After a failed push for political reform, the T’ang era’s greatest prose-writer, Liu Tsung-yuan, was exiled to the southern reaches of China. Thousands of miles from home and freed from the strictures of court bureaucracy, he turned his gaze inward and chronicled his estrangement in poems. Liu’s fame as a prose writer, however, overshadowed his accomplishment as a poet. Three hundred years after Liu died, the poet Su Tung-p’o ranked him as one of the greatest poets of the T’ang, along with Tu Fu, Li Pai, and Wei Ying-wu. And yet Liu is unknown in the West, with fewer than a dozen poems published in English translation. The renowned translator Red Pine discovered Liu’s poetry during his travels throughout China and was compelled to translate 140 of the 146 poems attributed to Liu. As Red Pine writes, “I was captivated by the man and by how he came to write what he did.” Appended with thoroughly researched notes, an in-depth introduction, and the Chinese originals, Written in Exile presents the long-overdue introduction of a legendary T’ang poet.
Product Details
ISBN-13: 9781556595622
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: 09-17-2019
Pages: 256
Product Dimensions: 5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
About the Author
Bill Porter (aka Red Pine) was born in Van Nuys, California in 1943 and grew up in Northern Idaho. After a tour of duty in the US Army 1964-67, he attended UC Santa Barbara and majored in Anthropology. In 1970, he entered graduate school at Columbia University and studied anthropology with a faculty that included Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. While he was living in New York, he became interested in Buddhism, and in 1972 he left America and moved to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. After more than three years with the monks and nuns, he struck out on his own and supported himself by teaching English and later by working as a journalist at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong. During this time, he married a Chinese woman, had two children, and began working on translations of Chinese poetry and Buddhist texts. In 1993, he returned to America so his children could learn English. For the past twenty years, he has worked as an independent scholar and has supported himself from book royalties and lecture fees. His translations have been honored with a number of awards, including two NEA translation fellowships, a PEN translation award, the inaugural Asian Literature Award of the American Literary Translators Association, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2018 the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation bestowed by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington.
Read an Excerpt
Read an Excerpt
River Snow
A thousand mountains and not a bird flying ten thousand paths and not a single footprint an old man in his raincoat in a solitary boat fishes alone in the freezing river snow
Ode for a Caged Eagle
In whistling wind and pelting sleet an eagle takes off in morning light flying through clouds cutting through rainbows it dives like lightning into the hills slicing through thickets of thorns with its wings it grabs a rabbit then flies into the sky other birds scatter from its bloody talons settling on a perch it surveys its realm the winds of summer then suddenly arise it loses its feathers and goes into hiding harassed by vermin lurking in the grass frightened and distressed unable to sleep all it can think of is the return of cool air escaping its restraints and soaring into the clouds
Lament – Two Poems
One
Cold air stirs in the West in the North Woods the crows sound alarmed they can’t change where they live or roost on leafless trees the swan is gone and not coming back the road to Wu was long and hard it’s useless to sigh about current excesses dropping copper balls on drums for the sound the East Sea has always been stormy but the South Wind too is wild the moment the sky turns dark stars worry about the moon people crave money and sex they amass possessions at any price as soon as a tree stands out sharp axes seek it out throwing on a robe at midnight I soak the sleeves with tears walking on the year’s first frost who thinks about the coming cold
Two
Dawn lights the winter wilds crows rise from the brambles enjoying a good caw they swarm the Western Hills all day the wind swirls leaves bury what plants remain there’s no safe place to roost and hawks fill the sky