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The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain Kindle Edition

by Cold Mountain (Han Shan) (Author), John Blofeld (Introduction), Red Pine (Translator) Format: Kindle Edition
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 164 ratings
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This authoritative, bilingual edition represents the first time the entirety of Cold Mountain's poetry has been translated into English.

These translations were originally published by Copper Canyon Press nearly twenty years ago. Now, significantly revised and expanded, the collection also includes a new preface by the translator, Red Pine, whose accompanying notes are at once scholarly, accessible, and entertaining. Also included for the first time are poems by two of Cold Mountain's colleagues.

Legendary for his clarity, directness, and lack of pretension, the eight-century hermit-poet Cold Mountain (Han Shan) is a major figure in the history of Chinese literature and has been a profound influence on writers and readers worldwide. Writers such as Charles Frazier and Gary Snyder studied his poetry, and Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums is dedicated "to Han Shan."

1.B

storied cliffs were the fortune I cast
bird trails beyond human tracks
what surrounds my yard
white clouds nesting dark rocks
I've lived here quite a few years
and always seen the spring-water change
tell those people with tripods and bells
empty names are no damn good

71.

someone sits in a mountain gorge
cloud robe sunset tassels
handful of fragrances he'd share
the road is long and hard
regretful and doubtful
old and unaccomplished
the crowd calls him crippled
he stands alone steadfast

205.

my place is on Cold Mountain
perched on a cliff beyond the circuit of affliction
images leave no trace when they vanish
I roam the whole galaxy from here
lights and shadows flash across my mind
not one dharma comes before me
since I found the magic pearl
I can go anywhere everywhere it's perfect

Cold Mountain

A mountain man lives under thatch
before his gate carts and horses are rare
the forest is quiet but partial to birds
the streams are wide and home to fish
with his son he picks wild fruit
with his wife he hoes between rocks
what does he have at home
a shelf full of nothing but books

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  1. Print length
    343 pages
  2. Language
    English
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    Copper Canyon Press
  5. Publication date
    December 18, 2012
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    12614 KB
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Editorial Reviews

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The Poems Of Big Stick: 1
The Poems Of Big Stick: 2
The Poems Of Big Stick: 3
The Poems Of Big Stick: 4
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The Poems Of Cold Mountain: 99
The Poems Of Pickup: 1
The Poems Of Pickup: 10
The Poems Of Pickup: 11
The Poems Of Pickup: 12
The Poems Of Pickup: 13
The Poems Of Pickup: 14
The Poems Of Pickup: 15
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The Poems Of Pickup: 2
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The Poems Of Pickup: 24
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The Poems Of Pickup: 26
The Poems Of Pickup: 27
The Poems Of Pickup: 28
The Poems Of Pickup: 29
The Poems Of Pickup: 3
The Poems Of Pickup: 30
The Poems Of Pickup: 31
The Poems Of Pickup: 32
The Poems Of Pickup: 33
The Poems Of Pickup: 34
The Poems Of Pickup: 35
The Poems Of Pickup: 36
The Poems Of Pickup: 37
The Poems Of Pickup: 38
The Poems Of Pickup: 39
The Poems Of Pickup: 4
The Poems Of Pickup: 40
The Poems Of Pickup: 41
The Poems Of Pickup: 42
The Poems Of Pickup: 43
The Poems Of Pickup: 44
The Poems Of Pickup: 45
The Poems Of Pickup: 46
The Poems Of Pickup: 47
The Poems Of Pickup: 48
The Poems Of Pickup: 49
The Poems Of Pickup: 5
The Poems Of Pickup: 6
The Poems Of Pickup: 7
The Poems Of Pickup: 8
The Poems Of Pickup: 9
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00APD9UO4
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Copper Canyon Press; Revised and Expanded ed. edition (December 18, 2012)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 18, 2012
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 12614 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 343 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 164 ratings

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  1. Hanshan

    Hanshan

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  2. Red Pine

    Red Pine

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    Bill Porter (aka "Red Pine") is widely recognized as one of the world's preeminent translators of Chinese poetry and religious texts; he assumes the pen name "Red Pine" for his translations.

    Bill Porter was born in Los Angeles in 1943 and grew up in the Idaho panhandle. He served a tour of duty in the U.S. Army (1964-67), graduated from the University of California with a degree in anthropology in 1970, and attended graduate school at Columbia University. Uninspired by the prospect of an academic career, he dropped out of Columbia and moved in 1972 to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. After four years with the monks and nuns, he struck out on his own and eventually found work at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where he produced over one thousand programs about his travels in China. In 1993 he returned to America with his family and has lived ever since near Seattle, Washington.

    Writing as Bill Porter, he is the author of several travelogues, including Road to Heaven, which focuses on his interactions with Taoist hermits in the mountains of China; Zen Baggage; and his Guggenheim project, Finding Them Gone: Visiting China's Poets of the Past.

    Writing as Red Pine, he was the first translator to ever translate the entirety of Han-shan's oeurve into English, published as The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain. Red Pine was also the first to translate into English the entirely of The Poems of the Masters. He has also translated several of the major Buddhist sutras, including the Heart Sutra, Diamond Sutra, and Platform Sutra.

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Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
164 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

bee13
5.0 out of 5 stars The wilderness way
Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2010
Verified Purchase
Admired by the likes of Kerouac and Snyder, the wisdom-filled poems of Chinese hermit, Han Shan, have a timeless magic to them. Whether extolling the virtues of the solitary life or capturing glimpses of wilderness beauty, Han Shan's poetry sings with simplicity and elegance.

Revered as a sage in his native China, Han Shan, who wrote under the Zen nom de plume, 'Cold Mountain,' followed an individualist credo with both Taoist and Buddhist influences. He chose to live in severe isolation from his fellows in close intimacy with the natural world. The finest poems in this collection constantly return to this theme of willful exile.

Since I came to Cold Mountain
How many thousand years have passed
Accepting my fate, I fled to the woods
To dwell and gaze in freedom
My quilt is the dark blue sky
A boulder makes a fine pillow
Heaven and Earth can crumble and change

While many of these poems celebrate the purity and liberty of the solitary life, others tackle social issues. Despite his hermetic exile, Han Shan nonetheless attacked the injustices that plagued T'ang Dynasty China. The targets of his poetic scorn vary from hypocritical monks to flesh-eaters. In accordance with. the Buddhist principle of protecting all forms of life, Han Shan saves his most acerbic barbs for those who destroy life to satiate desire.

Here's some advice for meat-eating people
Who eat without reflecting
Living things were formerly seeds
The future depends on current deeds
Seizing present joys
Unafraid of sorrows to come

True to his calling as a voice in the wilderness Han Shan fills his poems with both instruction and admonition. Nearly all the poems in this collection carry some sort of teachable lesson.

"Better to know nothing at all, to sit and not speak and have no cares...A straight mind means straight words."

The richly evocative descriptions of nature so common to other Chinese poets are conspicuously muted here. Imagery and description both serve the main goal of transmitting wisdom and virtue. Emerald mountains, jade streams, crane-like clouds are all present in these songs but always in support of some greater meaning.

Those unschooled in Buddhist or Taoist thought will have a difficult time with the layers of scholarly allusion and metaphor found in many of these poems. Thanks to translator Red Pine's copious notes, the reader can better understand each poem's meaning and message.

Cold Mountain's best poems are glowing stars. Their clarity and beauty set them apart. Like the rocks and pines on which they were written, they read like nature itself. Had Thoreau written his Walden in poetic fragments, the result might have been something similar to Cold Mountain's Songs.

"Deer live deep in the forest surviving on water and grass/But tie them up in a fancy hall and their loveliness fades."
8 people found this helpful
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LostMarble
5.0 out of 5 stars Satirical poetry from old China
Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2015
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This is a beautiful edition from Copper Canyon Press of the poems of Han Shan (Cold Mountain) and a few poems of two of his companions. Han Shan was a medieval Chinese poet, often considered part of the Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist tradition. In my opinion he owes more to the Taoists, but gets his morality from the Buddhists, and morality is the subject of a lot of the poems. He is often classified as a wilderness poet, but he is more of a satirist. Many of his poems are scathing denunciations of society, including Buddhist and Taoist religious society.

The poems are short, but the book is long, containing 307 poems by Han Shan, 49 by Shih Te, and four by Feng Kan. Han Shan's style is simple and straightforward, lyrical at times and rhetorical, even invective, at others. For a wilderness poet, it doesn't demonstrate love of nature so much as love of simple living. For a religious poet, he is remarkably non-pious. He also has a sense of humor, which tempers his satire. Like much Chinese poetry, his is very allusive, which makes Red Pine's footnotes most helpful. The translation is line by line, sticking close to the original (as far as my limited Chinese could detect from the Chinese text on facing pages). Red Pine's style is clear and concise, without affectations.

