Classical Chinese PoetryTranslated and Edited by DAVID HINTON

Reviewed by Tess Taylor

A new anthology unlocks centuries of a grand tradition in verse.

 What comes through is the distinctness of tone, from poet to poet, as if Hinton is lovingly teaching us to be connoisseurs of rare plum wines. 

In the mid-'60s, thinking of his childhood mill town, Ohioan James Wright penned "Autumn Begins in Martin's Ferry Ohio," arguably one of the great American poems of the last century. Football season kicks off in a working-class midwestern town, where fathers are "ashamed to go home" and "sons gallop terribly against one another's bodies." The 12-line poem's directness seems as quintessentially American as a painting of silos. But if Wright's version of American modernism seems to sprout from soil of the heartland, its images come from over the horizon. The title "Autumn Begins in..." doffs its hat to the Chinese poetry Wright had been reading and translating for years. Later, Wright would write more deliberate evocations -- poems directly indebted to the Chinese masters Du Fu and Wang Wei, or works with titles like "In the Manner of the Old Chinese Poems."

Wright was in good company. It's true that Chinese mandarins never wrote about football -- they were more enraptured with pheasants crying, dry thistles, full moons, or secluded mountain huts where they bemoaned their empty wine bottles. But classical Chinese verse, the world's oldest and longest continuous poetic tradition, has been a central part of what has made this century's American poetry sound quintessentially American. After Ezra Pound, its associative, imagistic language has influenced William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder. Current poets borrow Chinese traditions (and perceptions of Chinese traditions) as a storehouse for their own reinventions, as in Frank Bidart's recent book Watching the Spring Festival, which places Du Fu next to Marilyn Monroe and Catullus. Sometimes poets acknowledge the influence more puckishly; Billy Collins has a recent poem called "Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Song Dynasty, I Pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles."