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Written in Exile: The Poetry of Liu Tsung-yuan - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Written in Exile: The Poetry of Liu Tsung-yuan

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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.

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)

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

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