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“The Gary Snyder reader : prose, poetry, and translations, 1952-1998” (Publication, 1999)

Year

1999

Text

Snyder, Gary. The Gary Snyder reader : prose, poetry, and translations, 1952-1998. (Washington, D.C. : Counterpoint, 1999). (Sny6)

Type

Publication

Contributors (1)

Snyder, Gary  (San Francisco, Calif. 1930-) : Schriftsteller, Dichter, Professor of English, University of California Davis
[Reproduction of the texts with the permission by Gary Snyder, January 2013].

Subjects

Literature : Occident : United States of America

Chronology Entries (10)

# Year Text Linked Data
1 1961-1962 Gary Snyder travels with Allen Ginsberg six months in India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. They visited the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala.
2 1968 Snyder, Gary. Passage to more than India. In : Fire ; no 2 (March 1968).
This subculture of illuminati has been a powerful undercurrent in all higher civilization. In China it manifested as Taoism – not only Lao-tzu but the later Yellow Turban revolt and medieval Taoist secret societies – and the Zen Buddhists up till early Sung.
3 1972 Snyder, Gary. Poetry and the primitive. In : Co Tinneh (1972).
By civilized times, hunting was a sport of kings. The early Chinese emperors had vast fenced hunting reserves ; peasants were not allowed to shoot deer. Millennia of experience, the pour knowledges of hunting magic – animal habits – and the skills of wild plants and herb gathering were all but scrubbed away…
One finds evidence in T'ang and Sung poetry that the barren hills of central and northern China were once richly forested. The Far Eastern love of nature has become fear of nature : gardens and pine trees are tormented and controlled. Chinese nature poets were too often retired bureaucrats living on two or three acres of trees trimmed by hired gardeners… 'Wild' in the Far East means uncontrollable, objectionable, crude, sexually unrestrained, violent ; actually ritually polluting. China cast off mythology, which means its own dreams, with hair cocks and gaping pudenda, millennia ago…
4 1977 The 'East West' interview. In : Narachan ; no 1 (1978). [Peter Barry Chowka interviewed Gary Snyder in New York in April 1977].
Chowka
This interest was mainly self-taught ?
Snyder
Very much self-taught. As soon as I was permitted, from the time I was thirteen, I went into the Cascade Mountains, the high country, and got into real wilderness. At that age I found very little in the civilized human realm that interested me. When I was eleven or twelve, I went into the Chinese room at the Seattle art museum and saw Chinese landscape paintings ; they blew my mind. My shock of recognition was very simple : 'It looks just like the Cascades'. The waterfalls, the pines, the clouds, the mist looked a lot like the northwest United States. The Chinese had an eye for the world that I saw as real. In the next room were the English and European landscapes, and they meant nothing. It was no great lesson except for an instantaneous, deep respect for something in Chinese culture that always stuck in my mind and that I would come back to again years later…
By this time I was also studying Far Eastern culture at Reed College. I read Ezra Pound's and Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese poetry, a translation of the Tao te ching, and some texts of Confucius. Within a year or so I went through the Upanishads, Vedas, Bhagavad-Gita, and most of the classics of Chinese and Indian Buddhist literature. The convergence that I found really exciting was the Mahayana Buddhist wisdom-oriented line as it developed in China and assimilated the older Taoist tradition. It was that very precise cultural meeting that also coincided with the highest period of Chinese poetry – the early and middle T'ang Dynasty Zen masters and the poets who were their contemporaries and in many cases friends – that was fascinating. Then I learned that this tradition is still alive and well in Japan. That convinced me that I should go and study in Japan.
Chowka
… Has the coming of the Buddhadharma to the West altered your view about its complicity with the degenerate, oppressive political systems ?
Snyder
Not particularly. It has to be understood that in Asia – India, China, and Japan – the overwhelming fact of life for three millennia has been the existence of large, centralized, powerful states… The organizations of Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism made the essential compromises they had to make to be tolerated by something that was far more powerful than themselves, especially in the imperial state of China. One of those compromises was to not criticize the state. You can't blame them for it, because they had no sense of there being an alternative. Even so, an interesting set of historical moves occurred in Chinese Buddhism. During the early period of Zen an essay was written that said Buddhist monks to not have to bow to the emperor since they are outside the concerns of the state. Later, in the thirteenth century, in Zen monasteries, sutras were chanted on behalf of the long life of the emperor ; the monasteries supported and aided the regime…
Chowka
Would you like to comment on those few places where people are provided with teaching which requires work, too ?
Snyder
The San Francisco Zen Center is a good example. In both the mountain and city centers they are striving conscientiously to find meaningful work for everybody – work that, in the city center, is not foppish or artificial but is relevant to the immediate need of that neighborhood, which is predominantly black, with lots of crime. Zen Center opened a grocery store and a bakery ; they sell vegetables from their garden in Green Gulch in the grocery store. It's an effort in the right direction – that which is 'spiritual' and that which is sweeping the floor are not so separated. This is one of the legacies of Zen, Soto or Rinzai – to steadily pursue the unity of daily life and spiritual practice.
Chowka
Does that relate to a difference between the Chinese and Indian legacies as they've been applied to North American spiritual disciplines ?
Snyder
The spiritual legacy of Chinese culture is essentially Zen (or Ch'an) Buddhism. The secondary spiritual legacy of China is in the aesthetics – the poetry and painting (Confucius, Lao-tzu, and Chuang-tzu are included in that ; also Mencius, whose work will be appreciated more in time for its great human sanity, although it's deliberately modest in its spiritual claims). Ch'an Buddhism added to Indian Buddhism the requirement that everybody work : 'a day without work, a day without food'. The cultural attitude toward begging in China was totally different from that in India ; the Chinese public wouldn't stand for beggars… So although Buddhism starts out with no caste, with the concept of bhikkhu, nonetheless, the bhikkhu becomes rated so highly socially that, in a certain way, he's like a Brahmin - he's 'pure' and shouldn't become defiled in any way. This lays the groundwork for the later extraordinary hierarchization of the Buddhist orders of India and Tibet. The Chinese culture wouldn't tolerate that. Po-chang, in his monastic rules written during the T'ang Dynasty, makes clear that begging is not a main part of our way of self-support. Our way of self-support is to grow our own food, build our own buildings, and make everybody, including the teacher, work… There are other things within the Ch'an administrative structures, within the monasteries, that are quite amazingly democratic when is comes to certain kinds of choices. All of the monks – whether novices or elders – have an equal vote. That is a Chinese quality in that spiritual legacy. Another development that is Chinese, as far as I can tell, is group mediation. In India and Tibet, meditation is practiced primarily in a solitary form. The Chinese and Japanese made group sitting a major part of their practice. There is a communalization of practice in China, a deemphasis of individual, goofy, yogic wanderings around. For the Chinese monk there is a phase of wandering, but it's after many years of group practice/labor. I love both India and China ; I love the contradictions. I can identify with both – see the beauty of both ways of going at it.
…
Chowka
You mentioned China positively in Turtle Island ('I lost my remaining doubts about China') and in a letter about Suwa-no-se Island ('People's China has many inspiring examples'). You also published a poem in The Black Country titled 'To the Chinese comrades'. What are your feelings about China now ?
Snyder
I guess I probably spoke too soon in saying I've lost my remaining doubts ; I still have doubts about China – certainly doubts about China as a model for the rest of the industrial world. Many lessons, though, can be learned but they cannot be applied wholesake – people wouldn't stand for it. But, yes, China is filled with inspiring examples of cooperation, reforestation, and less inspiring examples like the campaign to kill sparrows some years ago.
Chowka
What about their disaffiliation with their spiritual lineage ?
Snyder
That doesn't trouble me too much. I believe the Chinese had been pretty well disaffiliated from that already for some time. But, in a sense, the primary values already had sunk in so deeply that they didn't have to articulate them much anymore. Also, as a student of Chinese history, I perceive a little about the cycles that it moves in. If the rest of the world hold together, I would bet that a century and a half from now China again will be deeply back into meditation, as part of the pendulum swing of things. In a way, People's China is a manifestation of wonderful qualities of cooperation and selfless endeavor toward a common goal that were there all along. The negative side, though, is that China has been the most centralized, bureaucratic, civilized culture on earth for the longest time ; unquestionably because of that, much was lost within and without. Much diversity was lost. The Chinese in the past, and probably still, don't have an appreciation for the ethnic or the primitive. For centuries, they have been looking down on their own border people or on the small aboriginal enclaves – tiny cultures in the hills of which there are still hundreds within China. So I feel ambivalent about China. Without doubt one can recognize the greatness of its achievement on all levels and think of it as a model of what a civilization can be ; but then I can just as soon say. 'But I wish there weren't any civilization !'
