The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (Mandarin Chinese and English Edition)

Admired by the likes of Kerouac and Snyder, the wisdom-filled poems of Chinese hermit, Han Shan, have a timeless magic to them. Whether extolling the virtues of the solitary life or capturing glimpses of wilderness beauty, Han Shan's poetry sings with simplicity and elegance.Revered as a sage in his native China, Han Shan, who wrote under the Zen nom de plume, 'Cold Mountain,' followed an individualist credo with both Taoist and Buddhist influences. He chose to live in severe isolation from his fellows in close intimacy with the natural world. The finest poems in this collection constantly return to this theme of willful exile. Since I came to Cold Mountain How many thousand years have passed Accepting my fate, I fled to the woods To dwell and gaze in freedom My quilt is the dark blue sky A boulder makes a fine pillow Heaven and Earth can crumble and changeWhile many of these poems celebrate the purity and liberty of the solitary life, others tackle social issues. Despite his hermetic exile, Han Shan nonetheless attacked the injustices that plagued T'ang Dynasty China. The targets of his poetic scorn vary from hypocritical monks to flesh-eaters. In accordance with. the Buddhist principle of protecting all forms of life, Han Shan saves his most acerbic barbs for those who destroy life to satiate desire. Here's some advice for meat-eating people Who eat without reflecting Living things were formerly seeds The future depends on current deeds Seizing present joys Unafraid of sorrows to comeTrue to his calling as a voice in the wilderness Han Shan fills his poems with both instruction and admonition. Nearly all the poems in this collection carry some sort of teachable lesson."Better to know nothing at all, to sit and not speak and have no cares...A straight mind means straight words."The richly evocative descriptions of nature so common to other Chinese poets are conspicuously muted here. Imagery and description both serve the main goal of transmitting wisdom and virtue. Emerald mountains, jade streams, crane-like clouds are all present in these songs but always in support of some greater meaning.Those unschooled in Buddhist or Taoist thought will have a difficult time with the layers of scholarly allusion and metaphor found in many of these poems. Thanks to translator Red Pine's copious notes, the reader can better understand each poem's meaning and message.Cold Mountain's best poems are glowing stars. Their clarity and beauty set them apart. Like the rocks and pines on which they were written, they read like nature itself. Had Thoreau written his Walden in poetic fragments, the result might have been something similar to Cold Mountain's Songs."Deer live deep in the forest surviving on water and grass/But tie them up in a fancy hall and their loveliness fades."

This is a beautiful edition from Copper Canyon Press of the poems of Han Shan (Cold Mountain) and a few poems of two of his companions. Han Shan was a medieval Chinese poet, often considered part of the Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist tradition. In my opinion he owes more to the Taoists, but gets his morality from the Buddhists, and morality is the subject of a lot of the poems. He is often classified as a wilderness poet, but he is more of a satirist. Many of his poems are scathing denunciations of society, including Buddhist and Taoist religious society.The poems are short, but the book is long, containing 307 poems by Han Shan, 49 by Shih Te, and four by Feng Kan. Han Shan's style is simple and straightforward, lyrical at times and rhetorical, even invective, at others. For a wilderness poet, it doesn't demonstrate love of nature so much as love of simple living. For a religious poet, he is remarkably non-pious. He also has a sense of humor, which tempers his satire. Like much Chinese poetry, his is very allusive, which makes Red Pine's footnotes most helpful. The translation is line by line, sticking close to the original (as far as my limited Chinese could detect from the Chinese text on facing pages). Red Pine's style is clear and concise, without affectations.Han Shan is considered (at least by Americans) as a classic Zen poet, but to my ear he lacks the heavy symbolism and deliberate mystification I often associate with Zen poetics. I appreciate his freshness, vigor, humor, and austere advice.

I've read the poems of T'ao Chi'en, Hsieh Ling-Yun, Meng Hao-Jan, Li Po, Wang Wei, Tu Fu and others. They all surpass these bland, often didactic and at times self-important writings. There are a few stanzas that do stand out, but this in a book of many, many stanzas. I found the appended poems of Shih-te at the end to be the best thing about this book. There are just times when a writer's outsized reputation dwarfs his actual ability. Think Hemingway.

