In the poem, “A Meal with Kettle-Fold Mountain Monks,” Wei tidies up his cabin and prepares a meal of pine nuts for some visiting monks. The “Dragon,” often referenced by Wei is very like the horned god of the European pagans Wei’s C’han Buddhism much like (and a precursor to) what we know today as Zen. For all their differences, Wei’s philosophy would have more in common with that of Horace than it would Wordsworth, or Robert Creeley. To approach these poems nearer to the way the were intended we must remove ourselves from the Christian context in which, like it or not, we read most English language poetry. Hinton, in his too-brief introduction, is on point when he writes that “the distinction between human and nature is entirely foreign” to Wei’s art. So why are these seagulls still suspicious? This is the landscape of his poetry.ĭone struggling for a place in that human realm, I’m just this To escape the city, meditate and to write, Wei would periodically visit his mountain retreat by Wheel-Rim River. These are not the poems of a simple man in a simple time, but of a highly skilled mind and a great era. The Analects of Confucius and the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu would have felt far more ancient to Wei than the King James Bible does to us.

The arts of poetry and painting (both of which he practiced and-like Blake-married) were highly developed, and the city in which he spent his life numbered two million souls. He was born of the governing class around 699 AD and worked as a high-level official in one of the most prosperous and advanced cities in the world, Ch’ang-an.

Our surviving knowledge of Wang Wei’s life isn’t encyclopedic, but we know a little. Up in those gorges, who would guess the great human drama evenĪnd when people in town gaze out, they see distant empty-cloud mountains. But where Tu Fu and Li Po feel and think in voices like our own, Wei is a deeply impersonal writer. That Hinton is our most accomplished translator of Classical Chinese is no longer in question: in addition to his ten thousand other projects, Hinton has now completed versions of all three great T’ang era poets for New Directions. Hinton’s versions feel like Classical Chinese poetry alright: the brief depth, the spare illustrations of nature, the ambiguous finish sending us back into the center of the poem. Myself waiting for your light boat to return:ĭuckweed slowly drifted together behind you,Īnd now hanging willows sweep it open again. But because the culture is alien, the translation is new, and the poems over a millennium old, we are bound to approach them cautiously.īeside this spring lake deep and wide, I find Were we able to read these poems in Classical Chinese (were we able to read them a thousand years ago) each word would spiral with connotations. English permits Wang Wei only one or two levels of allusion, even in the hands of a translator as good as David Hinton.

Wang wei famous poems