Sir Joseph Needham is very impressed by the Chinese revolution ; in his book Science and civilization in China he says that Taoism foreshadows the Revolution, and that's true. Taoism is a Neolithic world view and a matrilineal, if not matriarchal, Chinese world view that somehow went through the sound barrier of early civilization and came out the other side halfway intact, and continued to be the underlying theme of Chinese culture all through history up until modern times – antifeudalistic ; appreciative of the female principle, women's powers, intuition, nature, spontaneity, and freedom. So Needham says that Taoism through history has been a 2,000-year-long holding action for China to arrive at socialism. That's how positively 'he' looks at it. The contemporary Chinese look back on Taoism as a heritage in their past that as socialists they can respond to. Buddhism is a foreign religion – it came from India ! But the Taoist component in Chinese culture will surely return again to the surface.
[Peter Orlovsky enters the conversation]
Orlovsky
Are there any tribes in China still that have been left alone?
Snyder: There are some. You can't communalize certain kinds of pro¬duction in certain areas—you can't improve on what they're doing already. If a group has a good communal village agriculture—a hill situation not susceptible to use of tractors—it might as well be left alone.
The present Chinese regime, like every regime in the world, has been guilty of some very harsh and ethnocentric treatment of people, especially the Tibetans, which is inexcusable. At the same time they hold out a certain measure of hope, especially to people of the Third World underdeveloped countries, who are offered only two models of what to do. One model is to plug into the nearest fossil fuel source and become a satellite country of the United States or some other industrial nation; the other option is the Chinese: get the landlords off your back, straighten out the tax structure, and then do better agriculture with the tools you have available. The Chinese are perhaps on the verge of becoming more industrialized, and this good opinion of them may soon evaporate; as a strategy for what they consider to be their own survival, they may go the same route we have. The other point I want to make is that although it's true that China is the world's most centralized and bureaucratic, the oldest, and in some ways the most autocratic civilization, at the same time it has been filled with a rich mix of humanity from north to south, east to west: dialects, subcultures, of all sorts, of great vigor—many of them in one way or another amazingly still around. But it isn't something we would want to be, we would never want to be as populated as China.
Chowka
One of the more interesting points to arise during the 'Chinese Poetry and the American Imagination' conference this week is a question that you raised. We had assumed that there was a tone of intimacy, of cooperation, of communality in a lot of the Chinese poetry that was discussed. You wondered if the new, wider, Occidental interest in classical Chinese poetry presaged the development of similar qualities here.
Snyder
I think it's inevitable that American society move farther and farther away from certain kinds of extreme individualism, for no reason other than that the frontier is gone and the population has grown; partially, it may be the social dynamics of crowding…
5 1978 Snyder, Gary. Working on the '58 Willys pickup. In : Snyder, Gary. Axe handles : poems. (Port Townsend, Wash. : Cooper Canyon Press, 1978).
For Lu Yu [Lu You].
The year this truck was made
I sat in early morning darkness
Chanting sutra in Kyoto,
And spent the days studying Chinese.
Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, French –
Joy of Dharma-scholarship
And the splendid old temples –
But learned nothing of trucks.
Now to bring sawdust
Rotten and rich
From a sawmill abandoned when I was just born
Lost in the young fir and cedar
At Bloody Run Creek
So that clay in the garden
Can be broken and tempered
And growing plants mulched to save water –
And to also haul gravel
From the old placer diggings,
To screen it and mix in the sand with the clay
Putting pebbles aside to strew on the paths
So muddy in winter –
I lie in the dusty and broken bush
Under the pickup
Already thought to be old –
Admiring its solidness, square lines,
Thinking a truck like this
would please Chariman Mao.
The rear and rebuilt and put back
With new spider gears,
Brake cylinders cleaned, the brake drums
New-turned and new brake shoes,
Taught how to do this
By friends who themselves spent
Youth with the Classics –
The garden gets better, I
Laugh in the evening
To pick up Chinese
And read about farming.
I fix truck and lock eyebrows
With tough-handed men of the past.
6 1983 Snyder, Gary. Passage through India [ID D29195].
Hong Kong: we first off headed for the Japanese Consul and presented our papers, applying for a new visa to Japan. Then walked around on the hillside back of town—Joanne went shopping for a raincoat, and Neale and I went into an old-style wineshop and talked to the old men in broken Chinese, sampling from various crocks and getting a little drunk— wandered up and down through the crowded alleys, people hanging all their laundry out the apartment balcony windows, old stained concrete and plaster. New buildings don’t seem to last long. Hong Kong so crowded—and barbed wire machine-gun emplacements set up all around. Lively, shopping is a major activity, stores are filled with every conceiv¬able thing, especially luxury. Joanne got a French raincoat—we met back at the ship. The next day Joanne, Neale, and I took a bus out to the border—about a thirty-mile ride. This is on the mainland side. We got up on a hill and gazed out through pine trees at the Chinese Peoples' Republic— spread out before us, a watery plain with houses here and there—a barbed-wire fence along a river at the foot of the hill showing where the actual line is. We could see men far off in China loading a little boat on the river, and hear the geese and chickens and water buffaloes from far away. It was warmish, gray cloudy, soft. Went back on the train to Kowloon (nine dragons) where our ship was—the seamen out handling rigging, sheaves, and cables. Joanne is wearing her fine yellow raincoat. The villages in mainland Hong Kong have a very different feeling from those in Japan. The rows in the gardens aren't so straight, the buildings not so neat—and the building material is brick instead of wood (though roofs are thatch); the people all wear the wide trousers and jackets, men and women alike, and the coolie hats in the field. But Hong Kong has food in a way no Japanese town could. The Japanese simply don't have the Chinese sense for cooking and eating (and a Japanese meal out, dinner party, say, is always a drag until people are finally drunk enough on sake to loosen up; whereas the Chinese have glorious multicourse banquets as a matter of course). In Hong Kong it Hong Kong: we first off headed for the Japanese Consul and presented our papers, applying for a new visa to Japan. Then walked around on the hillside back of town—Joanne went shopping for a raincoat, and Neale and 1 went into an old-style wineshop and talked to the old men in broken Chinese, sampling from various crocks and getting a little drunk— wandered up and down through the crowded alleys, people hanging all their laundry out the apartment balcony windows, old stained concrete and plaster. New buildings don't seem to last long. Hong Kong so crowded—and barbed wire machine-gun emplacements set up all around. Lively, shopping is a major activity, stores are filled with every conceivable thing, especially luxury. Joanne got a French raincoat—we met back at the ship. The next day Joanne, Neale, and I took a bus out to the bor¬der—about a thirty-mile ride. This is on the mainland side. We got up on a hill and gazed out through pine trees at the Chinese Peoples' Republic— spread out before us, a watery plain with houses here and there—a barbed-wire fence along a river at the foot of the hill showing where the actual line is. We could see men far off in China loading a little boat on the river, and hear the geese and chickens and water buffaloes from far away. It was warmish, gray cloudy, soft. Went back on the train to Kowloon (nine dragons) where our ship was—the seamen out handling rigging, sheaves, and cables. Joanne is wearing her fine yellow raincoat. The villages in mainland Hong Kong have a very different feeling from those in Japan. The rows in the gardens aren't so straight, the buildings not so neat—and the building material is brick instead of wood (though roofs are thatch); the people all wear the wide trousers and jackets, men and women alike, and the coolie hats in the field. But Hong Kong has food in a way no Japanese town could. The Japanese simply don't have the Chinese sense for cooking and eating (and a Japanese meal out, dinner party, say, is always a drag until people are finally drunk enough on sake to loosen up; whereas the Chinese have glorious multicourse banquets as a matter of course). In Hong Kong it's like walking along the market sections of Grant Avenue, Chinatown, only better, the wineshops and herb shops in between, That evening to an Australian-run bar for a while, then back to the end of the pier, looking across to the Victoria (Island) side, the celebrated lights going up the steep hill, drinking beer in the dark—a freighter comes in, blotting out the neon, the bridge decks alight, and a junk in full sail, batwing taut membrane over bones—goes out darkly and silent, a single yellow kerosene lamp dim in the stern.
The houses on the New Territory are all thatched, dry brown colors as the parched winter brown of the long plain stretching north-fallow paddies, with water buffalo, cows, pigs, and flocks of geese here and there browsing.
The dried out winter ricefields
men far off loading junks in the river
bales of rice on their shoulders
a little boat poles out
roosters and geese –
looking at China
Bought $ 347 worth of rupees in Hong Kong at 7 RS to $1 US, where official rate in India is 4.75 to $ 1. Ship sailed at midnight and we were bound for Saigon.
Out of Hong Kong they moved Joanne and me from our cabin-class cabins and put us together in one tiny two-man cabin in the tourist-class section. Food was still to be taken deck-class, but our living quarters had been altered. I never understood why except they did get a large number of additional cabin-class passengers, Indians and Chinese, and perhaps were overcrowded. So now in the messhall, besides our previous friends, there were women in saris and pigtailed old Chinese women in silk trousers – and the waters were warm, we were sunbathing on deck. At night took up the star map and a flashlight, and identified the southern stars, Canopus and Achernanr, and the Southern Cross, until one of the seamen came down from the bridge and said our little flashing of the flash-light was hard on the bridge lookout, so we stopped. Always in motion…

Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama's ashram has fences around it, and a few armed Indian army guards. Between the tops of the deodars are strung long ribbons of prayer flags. After getting cleared through the guardhouse (and washing up at a pump, right in front of the guards) we were led to a group of low wooden buildings and given a waiting room to wait in. I guess the Indians are afraid the Chinese might come and kidnap the Dalai if they're not careful. A few minutes later the Dalai Lama's interpreter came in, a neatly Western-dressed man in his thirties with a Tibetan cast, who spoke perfect English. His name is Sonam Topgay. He immediately started to ask me about Zen Buddhism. It seems he had found a book on Zen (if I understood him right) in a public toilet in Calcutta, and was immediately struck by its resemblance to the school of Tibetan Buddhism he followed. After that we didn't talk about Zen much, but he told me about the Zok-chen branch of Rnin ma-pa (Red Hat), which is a Tantric meditation school. He said it was by far the highest and greatest of all schools of Buddhism, including the Yellow Hat (which happens to be the sect his employer, the Dalai Lama, is head of). (Don't tell the Dalai Lama I said this.) He is originally from Sikkim, went to college in Delhi majoring in psychology. Got fits of depression and figured out a method of 'introspection' to see what was the mind that felt depressed. Then he went to Lhasa and met a saintly old woman age 122 who told him to go see Dudjon Rimpoche of the Rnin ma-pa, which he did, becoming that man's disciple. He also married a girl in Lhasa. He said that one of the good things about his school of Buddhism was that you could marry, and you and your wife could meditate together while making love. Then they came out, when the Chinese moved in, with their baby girl. (A book by Evans-Wentz called The Tibetan Book of Liberation, I believe, is of this sect. Book of the Dead, also.) They also say, perfect total enlightenment can come: 1) at the moment of dying, 2) by eating proper sacramental food, 3) through dance and drama, and 4) at the moment of orgasm.
Then he told us the Dalai Lama was busy talking to the Maharajah of Sikkim, who had just dropped in, and that's why it had been such a long wait. So we went into the Dalai Lama's chamber. It has colorful 'tankas' hanging all around and some big couches in a semicircle. We shake hands with him except that I do a proper Buddhist deep bow. The Dalai Lama is big and rather handsome. He looks like he needs more exercise. Although he understands a lot of English, always keeps an interpreter by when talking to guests. Allen and Peter asked him at some length about drugs and drug experiences, and their relationship to the spiritual states of meditation. The Dalai Lama gave the same answer everyone else did: drug states are real psychic states, but they aren't ultimately useful to you because you didn't get them on your own will and effort. For a few glimpses into the unconscious mind and other realms, they may be of use in loosening you up. After that, you can too easily come to rely on them, rather than under-taking such a discipline as will actually alter the structure of the personality in line with these insights. It isn't much help to just glimpse them with no ultimate basic alteration in the ego that is the source of lots of the psychic-spiritual ignorance that troubles one. But he said he'd be interested in trying psilocybin, the mushroom derivative, just to see what Westerners are so excited about. Allen promised to try and put Harvard onto it, and have this professor Dr. Tim Leary send him some.
Then the Dalai Lama and I talked about Zen sect meditation, him asking 'how do you sit? how do you put your hands? how do you put your tongue? where do you look? '—as I told or showed him. Then he said, yes, that's just how we do it. Joanne asked him if there couldn't be another posture of meditation for Westerners, rather than crosslegged. He said, 'It's not a matter of national custom', which I think is about as good an answer as you could get.
The Dalai doesn't spend all his time in his ashram; in fact he had just returned from a tour of south India, Mysore, where a few Tibetan refugee resettlements are. And last thing I've heard (since I got back to Japan) is at he's going to set out and do some real Buddhist preaching over India, maybe Europe and America eventually, spinning the wheel of the Dharma. He is at the least a very keen-minded well-read man, and probably lots more than that. Also, he himself is still in training—there are 'Senior Gurus of the Dalai Lama', the most learned of Tibetans, who keep him on a hard study schedule and are constantly testing and debat¬es with him.
Walked back down the hill, two miles in the dark, illuminated by occasional lightning flash, to our bungalow. To sleep late, some Englishman shouting under our windows.
7 1983 Snyder, Gary. The Brush
The elites of premodern China's high civilization were urbane, bookish, secular, arty, and supremely confident. The Imperial Government rested in a ritualized relationship with Great Nature, and the seasonal exchanges between Heaven and Earth—sun, rains, and soils—were national sacraments conducted at elaborate Earth and Heaven shrines. (The most powerful of rituals were conducted in solitude by the Emperor himself.) Nature and its landscapes were seen as realms of purity and selfless beauty and order, in vivid contrast to the corrupt and often brutal entanglements of politics that no active Chinese official could avoid. The price an intellectual paid for the prestige and affluence that came with being a member of the elite was the sure knowledge of the gap between humane Confucian theory and the actual practices of administering a county or a province—with multiple levels of graft, well-cooked books, and subtle techniques of coercion. And the higher one rose in the ranks, the more one’s neck was exposed to the deadly intrigues of enemies. The mountain horizons were a reminder of the vivid world of clear water, patient rocks, intensely focused trees, lively coiling clouds and mists—all the spontaneous processes that seemed to soar above human fickleness. The fu poet Sun Ch'o said of these processes, "When the Dao dissolves, it becomes rivers, when it coagulates it becomes mountains". Tsung Ping, an early fifth-century painter whose work does not survive, is described as having done mountain landscapes when ill and no longer able to ramble the hills he loved. He wrote the perfect program for a recluse: Thus by living leisurely, by controlling the vital breath, by wiping the goblet, by playing the ch'in, by contemplating pictures in silence, by meditating on the four quarters of space, by never resist-ing the influence of Heaven and by responding to the call of the wilderness where the cliffs and peaks rise to dazzling heights and the cloudy forests are dense and vast, the wise and virtuous men of ancient times found innumerable pleasures which they assimilated by their souls and minds. He also stated a philosophy of landscape painting that stood for centuries to come: "Landscapes exist in the material world yet soar in the realms of the spirit... The Saint interprets the Way as Law through his spiritual insight, and so the wise man comes to an understanding of it. Landscape pays homage to the Way through Form, and so the virtuous man comes to delight in it." Half a century later Hsieh Ho declared the first principle of landscape painting to be "spirit resonance and living moment"—meaning, a good painting is one in which the very rocks come alive, and one yearns to go walking in it. The basic aesthetics of the tradition had been articulated, but it was almost a thousand years before the implications of these statements were fully realized in painterly terms. The art of painting "mountains and waters" slowly unfolded through the centuries. The concept of ch'i—a rich term that translates as indwelling energy, breath, and spirit—is a rich sophistication of archaic East Asian animism. Joseph Needham calls it "matter-energy" and treats it as a proto-scientific term. Contemporary people everywhere tend to see matter as lifeless. The notion of a rock participating in life and spirit—even as metaphor—is beneath adult consideration. Yet for those who work for long amid the forms of nature, the resonating presence of a river-system or prairie expanse or range of hills becomes faintly perceptible. It's odd but true that if too much human impact has hit the scene, this presence doesn't easily rise. Archaic art worldwide is often abstract and geometrical. The spiral motif is widely found—from tattoos on the cheek to petroglyphs on a canyon wall. This representation of the ch'i of things becomes a design of volutes in early Chinese decorative art. Artists started tracing the lines of energy flow as observed in the clouds, running water, mist and rising smoke, plant growth—tendrils, rock formations, and various effects of light, in their patterns. They went on, according to Michael Sullivan, to draw images of fantastically formed animal/energy-bodied nature spirits, and this provided a main bridge from archetypal being to archetypal land- form. The lines finally twisted themselves into ranges of mountains. The word for civilization in Chinese is wen-ming, literally, “understanding writing." In the time of Confucius people wrote on slats of bamboo with a stylus. When paper and the soft-haired brush came into use, the fluidity of calligraphy became possible. In China calligraphy is considered the highest of the graphic arts. The painter uses the same equipment as a writer—the "four treasures" of brush, ink, inkstone, and paper. The brush usually has a bamboo handle with rabbit, badger, goat, deer, wolf, sable, fox, and other hairs for the tip. Even mouse-whiskers have been tried. Everything from a broken roof-tile to rare and unusual stones have been used for grinding the ink. Paper, which is said to have been invented in the first century A.D., is commonly made from paper mulberry, hemp, and bamboo. The paper preferred by Sung and Yuan dynasty painters was called "Pure Heart Hall" paper. It was smooth, white, and thin. Paintings were also done on silk, but paper lasts longer. Ink was made by burning dry pine logs in a kind of soot-collecting kiln. The soot was mixed with glue, one famous glue being made of donkey skin boiled in water from the Tung river. Fragrance was added, and the whole pressed into an inscribed stick. Grinding the ink with a slow steady back-and-forth stroke, softening the brush, spreading the paper, amounts to a meditation on the qualities of rock, water, trees, air, and shrubs. The earliest surviving landscape paintings (early T'ang, the seventh century) are more like perspective maps. Wang Wei's Wang Chuan Villa is a visual guide to a real place, with little labels on the notable locations. These first painted mountains are stark and centered, and the trees look stuck on. The painting might be a guidebook scene of a famous temple on a famous mountain. They are still half-tied to accounts of journeys, land- use records, or poems. Then, with the Sung dynasty, in the eleventh century, paintings open out to great space. The rock formations, plants and trees, river and stream systems, flow through magically realistic spatial transitions. The painter-essayist Kuo Hsi reminded us that the mountains change their appearance at every step you take. Paintings distinguish the wider drier mountains of the north from the tighter, wetter, mistier valleys of the south. These vast scenes, with a few small fishing boats, little huts—cottages— travellers with pack stock—become visionary timeless lands of mountain- rocks and air-mist-breath and far calm vistas. People are small but are lovingly rendered, doing righteous tasks or reclining and enjoying their world. Painters moved between extremes of wet ink-dripping brushes and drier sparser ink on the brush. From hard-boned fine-detailed meticulous workmanship leaf by leaf and pebble by pebble they moved to wet-flung washes of lights and darks that capture a close hill, a distant range, a bank of trees with an effect that can be called impressionistic.
The Sung dynasty painters ot large scale, including the horizontal handscrolls of a type sometimes called "Streams and Mountains without End," didn't always walk the hills they portrayed. With an established vocabulary of forms and the freedom of the brush they could summon up mountains that defied gravity and geomorphology, that seemed to float in mist. But these invented landscapes were somehow true to organic life and the energy cycles of the biosphere. The paintings show us the earth surface as part of a living being, on which water, cloud, rock, and plant growth all stream through each other—the rocks under water, waterfalls coming down from above clouds, trees flourishing in air. I overstate to make the point: the cycles of biosphere process to just this, stream vertically through each other. The swirls and spirals of micro- and macrocli¬mate ("the tropical heat engine" for example) are all creations of living organisms; the whole atmosphere is a breath of plants, writhing over the planet in elegant feedback coils instructed by thermodynamics and whatever it is that guides complexity. "Nature by self-entanglement," said Otto Rossler, "produces beauty." The mountains and rivers of the Sung dynasty paintings are remote. Yet they could be walked. Climbers take pleasure in gazing on ranges from a near distance and visualizing the ways to approach and ascend. Faces that seem perpendicular from afar are in fact not, and impossible-looking foreshortened spurridges or gullies have slopes, notches, ledges, that one can negotiate—a trained eye can see them. Studying Fan K’uan's "Travellers Among Streams and Mountains" (about A.D. 1000)—a hanging scroll seven feet tall—one can discern a possible climbing route up the chimneys to the left of the waterfall. The travellers and their packstock are safe below on the trail. They could be coming into the Yosemite Valley in the 1870s. Southern Sung and Yuan dynasty landscape painting (especially with the horizontal handscroll format) tends to soften the hills. In the time of the evolution of the paintings, the mountains become easier, and finally can be easily rambled from one end to the other. As Sherman Lee says, the landscapes are no longer "mountain-and-water" but "rock-and-tree-and-water."
The cities of the lower Yangtze became a haven for refugee artists and scholars during the Southern Sung dynasty, in the twelfth century, when the northern half of the country fell to the Khitans, a forest-dwelling Mongol tribe from Manchuria. The long-established southern intelligentsia had always been closer to Daoism than the northerners. At that time Ch'an Buddhism and painting both were popularly divided into a northern and southern school. In both cases, the southern school was taken to be more immediate and intuitive. This large community of artists in the south launched new styles of painting. Lighter, more intimate, suggestive, swift, and also more realistic. Some of the painters—Hsia Kuei, Mu Ch'i, Liang K'ai, were much admired by the Japanese Zen monks and merchants, so many of their works were bought by the Japanese: traded for the exquisite Japanese swords that the Chinese needed to fight off the northern invaders. Many of the paintings ended up in the Zen Honzans ("Main Mountains"—headquarters temples) of Kyoto, where they are kept today. The fact that some scrolls were landscapes of the imagination should not obscure the achievement of Chinese artists in rendering actual landscapes. The most fantastic-looking peaks of