by Sam Hamill
New American Translations
Series
After years of passionate labor, Sam Hamill has translated both
familiar and little-known Chinese poems from three millennia (330
BC to the 16th century) to compile the most comprehensive collection
of its kind. Crossing the Yellow River:Three Hundred Poems
from the Chinese represents a “lifetime’s devotion
to the classic originals,” in the words of W. S. Merwin,
begun when Hamill was introduced to classical Chinese by Kennth
Rexroth and the Beat poets of the late 1950s.
Unlike earlier translators
of Chinese and Japanese poetry, Hamill attempts to bring the poems
into English with their directness and simplicity intact, at the
same time attempting to remain true to the poet’s orginal
message. Hamill includes the rarely-translated social poems of
Tu Fu, the poems and songs of Tzu Yeh and Li Ch’ing-Chao,
and lyrical selections from Li Po, Shih Ching, Wang Wei, Su Tung-p’o
and others. Hamill’s introduction provides the most definitive
overview to date of aesthetic impulses propelling Chinese poetry
and reveals his own reasons for his “lifetime’s devotion.”
“I sit at the feet of the great old masters of my tradition
not only to be in a position to pass on their many wonderful gifts,”
Hamill says, “but to pay homage while in the very act of
nourishing, sustaining and enhancing my own life.”
Silent
at Her Window
by Wang Ch'ang-ling (d. 756)
Too
young to have known the meaning of sorrow,
in
her spring dress she climbs the tower chamber.
New
leaves on all the willows wound her.
She
sent him off to war for nothing but a title.
©BOA
Editions, Ltd 2000
Available editions:
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Paperback
ISBN: 1-880238-95-5
Price: $19.95
Publishing Date: August 2000
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