Dancing with the Dead: The Essential Red Pine Translations

by Red Pine

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556596452
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	04/11/2023
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 6.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Bill Porter assumes the pen name Red Pine for his translation work. He was born in Los Angeles in 1943, grew up in the Idaho Panhandle, served a tour of duty in the US Army, graduated from the University of California with a degree in anthropology, and attended graduate school at Columbia University. Uninspired by the prospect of an academic career, he dropped out of Columbia and moved to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. After four years with the monks and nuns, he struck out on his own and eventually found work at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where he interviewed local dignitaries and produced more than a thousand programs about his travels in China. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

Read an Excerpt

from The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse

78

Someone asked what year I arrived

I had to think before the answer came

the peach tree I planted outside my door 

has flowered in spring twenty times.

from Poems of the Masters - Ye Shaoweng

109. Visiting a Private Garden Without Success 

It must be because he hates clogs on his moss

I knocked ten times still his gate stayed closed 

but spring can’t be kept locked inside a garden 

a branch of red blossoms reached past the wall.

from In Such Hard Times - Wei Yingwu

149. While Observing Local Customs, I Visited My Daoist Nephew Without Success and Wrote This on His Wall

Last year’s mountain stream is still flowing today

last year’s apricot blossoms I picked again today

a hermit on the trail asked me who I am

I’m the same spring visitor as last year.

from In Such Hard Times - Wei Yingwu

91. Meeting Secretary Lu Geng of Luoyang in Yangzhou 

In the land of Chu friends are rare

meeting you here was unexpected

I’ve kept your letters close to my heart

how strange to see white in your hair

our cups overflow with an innkeeper’s wine 

our luggage is full of river travel poems 

let’s toast to riding together again

as we once did on Luoyang Bridge.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Ha Jin

Puming

Cold Mountain & Friends

Stonehouse

Laozi

Song Boren

Poems of the Masters

Wei Yingwu

Finding Them Gone

Liu Zongyuan

Qu Yuan

Tao Yuanming

Dancing with the Dead

Editorial Reviews

Bill Porter has been one of the most prolific translators of Chinese texts, while also developing into a travel writer with a cult following.”—New York Times

“In the travel writing that has made him so popular in China, Porter’s tone is not reverential but explanatory, and filled with luminous asides.”—New York Review of Books

"For decades, Red Pine has breathed new life into some of the most profound yet humble poetic expressions of realization, many of which have been collected together in the anthology Dancing with the Dead: the Essential Red Pine Translations (Copper Canyon). Whether translating Puming’s verses on the oxherd taming the ox—a quintessential Zen metaphor of taming the mind through meditation—or the vernacular poetry of the enigmatic Buddhist hermit Cold Mountain, it is the utter simplicity of Red Pine’s translations that is most alluring. He renders the evocative essence of the Chinese into English with confident economy; there are no extra words or punctuation, nor is there want of more. Lovers of poetry as art and believers of poetry as a conduit to rarified experiences will find no shortage of pleasure or insight here."—Buddhadharma

“With its clarity and scholarly range, this version of the Taoteching works as both a readable text and a valuable resource of Taoist interpretation.”—Publishers Weekly

“[Translator] Red Pine’s out-of-the-mainstream work is uncanny and clearheaded.”—Kyoto Journal

"Red Pine introduces Western readers to both the text itself and the traditions it has inherited."—Virginia Quarterly Review

“Red Pine… has given us the first full collection of Han Shan’s songs in an idiom that is clear, graceful, and neutral enough to last… His translations are accurate and mirror the music of the originals…”—Bloomsbury Review

“In Red Pine’s hands, these poems are revitalized.”—Ellipsis

From the Publisher