I Hear My Gate Slam: Chinese Poets Meeting and Parting - Softcover

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9780978515621: I Hear My Gate Slam: Chinese Poets Meeting and Parting

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0978515625 ISBN 13: 9780978515621

Publisher: Pressed Wafer Press, 2007

Poetry. Asian Studies. Translated from the Chinese by Taylor Stoehr. These adroit translations of an assortment of Classical Chinese poets provide modern readers access to an ancient lyrical tradition of celebrating real intimate lives. Equally a display of the contemporary practice of translation and of the specific power of the included poems themselves, Stoehr's collection suggests parallels between the lives of past and present. The effect of such a union between source and transmission leads David Budbill to marvel: "This is a passionate, clear, honest book of poems translated by a passionate, clear, honest man." A teacher as well as a writer, Stoehr helped found "Changing Lives Through Literature," an alternative sentencing program in Dorchester, Massachusetts District Court.

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From Booklist:

No ancient poetry meant more to twentieth-century English-language poets than that of Tang China (618–907). Splendid translations by Pound, Waley, Bynner, Rexroth, and others attest the fact. Stoehr's versions, refreshingly presented thematically rather than by period or author, add worthily to that canon. Under the rubric "Voices at Dusk" appear poems of meditative solitude, some imagistic and reflective, some philosophical and rueful. Those in "Friends Meeting and Parting" are grouped to illuminate the real friendships of Meng Hao-Jan, Wang Wei, and Li Po; of Wang Wei and P'ei Ti; of Li Po and Tu Fu; and of Po Chu-i and Yuan Chen; pairs of these poems are calls and responses. "Woe to the Soldiers" is an album of antiwar poems, much more expansive, declamatory, and narrative than the other parts' contents. The last section considers "Exile and Loneliness," which these poets, gentlemen of the court, frequently experienced when power changed hands. Superb remarks on translating classical Chinese poetry and notes on the great poetic friendships and the war poems conclude, and piquant brush-and-ink drawings decorate. Olson, Ray

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