Bill Porter (aka Red Pine)

It all started with a book of Chinese poems I picked up at random from the shelves of the Central Library. It was called Dancing with the Dead: The Essential Red Pine Translations. It turns out that Red Pine (Chinese: 赤松) is the pen name of one Bill Porter, an American writer known for his translations from the Chinese of ancient poetry. I guess that’s where “the Dead” in the title comes from.

That book, which I read in April, opened a whole new world to me. I had read Chinese poems in translation before, from translators like Arthur Waley, Kenneth Rexroth, and Ezra Pound. But I had the feeling that Red Pine was somehow closer to the original. Like this short poem from a poet who calls himself Cold Mountain:

Looking for a refuge
Cold Mountain will keep you safe
a faint wind stirs dark pines
come closer the sound gets better
below them sits a gray-haired man
chanting Taoist texts
ten years unable to return
he forgot the way he came

If you are interested, I sugget you begin the way I did, by reading Dancing with the Dead: The Essential Red Pine Translations. It excerpts some of the best selections from his thirty-odd books containing selections from such poets as Cold Mountain, Stonehouse, Tao Yuanming, Wei Ying-wu, and Liu Zongyuan.

Here is a poem from Tao Yuanming:

With the passing days and months
as you leave childhood behind
good fortune won’t be undeserved
but disaster easily earned
rise early and retire late
I hope such habits are yours
if they aren’t
so be it