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Dancing with the Dead - Red Pine

By Red Pine

Release Date: 2023-04-11

Genre: Poetry

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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.”  

 â€œour luggage is full of river travel poems  

may we ride forth together again.” 

– Wei Yingwu

Dancing with the Dead - Red Pine

By Red Pine

Release Date: 2023-04-11

Genre: Poetry

(0 ratings)
Read Download
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.”  

 â€œour luggage is full of river travel poems  

may we ride forth together again.” 

– Wei Yingwu

More by Red Pine

The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma

Three Zen Sutras

The Heart Sutra

The Diamond Sutra

The Lankavatara Sutra

Road to Heaven

The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse

Zen Roots

The Platform Sutra

The Clouds Should Know Me By Now

Dancing with the Dead

Finding Them Gone

Choosing to Be Simple

Written in Exile

If a Mountain Lion Could Sing

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