TANG DYNASTY AUTHOR · TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH · CHINESE POETRY
Wei Wang
WHO stands on that cliff, like a figure of stone,
— from Poems
Most acclaimed
Laughing lost in the mountains
The largest selection from the work of Wang Wei (circa 699-761), one of the finest poets in China's long literary history, is offered here in accessible and definitive translations. Wang Wei is among the three most important Chinese poets (with Li Po and Tu Fu) and wrote during the Tang Dynasty, the pinnacle of Chinese literary achievement. Though widely known to Western readers, his work has never before been presented in such a comprehensive volume in English. The 171. Poems here may be read with pleasure by the general reader and scholar alike, for the distinguished translators succeed in making the pieces work poetically in modern English while still retaining their ecstasy of stillness and quiet lucidity. A critical introduction provides helpful background and compares Wang Wei to mystical poets in other cultures; extensive endnotes permit deeper appreciation of the works. Wang Wei was a talented musician, painter, and poet who. Served in various official posts throughout his life, at times suffering banishment and even imprisonment as he came in or out of favor. During frequent retreats to his country estate on the Wang River, he sought the "reality of disengagement and the study of nonbeing and illumination," write the Barnstones. A devout Buddhist, he wrote "poems of eremitic seclusion" in which the empty mountain, rain, clouds, and other aspects of nature form a literary landscape painting. Rich with meaning. The poet is "invisibly present and intensely personal" in poems on grief, friendship, loneliness, reverie, exile, and aging. Without being theological, he evokes key notions of Buddhism and Taoism in these exquisitely rendered translations that shimmer with beauty and quietude.
Poems
This is an edition of all the known poems of Mark Akenside, the eighteenth-century English poet and physician, whose poetry has not been newly edited for more than a century. This edition will thus provide scholars and students with a much-needed opportunity to reassess the extent of Akenside's contribution to literary culture, and it will also clarify his role in the development of the aesthetic theories of his own generation and the one that followed. The career of Mark Akenside (1721-70) spans a period of extraordinarily fast change in English literature: his first major poem, The Pleasures of Imagination, appeared in the year of Pope's death; and Akenside died in the year Wordsworth was born. His works not only reflected the very considerable changes that took place during these years; they also contributed in many ways to the shifts in focus, interest, and emphasis that characterize the literature of the later eighteenth century. Akenside's fascination with the imagination, its characteristics and functions, resulted in an intriguing and influential blend of the poetic and the philosophical in his longer poems, The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) and The Pleasures of the Imagination (1772). The earlier work explores the then new subject of aesthetics in greater detail than it had ever been explored before, presenting various original insights and arguments. Yet it would be wrong to see the poem as merely a versified philosophical treatise; its complex structure offers satisfactions beyond those of sequential logic, and the examples cited to illustrate the central ideas are imbued with considerable vigor and clarity. As products of, and contributors to, the eighteenth-century enthusiasm for aesthetics, Akenside's longer poems are captivating examples of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experiment in developing the philosophical poem into a major literary form. It is for this reason above all others that they are valued by Coleridge and the writers of the next generation. Because of the comparative obscurity into which Akenside's works fell after the demise of the long philosophical poem in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they have not by and large attracted the attention of modern bibliographers. In this edition numerous bibliographical and textual puzzles presented by his poems are solved for the first time. The apparatus, meanwhile, demonstrates the full extent of the poet's urge to revise - an urge that extended from the wholesale rewriting of some poems to subtle alterations of textual minutiae, showing a mind and an ear alive to nuances of meaning and intonation.
Poems of Wang Wei
Wang Wei (699-761 CE) is one of the greatest poets in Chinese literature. During his life he survived several political upheavals, dividing his time between the imperial court and his country estate where he drew inspiration from the solitude and the countryside.