Dancing with the Dead by Red Pine

Dancing with the Dead by Red Pine

An essential collection from the leading figure of Chinese poetry translation, presenting work of insight, humor, and musicality that continues to resonates across thousands of years.

Red Pine is one of the world's finest translators of Chinese poetic and religious texts. His new anthology, Dancing with the Dead: The Essential Red Pine, gathers over thirty voices from the ancient Chinese past--including Buddhist poets Cold Mountain (Hanshan) and Stonehouse (Shiwu), as well as Tang-dynasty luminaries Wei Yingwu and Liu Zongyuan.

Dancing with the Dead also includes translations from such religious texts as Puming's Oxherding Pictures and Verses and Lao-Tzu's Daodejing, as well as poems and woodblock illustrations from Su Po-Jen's Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom, one of the world's first printed books of art. 

Throughout the book, poems are accompanied by footnotes providing historical context, and each section includes a new and illuminating introduction chronicling Red Pine's relationship to the poet--discovery, travel, scholarship. Dancing With The Dead is more than a book, it is a journey: part travel essay, part road map, part guided meditation. It is a history translated in poem.

For Red Pine, "translating the words in a Chinese poem isn't that hard, but finding the spirit that inspired those words, the music of the heart, and asking it to inspire [his heart], that is how, and why, [he] translates."

"our luggage is full of river travel poems 

may we ride forth together again."

- Wei Yingwu

Bill Porter (aka Red Pine) was born in Van Nuys, California in 1943 and grew up in Northern Idaho. After a tour of duty in the US Army 1964-67, he attended UC Santa Barbara and majored in Anthropology. In 1970, he entered graduate school at Columbia University and studied anthropology with a faculty that included Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. While he was living in New York, he became interested in Buddhism, and in 1972 he left America and moved to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. After more than three years with the monks and nuns, he struck out on his own and supported himself by teaching English and later by working as a journalist at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong. During this time, he married a Chinese woman, had two children, and began working on translations of Chinese poetry and Buddhist texts. In 1993, he returned to America so his children could learn English. For the past twenty years, he has worked as an independent scholar and has supported himself from book royalties and lecture fees. His translations have been honored with a number of awards, including two NEA translation fellowships, a PEN translation award, the inaugural Asian Literature Award of the American Literary Translators Association, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2018 the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation bestowed by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781556596452
ISBN 10	1556596456
Title	Dancing with the Dead
Author	Red Pine
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Copper Canyon Press,U.S.
Year published	2023-05-25
Number of pages	344
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.