the scrolls have models in the karst limestone pinnacles of Kuangsi; misty cliffs and clinging pines are characteristic of the ranges of southern Anhwei province. The painting manual Chieh-tzu Yuan Hua Chuan, "Mustard-Seed Garden Guide to Painting" (about 1679), distinguishes numerous types of mountain formations, and provides a traditional menu of appropriate brush stroke- types for evoking them. Geological identifications of the forms indicated by different brush-strokes are described in Needham: Glaciated or maturely eroded slopes, sometimes steep, are shown by the technique called "spread-out hemp fibers", and mountain slopes furrowed by water into gullies are drawn in the bo yeh ts’un manner ("veins of a lotus-leaf hung up to dry"). "Unravelled rope" indicates igneous intrusions and granite peaks; "rolling clouds" suggest fantastically contorted eroded schists. The smooth roundness of exfoliated igneous rocks is seen in the "bullock hair" method, irregularly jointed and slightly weathered granite appears in "broken nets", and extreme erosion gives "devil face" or "skull" forms... cleavages across strata, with vertical jointed upright angular rocks, looking somewhat like crystals, are depicted in the "horse teeth" (ma ya ts'un) technique. The Ta Ch'ing T'ung Chih is an eighteenth-century geographical encyclopedia with an illustrated chapter on "mountains and rivers". These woodblocks, based on the painting tradition, not only give a fair rendering of specific scenes, but do so with geological precision. Needham notes how one can identify lwater-rounded boulder deposits, the Permian basalt cliffs of Omei-shan, the dipping strata of the Hsiang mountains near Po Chii-i's tomb, U-shaped valleys and rejuvenated valleys.
Huang Kung-wang (born in 1269) was raised in the south. After a short spell with the civil service he became a Daoist teacher, poet, musician, and painter. He said to have recommended that one should "carry around a sketching brush in a leather bag" and to have called out to his students "look at the clouds—they have the appearance of mountain tops!" His handscroll "Dwelling in the Fu-ch'un Mountains" came to be one of the most famous paintings within China. He started it one sum¬mer afternoon in 1347, looking out from his house, and doing the whole basic composition on that one day. It took another three years to finish it. It's a clean, graceful painting that breathes a spirit of unmystified naturalness. The scene is not particularly wild or glamorous; it has the plain power of simply being its own quite recognizable place. This is in tune with the Ch'an demand for "nothing special" and its tenderness for every entity, however humble. From around the Ming dynasty (1368 on) China had more and more people living in the cities. Painting helped keep a love of wild nature alive, but gradually many paintings were done by people who had never much walked the hills, for clients who would never get a chance to see such places. At the same time, there were painters like Wang Hui, who was a master of all historical styles, but also an acute observer of nature. His "Landscape in the Style of Chii-jan and Yen Wen-Kuei" (1713) carries the hills and slopes on out to sea as the painting fades away, by a portrayal of sea-fog twisting into scrolls and curls of water vapor / wind current / energy flow that faintly reminds us of the origins of Chinese paintings, and takes us back to the mineral and water cycle sources. Chi¬nese painting never strays far from its grounding in energy, life, and process.
8 1984.10.16-12.9 Gary Snyder travels in the Peoples' Republic of China as part of an American Academy of Arts & Letters delegation for a 4-day writers conference, as guest of the Writers' Union with Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg, Harrison Salisbury, William Gass, Francine du Plessix Gray.
The American writers were taken to the most famous tourist destinations : Beijing, the Chinese Acrobat Theatre, the Imperial Palace, a section of the Great Wall. After a week in Beijing, the group went to Xian, to Shanghai, to see the Buddhist temples, the Tang gardens in Suzhou and Han Shan's Cold Mountain.
After the other members of the mission went back to America, Allen Ginsberg stayed in China by himself for some time to have more communication with contemporary Chinese writers and a spiritual dialogue with great ancient Chinese poets. He wen to the universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Baoding and Guiling to read and instruct his own poems and other western poets. In this period he wrote more than ten poems : One morning I took a walk in China, Reading Bai Juyi, Improvisation in Beijing, I love old Whitman so, Black shroud. In these poems Ginsberg depicts his endearment of China and its profound culture. And the poems have been praised as opening a window for western readers to understand China.
9 1987 Bai, Juyi [Bo, Juyi]. Long bitter song. Transl. by Gary Snyder.
The "Long Bitter Song" (Chang hen ge) of Bai Juyi (Po Chü-i) is probably the best known and most widely popular poem in the whole Chinese cultural-sphere. Bai and his friend Wang Shifu (Wang Shih-fu) were visiting the Xienfu Chan Buddhist training center in 806, and were talking one night of the events of the reign of Emperor Xuanzong (Hsiian Tsung) and the An Lushan rebellion, sixty years earlier. Xuanzong was one of China's better rulers and presided over what has since been considered the golden age of both Chan Buddhist creativity and Chinese poetry. He took power in 712 and led a strong and innovative administration up to about 745. At that time he became totally infatuated with Yang Gui Fei (Yang Kuei- fei), the wife of one of his many sons. She became his concubine, the Sogdian-Turkish general An Lushan became an intimate of the couple and perhaps also a lover of Yang, the restive Northeast revolted under An, he led his troops into the capital, Xuanzong, Yang Gui Fei and the palace guard fled the city, and outside town at Horse Cliff the troops stopped, refused to go on, and insisted on putting Yang Gui Fei to death. That was in 755. The rebellion was quelled by 762, about the same time Xuanzong died. This rebellion marked a watershed in the fortunes of the Tang dynasty, beginning a period of somewhat more decentralized power, a rise of Chinese cultural chauvinism and contempt for the "third world" bor¬der peoples, and a greater weakness in relation to the borders.
The story of the Emperor and his lovely concubine had become legend. After that evening's reminiscences. Bai was inspired to write the story as a long poem. Within his own lifetime he then heard it sung on the canals and in the pleasure quarters by singing-girls and minstrels. Bai lived from a.d. 772 to 846. He was born in a poor family, passed the examina-tions partly on the strength of his literary brilliance, and became a life¬long political functionary of great integrity and compassion who wrote many stirring poems on behalf of the common people. He was a Chan Buddhist, and studied under the master Wei Kuan, who was a disciple of the outstanding Chan teacher Mazu (Ma-tsu).
This poem is in the seven character line, which gives it (in Chinese) this sort of rhythm:
tum tum / turm turm: turm turm turm
I have tried to keep to this beat as far as possible in my translation. I did the first version of it with the aid of Ch'en Shih-hsiang who was my teacher in graduate seminars at U.C. Berkeley in Tang poetics, in the early fifties.
I must take full responsibility, however, for idiosyncratic aspects of the translation—cases of both stripped-down literalism, and occasional free flights. My debt to his gracious, learned, unquenchable delight in all forms of poetry is deep indeed, and I am pleased to honor his memory with this publication of a poem that we took much pleasure in reading together.
Gary Snyder 28.X.86

