Selected Poems of Su Tung-P'o

This is a fine little volume of poetry by Su Tung-p'o, one of the great poets of Sung Dynasty China, translated with the usual virtuosity by Burton Watson. As usual, too, Watson knows how to be scholarly without being pedantic: his introduction is appropriately brief and to the point, outlining the poet's life and his poetics nicely and so giving readers enough background information without delaying them too much from the wonderful poems that follow. In the same way, enough footnotes are included to clarify and contextualize without overburdening the poems with a morass of prose.Su has sort of helped Watson out on this, though, because his poems are for the most part very straightforward and accessible, appealing directly to our sensibilities. There is nothing so very convoluted or obscure about them that would require lots of annotation (in contrast, say, to poetry like that of Li He (as seen in  Goddesses, Ghosts and Demons (Poetica) ). This is not to say that Su's poems are shallow or simplistic. Far from it. They include within themselves depths and depths of feeling and insight by someone who was clearly moved by the world around him, someone who had seen his shares of life's ups and downs, someone who as a layperson practiced Buddhist meditation and fine-tuned his spirit thereby but who was far from adverse from inspiring himself with spirits of a more liquid nature. Indeed, the poems give every impression that this poet would've been a great guy to hang out with, perched somewhere on the ridge of some mountain temple, looking out over the landscape, sharing a few bottles of wine and a good laugh. In a way, the poems themselves travel over the centuries and give the reader just such an experience.

You’re in good hands with Burton Watson’s translation. An essential addition to any Sung Dynasty hermit poetry collection.

Well, it's a well executed translation of "selected poems of Su Tung-p'o"The poet was a Chinese bureaucrat who often had to travel, at times was exiled, and he made many observations of nature, life and people.The poems range from "early" 1059-1073, middle, to late 1080-1083.If you like poetry, you will enjoy, observe, read again and again, and find other meanings, etc etc

Thank you. This adds to Su Tung-po's poetry that I read so much. Thank you Burton Watson for translating

Quite enjoyable, with helpful historical notes.

i really liked these poems of Su Tung-P'o. Most are nature poems but a few are written about relationships. These poems are very accessible. The images in them are very sharp and quite lyrical. i think Burton Watson did a great job of translating these poems.

Great product

SELECTED POEMS OF SU TUNG-P'O : Translated from the Chinese by Burton Watson. 148 pp. Port Townsend, WA : Copper Canyon Press, 1994. ISBN 1-55659-064-4 (pbk.)Burton Watson has always struck me as an eminently civilized scholar and as a fine translator. Unlike certain others, he wears his scholarship lightly, and doesn't overburden the text with extraneous matter. His many translations from Chinese and Japanese Literature are of uniformly high quality, and are well worth having as they are books one often wants to returns to.The present book, after a typically brief but interesting and informative introduction which provides all we really need before diving into the poems, gives us translations of 105 of Su Tung-p'o's poems, lightly annotated and beautifully printed on spacious pages.Su Tung-p'o is one of China's greatest poets, and Watson has outdone himself here. The wrapper includes a highly laudatory appreciation by Gary Snyder, and it's easy to see why. Watson has always been a brilliant translator, and a true artist with words, but in this book he has lifted himself into the ranks of the very best, and has produced translations indistinguishable in quality from those of Snyder himself.Here, as an example of his marvelous control of tone, thought, feeling, image, rhythm, and sound, are the opening lines of poem 52 (with my obliques added to indicate line breaks) - 'Reading the Poetry of Meng Chiao' :"Night : reading Meng Chiao's poems, / characters fine as cow's hair. / By the cold lamp, my eyes blur and swim. / Good passages I rarely find - / lone flowers poking up from the mud - / But more hard words than the Odes or Li Sao - / jumbled rocks clogging the clear stream, / making rapids too swift for poling. / My first impression is of eating little fishes. . . . " (p.70).What we find here is what Burton Watson, in his 'Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry' (1984), has described as "a freshness and immediacy that is often quite miraculous" (p.3).Not poems about airy notions and exalted abstractions, then, but poems describing events from daily life, poems recording the scenes of a journey, poems expressing grief, joy, boredom, or irritation as here, poems both serious and funny and by someone who is in many ways like ourselves.Su Tung-p'o's is a wholesome poetry, a poetry that cleanses and refreshes the sensibility, and that translates us from the technoid madness of our own chaotic world to something more human and hence more nourishing. There's real food for the spirit in these poems. Watson has done them full justice. Sensitive readers would be unwise to pass them by.

These anthology of poems translated by Burton Watson, "one of the most revered translators of classical Chinese and Japanese poetry" is a true gem.Books on classical Chinese poetry invariably focus on Tang dynasty poets Li Bai and Tu Fu, who are rightly regarded as highlights of Chinese - and world - literature. But Li Bai and Tu Fu do not represent all of Chinese poetry, inasmuch as Shakespeare does not represent all of English-language poetry - imagine what would be lost, if we ignored Chaucer, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Elliot, Sylvia Plath, and simply stopped at Shakespeare! Similarly, Chinese poetry continues on for another 1100 years after the fall of the Tang dynasty.Burton Watson's poems are beautifully translated, keeping the vivid imagery of the original poems, and annotating poems with occasional explanatory notes that are sparse enough that they do not interrupt the experience of the poems, but frequent enough that the reader is provided with crucial context to understand otherwise obscure poems. As Burton Watson explains, medieval Song Dynasty China was in many ways closer to modern-day life than medieval Europe: people started using paper currency, living in large cities, and were subject to the whims and grievances of government bureaucracy.Consider this poem, which could easily have been written in today's age:CHILDREN (1075 AD)Children don't know what worry means!Stand up to go and they hang on my clothes.I'm about to scold thembut my wife eggs them on in their silliness:"The children are silly but you're much worse!What good does all this worrying do?"Stung by her words, I go back to my seat.She rinses a wine cup to put before me.How much better than Liu Ling's wife,grumbling at the cost of her husband's drinking!