of Red Pine, a prominent figure in the translation of Chinese poetry, presenting over thirty voices from ancient China, including notable poets such as Cold Mountain and Tang-dynasty figures like Wei Yingwu. The anthology also includes translations from important religious texts, offering readers a glimpse into the rich tapestry of Chinese literary and spiritual traditions.
Readers will find that Dancing with the Dead combines poetry with historical context, as each poem is accompanied by footnotes and insightful introductions that detail Red Pine’s relationship with the poets. The book serves as a journey through time, blending elements of travel essays and guided meditation, while exploring themes related to language, nature, and the human experience. This edition not only highlights the musicality and humor inherent in the original works but also invites readers to engage deeply with the cultural and historical significance of the texts.
Official synopsis Publisher
An 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.
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.
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
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