I
Han's Emperor wanted a Beauty
one to be a "Destroyer of Kingdoms" Scouring the country, many years,
sought, but didn't find.
The Yang family had a girl
just come grown;
Reared deep in the inner-apartments,
men didn't know of her.
Such Heaven-given elegance
could not be concealed
One morning she was taken to
the Emperor's household.
A turn of the head, one smile,
—a hundred lusts were flamed
The Six Palaces rouge-and-eyebrow
without one beautiful face.
In the Spring cold she was given a bath
at the Flower-pure Pool
Warm pool, smooth water,
on her cold, glowing skin
Servant girls helping her rise,
languorous, effortless beauty—
This was the beginning of her new role:
glistening with Imperial favour.
Hair like a floating cloud, flower-face,
ripple of gold when she walked.
—In the warm Hibiscus curtains
they spent the Spring night.
Spring night is bitterly short
it was noon when they rose;
From this time on the Emperor
held no early court.
Holding feasts and revels
without a moment's rest
Spring passed, Spring dalliance,
all in a whirl of nights.
Beautiful girls in the outer palace:
three thousand women:
Love enough for three thousand
centered in one body.
In Gold House, perfectly attired
her beauty served the night;
In the Jade Tower the parties ended
with drunk, peaceful Spring.
Her sisters and brothers
all given land,
Splendor and brilliance
surprised her humble family.
Following this, on all the earth,
fathers & mothers hearts
No longer valued bearing males
but hoped to have girls.
The high-soaring Li palace
pierces blue clouds
Delights of Immortals, whirled on wind
were heard of everywhere.
Slow song, flowing dance,
music like frost-crystal
sifting from the lute-strings—
The Emperor could exhaust a day
watching—and still not full
II
Then Yuyang war drums,
approached, shaking the earth;
Alarming, scattering, the "Rainbow Skirt"
the "Feathered Robe" dances.
From the nine great City-Towers,
smoke, dust, rose.
Thousands of chariots, ten thousand horsemen scattered Southwest—
Kingfisher banner fluttering, rippling,
going and then stopping;
West out the city walls
over a hundred li
And the six armies won't go on:
nothing can be done—
Writhing, twisting, Moth-eyebrows
dies in front of the horses.
Her flower comb falls to the ground
not a man will pick it up—
Kingfisher feathers, "little golden birds",
jade hair-pin;
The Emperor hides his face
no way to help
Turns, looks, blood, tears,
flow, quietly mingle.
Yellow dust eddies and scatters.
Desolate winds blow.
Cloud Trail winds and twists
climbing to Sword-point Peak
Under Omei Shan
the last few came.
Flags, banners, without brightness,
A meagre-coloured sun.
Shu river waters blue
Shu mountains green
And the Emperor, days, days,
nights, nights, brooding.
From the temporary palace, watching the moon colour tore his heart
The night-rain bell-tinkle
—bowel-twisting music.
III
Heaven turns, earth revolves,
The Dragon-Chariot returned.
But he was irresolute,
didn't want to go;
And at the foot of Horse Cliff,
in the sticky mud,
Couldn't find the Jade Face
at her death-place.
Court officials watching him
soaked their clothes with tears.
Looking east to the Capital walls,
they returned on horses
Came back to Pond Park
—all was as before.
Taiye Hibiscus,
Weiyang Willow.
But Hibiscus flowers were like her face,
the Willows like her brow:
Seeing this, how could he
keep tears from falling.
Spring wind, peach, plum,
flowers open in the sun;
Autumn rain, Wutong trees, leaf-fall time.
Western palace, the inner court,
many autumn grasses.
Falling leaves fill the stairs
red: and no one sweeps.
The Pear-garden players
white-haired young.
Pepper-court eunuchs
watched beautiful girls age.
Evening, palace, glow-worm flight,
—his thoughts were soundless
He picked his single candle-wick down, couldn't reach sleep.
Slow, slow, the night bell
begins the long night,
Glimmering, fading, the Milky Way,
and day about to dawn.
Silent tile roof-ducks
are heavy with frost-flowers
The Kingfisher quilt is cold—
who will share his bed?
Far, far, the living and the dead
and the light years—cut apart.
Her spirit already dissolving,
not even entering dreams.
IV
A Linqiong Daoist priest
of the Hongdu school
Was able to deeply concentrate
and thus call up the spirits.
Hearing this, the Emperor
—troubled, twisting thoughts.
Ordered the Daoist priest
to make a thorough search.
Pushing the sky, riding air,
swift as a thunderbolt,
Harrowing the heavens, piercing Earth,
he sought everywhere
Above exhausting the blue void,
below, the Yellow Springs.
The ends of earth—vast, vast,
and nowhere did he find her.
Then he heard—that out on the ocean—
was a mountain of Immortals
A mountain at—nowhere—
a cloudy, unreal place.
Palace towers, tinkling gems,
where Five Clouds rise.
Within—lovely, wanton, chaste,
many faery people.
There was there one faery
called Taizhen;
Snow skin, flower appearance,
it had to be her.
At the Gold Tower of the West Wing,
he knocked on the Jade door:
Announcing himself to Little Jade
—and she told Shuang Cheng,
That the Emperor of the people of Han
had sent an envoy.
In the nine-flowered canopy
the faery's dreams were broken;
Holding her clothes, pushing the pillow,
she rose, walking unsteady.
Winding, opening the pearl door,
the inlaid silver screens.
Her cloud-like hair, floating on one side,
—just brought from sleep.
Her flower-cap unadjusted
she came down the hall,
Wind blew her elegant sleeves
floating, floating up—
Seemed like the "Rainbow Skirt",
the "Feathered Robe" dance.
Her jade-like figure small and alone,
she scattered her sad tears:
As though one branch of a blossoming pear
was holding the whole Spring's rain.
Restraining her feeling, cooling her look,
she told him to thank the Emperor;
"With that parting our two forms
were split by the World's vast shifting;
After Zhaoyang temple,
our love was cut off.
Here in Raspberry-tangle Palace
the days and months are long—
I look down, hoping to see
lands where humans dwell,
I never see Chang'an
but only dusty haze.”
Then taking some ancient treasures
rich in deep feeling,
An inlaid box, a gold hairpin,
to be delivered back,
Keeping a leg of the hairpin,
keeping half the box,
Breaking the gold of the hairpin, box cut in two—
"If only our hearts are strong as
this gold hairpin,
Above in heaven, or among men,
we will somehow meet.
Go back swiftly
tell him this message:
For it tells of one Vow
that two hearts know,
In the seventh month on the seventh day
in Long-Life Temple.
At midnight, no one about,
we swore together
If in heaven, to fly as
the 'paired-wing' birds;
If on earth, to grow as
one joined branch."
Heaven lasts, Earth endures,
—and both will end;
This sorrow stretches on
forever, without limit.
10 1993 Snyder, Gary. Sixteen T'ang poems : [translations]. [ID D29196].
Note dat. 14.1.93
In the early fifties I managed to get myself accepted into the Department of Oriental Languages at UC Berkeley as a graduate student. I took seminars in the reading of T'ang and Sung poems with Professor Ch'en Shih-hsiang, a remarkable scholar, calligrapher, poet, and critic who had a profound appreciation for good poetry and of any provenance. Ch'en Hsien-sheng introduced me to the Han-shan poems, and I published those translations back in the sixties. The poems translated here also got their start in those seminars, but I never considered them quite finished. From Berkeley I went to Japan and for the subsequent decade was working almost exclusively with Ch'an texts. Another twenty years went into developing a farmstead in the Sierra Nevada and working for the ecological movement. In the last few years I have had a chance to return to my readings in Chinese poetry and bring a few of the poems I started back then to completion. The little collection is dedicated to the memory of Ch'en Shih-hsiang.

Two poems by Meng Hao-jan
Meng, Hao-jan [Meng Haoran]. Spring dawn. Transl. by Gary Snyder. In : The Peabody review ; winter (1989-1990).
Spring sleep, not yet awake to dawn,
I am full of birdsongs.
Throughout the night the sounds of wind and rain
Who knows what flowers fell.

Meng, Hao-jan [Meng Haoran]. Mooring on Chien-te river. Transl. by Gary Snyder. In : The Peabody review ; winter (1989-1990).
The boat rocks at anchor by the misty island
Sunset, my loneliness comes again.
In these vast wilds the sky arches down to the trees.
In the clear river water, the moon draws near.

Five poems by Wang Wei
Wang, Wei. Deer camp. Transl. by Gary Snyder. In : Journal for the protection of all beings ; no 4 (Fall 1978).
Empty mountains :
no one to be seen.
Yet – hear –
human sounds and echoes.
Returning sunlight
enters the dark woods ;
Again shining
on green moss, above.
Sekundärliteratur : Eliot Weinberger : Surely one of the best translations, partially because of Snyder's lifelong forest experience. Like Rexroth, he can see the scene. Every word of Wang has been translated, and nothing added, yet the translation exists as an American poem.
Changing the passive is heard to the imperative hear is particularly beautiful, and not incorrect: it creates an exact moment, which is now. Giving us both meanings, sounds and echoes, for the last word of line 2 is, like most sensible ideas, revolutionary. Translators always assume that only one reading of a foreign word or phrase may be presented, despite the fact that perfect correspondence is rare.
The poem ends strangely. Snyder takes the last word, which everyone else has read as on, and translates it with its alternative meaning, above, isolating it from the phrase with a comma. What's going on? Moss presumably is only above if one is a rock or bug. Or are we meant to look up, after seeing the moss, back toward the sun: the vertical metaphor of enlightenment?
In answer to my query, Snyder wrote: "The reason for .. moss, above'... is that the sun is entering (in its sunset sloping, hence 'again'—a final shaft) the woods, and illuminating some moss up in the trees. (NOT ON ROCKS.) This is how my teacher Ch'en Shih-hsiang saw it, and my wife (Japanese) too, the first time she looked at the poem."
The point is that translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining of the poem. As such, every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader's intellectual and emotional life. As no individual reader remains the same, each reading becomes a different—not merely another—reading. The same poem cannot be read twice.
Snyder's explanation is only one moment, the latest, when the poem suddenly transforms before our eyes. Wang's 20 characters remain the same, but the poem continues in a state of restless change.

