The Collected Poems Of Li He

The definitive collection of works by one of the Tang Dynasty's most eccentric (and badly-behaved) poets, now back in print for the first time in decades. Li He is the bad-boy poet of the late Tang dynasty. He began writing at the age of seven and died at twenty-six from alcoholism or, according to a later commentator, “sexual dissipation,” or both. An obscure and unsuccessful relative of the imperial family, he would set out at dawn on horseback, pause, write a poem, and toss the paper away. A servant boy followed him to collect these scraps in a tapestry bag. Long considered far too extravagant and weird for Chinese taste, Li He was virtually excluded from the poetic canon until the mid-twentieth century. Today, as the translator and scholar Anne M. Birrell, writes, “Of all the Tang poets, even of all Chinese poets, he best speaks for our disconcerting times.” Modern critics have compared him to Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Keats, and Trakl. The Collected Poems of Li He is the only comprehensive selection of his surviving work (most of his poems were reputedly burned by his cousin after his death, for the honor of the family), rendered here in crystalline translations by the noted scholar J. D. Frodsham.

"Li He (790-816) was the bad-boy poet of the late Tang Dynasty. He began writing at the age of seven and died at twenty-six from a long illness. An obscure and unsuccessful relative of the imperial family, he would set out at dawn on horseback, pause, write a poem, and toss the paper away. A servant-boy followed him to collect these scraps in a tapestry bag. Long considered far too extravagant and weird for Chinese taste, Li He was virtually excluded from the poetic canon until the mid-twentieth century. Today, as the translator and scholar Anne M. Birrell, writes, "Of all the Tang poets, even of all Chinese poets, he best speaks for our disconcerting times." Modern critics have compared him to Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Keats, and Trakl. The Collected Poems of Li He is the only comprehensive selection of his surviving work. (Most of his poems were reputedly burned by his cousin after his death, for the honor of the family.) This important work was published by Anvil Press and North Point Press in 1983, and is an updated edition of Professor Frodsham's original 1970 translation of Li He's poems published by Clarendon Press. In crystalline translations by the noted scholar J. D. Frodsham, the book has been out of print for decades"--

Poetica 15 Li He, born in 790 AD, is said to have written poetry of great power at age seven. His death at twenty-six was considered a tragic loss. Legend records him writing poems on horseback, gathering the fragments in a tapestry bag carried by a servant lad. Barely 240 of his poems survive.

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.

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.

Li He (790-816) holds a place in China's poetic history somewhat outside the mainstream, but in every generation of readers there have been those who have found his intense and often cryptic lyrical visions irresistibly fascinating and utterly without parallel. He is renowned particularly for his lyrical reimaginings of song traditions from the ancient past, and his premature death, along with the otherworldly quality of many of his works, led later readers to view him as the emblematic cursed poet, whose fascination with ancient history, with ghosts, and with celestial and demonic beings seemed to presage the brevity of his own existence. Li He's style and diction are often idiosyncratic and even hermetic, and his work presents daunting challenges to readers wishing to follow the flights of his imagination, or simply to construe the basic sense of his language. This volume presents close translations of all of Li He's poetry, in facing-page format with the original texts, with explanatory notes on literary and historical references and difficult points of interpretation, along with endnotes briefly discussing textual variants and other technical matters. Taken together, these features will be a welcome aid to readers wishing to explore Li He's poetic worlds first-hand.

Discovered in an Egyptian papyrus in 1896, the lyrics of Bacchylides are one of the great treasures of Greek poetry. These exquisite choral odes celebrate victories in the Pythian, Isthmian, Nemean, and Olympic games and chronicle the classical gods and heroes, eloquently revealing to us the spirit and world of Golden Age Greece. The poems are brilliantly translated by Robert Fagles, recently hailed by Garry Wills in the New Yorker as "the best living translator of ancient Greek drama, lyric poetry, and epic into modern English." First published in 1961, the book now includes a new translator's note by Fagles. " Fagles] has produced a work which is at once a faithful translation of Bacchylides in the fullest sense and something which stands and lives in its own right as a work of art."--Sir Maurice Bowra, from the Foreword "Fagles has created . . . a musical and craftsmanly series of verses. As a translator, Fagles has the merits of . . . keeping the lilting rhythms of Bacchylides alive in one's ear . . . and unearthing metaphors behind faded Greek words, of splitting the strings of compound adjectives into pungent clauses which lose nothing in color but make coordinated English."--Emily Vermeule, American Journal of Philology "The beauty, richness, and classic quality of Mr. Fagles's unrhymed verse make this translation a creative work and a valuable contribution to English letters."--Rae Dalven, Poetry