For some reason, this was not love at first read. I gave up on reading the rather long "Translator's Preface" and the'Introduction by John Blofield", and moved straight on to the poems. Took a while. Then I started being steadily drawn in. I have now re-read and re-read and re-read many of these poems. I have also really enjoyed the aforementioned Preface and the Introduction, after I had gotten an idea of what it was all about. . This book helps you (Red Pine's balanced notes are indispensable) get into the charming, funny, mischievous, witty and at times depressed, lonely, pining mind of a real flesh-and-blood mountain hermit. Who lived in the 8th century. But could walk though my door, and we would spend the night chatting away happily.Great book. Great character. And if you ask me, nothing much has changed in 1200 years. The essential human experience, the essential questioning, the basic ingredients of Life... same, same. Comforting, in many ways.Someone sighed "Cold Mountain siryour poems possess no sense"I said for the ancientspoverty was no disgraceto this he answered laughing"such talk is poorly reasoned"well sir then be as you arewith money your concern.Or:I reached Cold Mountain and all cares stoppedno idle thoughts remained in my headnothing to do I write poems on rocksand trust the current like an unmoored boatEnjoy!

Another great translation by red pine, I absolutely love it, all of red pines books have lovely smooth covers, very tactile. Highly recommended, red pine is a brilliant translator of Taoist, and Chinese Buddhist works, with plenty of commentary, and foot notes, makes the translations so much easy to understand.

Bilingual edition with Chinese calligraphic text on the left-hand page and very good English translations on the facing right-hand page. These poems have deeply influenced Seamus Heany's works and that is how I came to know them. The translation presented in this edition is a very fine work in itself, done by a poetic scholar of Cold Mountain who lived and followed the traces of the poet in China for many years. Each poem is 8 lines in length and there are 307 of them all of which are copiously annotated with very detailed footnotes on the left-hand page under the Chinese text. Also included are 49 poems by his colleague (Shih-te) and 4 by (Feng-kan) This edition also includes several photos of the places where the poet lived and worked and a graphic map of China of the time of the poet. Many of these poems are little gems of insight and wit or of sarcasm and bitter irony. They are like seeds, seminal works which I think caused Seamus Heany's mind to take off in poetic flight.They may do the same for any serious poet who discovers them.

I read this and it was good.

In this book of translations by 'Red Pine' (Bill Porter) of the Tang Dynasty collection of poetry attributed mostly to 'Han Shan' or 'Cold Mountain' [some are also attributed to two other figures closely associated with him] not only are there translations of the quality one would expect of 'Red Pine' and notes explaining/ clarifying allusions but also on the facing page the Chinese text. Further, I think Porter's comments about Han Shan's life, his poetry and information about what was generally accepted as the requirements for great Chinese poetry at the time are tremendously helpful - things much like what in English when I was in school were called 'prosody' {requirements for which syllables were to be accented, which not, what kinds of rhymes were acceptable, which perhaps not, etc. for a 'proper poem' in certain metric forms of English poetry - perhaps it might not be too great a distortion to compare to the 'rules' for the tennis game Robert Frost implied in his image that free verse was like 'playing tennis without a net'}. This is very much to the point in understanding some comments in Han Shan's poetry about his poetry and also in understanding some important points about the Chinese in which he wrote his poems (as well as being of interest to someone interested in classical Chinese poetry in general).Han Shan apparently 'suffered' from an inability to distinguish certain tonal differences required to write according to the accepted norms (I do not think this means he was like a foreigner from a non-tonal language like English when first learning Mandarin, for example, who may tend not to use or understand tones correctly - English has tones but not as part of important information about what word is being spoken}. This 'disability' of Han Shan's caused his poetry to be rather unconventional to the degree a number of critics would have refused to even consider it as poetry, yet his poetry it seems has always been appreciated even by a number of contemporaries honoured for their own poetry.This is one of the books I am especially delighted to have in my library. A copy from a lending library would not satisfy the wish to have something like this always available to hand.

A very thorough translation with the original characters and editors notes on left page and the poems on the right. I prefer Ryokan's poetry, as he is purely Buddhist whereas Cold mountain refers to both Buddhist and Taoist ideas. Still very pleasing and sometimes thought provoking. Worth the read.