Wang, Wei. Bamboo Lane House. Transl. by Gary Snyder.
Sitting alone, hid in bamboo
Plucking the lute and gravely whistling.
People wouldn't know that deep woods
Can be this bright in the moon.
Wang, Wei. Saying farewell. Transl. by Gary Snyder.
Me in the mountains and now you've left.
Sunset, I close the peelpole door.
Next spring when grass is green,
Will you return once more ?

Wang, Wei. Thinking of us. Transl. by Gary Snyder.
Read beans grow in the south
In spring they put out shoots.
Gather a lapful for me –
And doing it, think of us.

Wang, Wei. Poem. Transl. by Gary Snyder.
You who come from my village
Ought to know its affairs
The day you passed the silk window
Had the chill plum bloomed ?
Three poems for women in the Service of the Palace

Tu, Mu [Du, Mu]. Autumn evening. Transl. by Gary Snyder.
A silver candle in the autumn gloom
by a lone painted screen
Her small light gauze fan
shivers the fireflies
On the stairs of heaven, night's color
cool as water :
She sits watching the Herd-boy,
the weaving-girl, stars.

Yuan, Chen [Yuan Zhen]. The Summer Palace. Transl. by Gary Snyder.
Silence settles on the old Summer Palace
Palace flowers still quiet red.
White-haired concubines
Idly sit and gossip of the days of Hsüan Tsung.

Po, Chü-i [Bo Juyi]. Palace song. Transl. by Gary Snyder.
Tears soak her thin shawl
dreams won't come.
In the dark night, from the front palace,
girls rehearsing songs.
Still fresh and young,
already put down,
She leans across the brazier
to wait the coming dawn.

Tu, Fu [Du Fu]. Spring view. Transl. by Gary Snyder.
The nation is ruined, but mountains and rivers remain.
This spring the city is deep in weeds and brush.
Touched by the times even flowers weep tears,
Fearing leaving the birds tangled hearts.
Watch-tower fires have been burning for three months
To get a note from home would cost ten thousand gold.
Scratching my white hair thinner
Seething hopes all in a trembling hairpin.
(Events of the An Lushan rebellion)

Liu, Ch'ang-ch'ing [Liu, Changqing]. Parting from Ling Ch'e. Transl. by Gary Snyder.
Green, green
bamboo-grove temple
Dark, dark,
the bell-sounding evening.
His rainhat catches
the slanting sunlight,
Alone returning
From the distant blue peaks.

Wang Chih-huan [Wang Zhihuan]. Climbing Crane Tower. Transl. by Gary Snyder.
The Whie sun has gone over the mountains
The yellow river is flowing to the sea.
If you wish to see a thousand li
Climb one story higher in the tower.

Liu, Tsung-yüan [Liu Zongyuan]. River snow. Transl. by Gary Snyder.
These thousand peaks cut off the flight of birds
On all the trails, human tracks are gone.
A single boat—coat—hat—an old man!
Alone fishing chill river snow.

Wang, Ch'ang-ling [Wang Changling]. Parting with Hsin Chien at Hibiscus tavern. Transl. by Gary Snyder
Cold rain on the river
we enter Wu by night
At dawn I leave
for Ch'u-shan, alone.
If friends in Lo-yang
ask after me, I've
"A heart like ice
in a jade vase."

Two poems written at Maple Bridge near Su-chou
Chang, Chi [Zhang Ji ]. Maple bridge night mooring. Transl. by Gary Snyder. In : Cloudline : no 1 (1985/86).
Moon set, a crow caws,
frost fills the sky
River, maple, fishing-fires
cross my troubled sleep.
Beyond the walls of Su-chou
from Cold Mountain temple
The midnight bell sounds
reach my boat.

Snyder, Gary. At Maple Bridge (1984)
Men are mixing gravel and cement
At Maple bridge,
Down an alley by a tea-stall
From Cold Mountain temple ;
Where Chang Chi heard the bell.
The stone step moorage
Empty, lapping water,
And the bell sound has travelled
Far across the sea.

Sources (3)

# Year Bibliographical Data Type / Abbreviation Linked Data
1 1983 Snyder, Gary. Passage through India. (San Francisco, Calif. : Grey Fox Press, 1983). [Enthält Eintragungen über China]. Publication / Sny8
2 1983 Snyder, Gary. Walls within walls. In : Co-evolution quarterly ; Spring (1983). Publication / Sny11
3 2000 Snyder, Gary. Reflections on my translation of the T'ang poet Han-Shan. In : Manoa, Honolulu ; vol. 12, no 1 (2000).
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/manoa/v012/12.1snyder.html. 		Publication / Sny10

Cited by (1)

# Year Bibliographical Data Type / Abbreviation Linked Data
1 Zentralbibliothek Zürich Organisation / ZB