The Selected Poems of Li Po

Author: Bai Li
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811213233
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description
There is a set-phrase in Chinese referring to the phenomenon of Li Po: "Winds of the immortals, bones of the Tao." He moved through this world with an unearthly freedom from attachment, and at the same time belonged profoundly to the earth and its process of change. However ethereal in spirit, his poems remain grounded in the everyday experience we all share. He wrote 1200 years ago, half a world away, but in his poems we see our world transformed. Legendary friends in eighth-century T'ang China, Li Po and Tu Fu are traditionally celebrated as the two greatest poets in the Chinese canon. David Hinton's translation of Li Po's poems is no less an achievement than his critically acclaimed The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, also published by New Directions. By reflecting the ambiguity and density of the original, Hinton continues to create compelling English poems that alter our conception of Chinese poetry.

Bright Moon, White Clouds

Author: Li Po
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834827786
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
Li Po (701-762) is considered one of the greatest poets to live during the Tang dynasty—what was considered to be the golden age for Chinese poetry. He was also the first Chinese poet to become well known in the West, and he greatly influenced many American poets during the twentieth century. Calling himself the "God of Wine" and known to his patrons as a "fallen immortal," Li Po wrote with eloquence, vividness, and often playfulness, as he extols the joys of nature, wine, and the life of a wandering recluse. Li Po had a strong social conscience, and he struggled against the hard times of his age. He was inspired by the newly blossoming Zen Buddhism and merged it with the Taoism that he had studied all his life. Though Li Po's love of wine is legendary, the translator, J. P. Seaton, includes poems on a wide range of topics—friendship and love, political criticism, poems written to curry patronage, poems of the spirit—to offer a new interpretation of this giant of Chinese poetry. Seaton offers us a poet who learned hard lessons from a life lived hard and offered his readers these lessons as vivid, lively poetry—as relevant today as it was during the Tang dynasty. Over one thousand poems have been attributed to Li Po, many of them unpublished. This new collection includes poems not available in any other editions.

Poems

Author: Li Po
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141915250
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Li Po (AD 701-62) and Tu Fu (AD 712-70) were devoted friends who are traditionally considered to be among China's greatest poets. Li Po, a legendary carouser, was an itinerant poet whose writing, often dream poems or spirit-journeys, soars to sublime heights in its descriptions of natural scenes and powerful emotions. His sheer escapism and joy is balanced by Tu Fu, who expresses the Confucian virtues of humanity and humility in more autobiographical works that are imbued with great compassion and earthy reality, and shot through with humour. Together these two poets of the T'ang dynasty complement each other so well that they often came to be spoken of as one - 'Li-Tu' - who covers the whole spectrum of human life, experience and feeling.

The Selected Poems of Po Chü-I

Author: Juyi Bai
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811214124
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
Po Chu-i (772-846 C.E.) is the quintessential Chinese poet. For although clear thought and depth of wisdom inform the work of all major Chinese poets (as opposed to the complexity and virtuosity often valued in the West), Po makes clarity itself his particular vision.

Selected Poems of Du Fu

Author:
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023150229X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Book Description
Du Fu (712–777) has been called China's greatest poet, and some call him the greatest nonepic, nondramatic poet whose writings survive in any language. Du Fu excelled in a great variety of poetic forms, showing a richness of language ranging from elegant to colloquial, from allusive to direct. His impressive breadth of subject matter includes intimate personal detail as well as a great deal of historical information—which earned him the epithet "poet-historian." Some 1,400 of Du Fu's poems survive today, his fame resting on about one hundred that have been widely admired over the centuries. Preeminent translator Burton Watson has selected 127 poems, including those for which Du Fu is best remembered and lesser-known works.

Facing the Moon

Author: Bai Li
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Book Description
Poetry. A lovely bilingual edition of the 8th century Chinese poets Li Bai and Du Fu, translated by Keith Holyoak with calligraphy by Hung-hsiang Chou. "Holyoak's clarity carries the profundity and complexity of the Chinese culture not dissimilar to our own. 'The wine keeps flowing; the moon keeps watch'"--London Magazine. "Keith Holyoak has succeeded in producing translations of Chinese poetry that achieve high literary excellence while conveying a real sense of the musicality of the originals"--Johanthan Chaves.

The Selected Poems of Wang Wei

Author: Wei Wang
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811216180
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
David Hinton, whose much-acclaimed translations of Li Po and Tu Fu have become classics, now completes the triumvirate of China's greatest poets with The Selected Poems of Wang Wei.

The Banished Immortal

Author: Ha Jin
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1524747424
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
From the National Book Award-winning author of Waiting: a narratively driven, deeply human biography of the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai—also known as Li Po In his own time (701–762), Li Bai's poems—shaped by Daoist thought and characterized by their passion, romance, and lust for life—were never given their proper due by the official literary gatekeepers. Nonetheless, his lines rang out on the lips of court entertainers, tavern singers, soldiers, and writers throughout the Tang dynasty, and his deep desire for a higher, more perfect world gave rise to his nickname, the Banished Immortal. Today, Bai's verses are still taught to China's schoolchildren and recited at parties and toasts; they remain an inextricable part of the Chinese language. With the instincts of a master novelist, Ha Jin draws on a wide range of historical and literary sources to weave the great poet's life story. He follows Bai from his origins on the western frontier to his ramblings travels as a young man, which were filled with filled with striving but also with merry abandon, as he raised cups of wine with friends and fellow poets. Ha Jin also takes us through the poet's later years—in which he became swept up in a military rebellion that altered the course of China's history—and the mysterious circumstances of his death, which are surrounded by legend. The Banished Immortal is an extraordinary portrait of a poet who both transcended his time and was shaped by it, and whose ability to live, love, and mourn without reservation produced some of the most enduring verses.

Selected Poems of Su Tung-pʻo

Author: Shi Su
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
Gathers poems about travel, nature, daily life, friendship, and exile by the eleventh-century Chinese poet, who wrote under the name Su Tung-p'o.

The Selected Poems of Tu Fu

Author: Fu Du
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811211000
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
For over a millennium, Chinese literati have almost unanimously considered Tu Fu (712-770 A.D.) to be their greatest poet.