Han Shan is considered (at least by Americans) as a classic Zen poet, but to my ear he lacks the heavy symbolism and deliberate mystification I often associate with Zen poetics. I appreciate his freshness, vigor, humor, and austere advice.
21 people found this helpful
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Francis Meyrick
5.0 out of 5 stars Once you get into it, surprisingly enjoyable
Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2014
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For some reason, this was not love at first read. I gave up on reading the rather long "Translator's Preface" and the
'Introduction by John Blofield", and moved straight on to the poems. Took a while. Then I started being steadily drawn in. I have now re-read and re-read and re-read many of these poems. I have also really enjoyed the aforementioned Preface and the Introduction, after I had gotten an idea of what it was all about. . This book helps you (Red Pine's balanced notes are indispensable) get into the charming, funny, mischievous, witty and at times depressed, lonely, pining mind of a real flesh-and-blood mountain hermit. Who lived in the 8th century. But could walk though my door, and we would spend the night chatting away happily.
Great book. Great character. And if you ask me, nothing much has changed in 1200 years. The essential human experience, the essential questioning, the basic ingredients of Life... same, same. Comforting, in many ways.

Someone sighed "Cold Mountain sir
your poems possess no sense"
I said for the ancients
poverty was no disgrace
to this he answered laughing
"such talk is poorly reasoned"
well sir then be as you are
with money your concern.

Or:

I reached Cold Mountain and all cares stopped
no idle thoughts remained in my head
nothing to do I write poems on rocks
and trust the current like an unmoored boat

Enjoy!
13 people found this helpful
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Zen Elder
4.0 out of 5 stars The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain
Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2017
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The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain: First of all, this is not fiction, so none of the categories above apply. I wish they'd fix that! Nice collection of Cold Mountain's poems, well-translated by Red Pine/Bill Porter. Looking out at the world through the eyes of an 8th century Chinese poet hermit makes Thoreau seem a bit wordy, but they're in a similar vein. Both left their previous lives. (Cold Mountain apparently left his previous life for good; whereas, Thoreau went back after about a year.)
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nohmn
5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding
Reviewed in Canada on June 18, 2010
Verified Purchase
In this book of translations by 'Red Pine' (Bill Porter) of the Tang Dynasty collection of poetry attributed mostly to 'Han Shan' or 'Cold Mountain' [some are also attributed to two other figures closely associated with him] not only are there translations of the quality one would expect of 'Red Pine' and notes explaining/ clarifying allusions but also on the facing page the Chinese text. Further, I think Porter's comments about Han Shan's life, his poetry and information about what was generally accepted as the requirements for great Chinese poetry at the time are tremendously helpful - things much like what in English when I was in school were called 'prosody' {requirements for which syllables were to be accented, which not, what kinds of rhymes were acceptable, which perhaps not, etc. for a 'proper poem' in certain metric forms of English poetry - perhaps it might not be too great a distortion to compare to the 'rules' for the tennis game Robert Frost implied in his image that free verse was like 'playing tennis without a net'}. This is very much to the point in understanding some comments in Han Shan's poetry about his poetry and also in understanding some important points about the Chinese in which he wrote his poems (as well as being of interest to someone interested in classical Chinese poetry in general).

Han Shan apparently 'suffered' from an inability to distinguish certain tonal differences required to write according to the accepted norms (I do not think this means he was like a foreigner from a non-tonal language like English when first learning Mandarin, for example, who may tend not to use or understand tones correctly - English has tones but not as part of important information about what word is being spoken}. This 'disability' of Han Shan's caused his poetry to be rather unconventional to the degree a number of critics would have refused to even consider it as poetry, yet his poetry it seems has always been appreciated even by a number of contemporaries honoured for their own poetry.

This is one of the books I am especially delighted to have in my library. A copy from a lending library would not satisfy the wish to have something like this always available to hand.
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Nardis
5.0 out of 5 stars Livre de chevet
Reviewed in France on October 30, 2011
Verified Purchase
Une bien belle édition du pseudo-moine fou mais authentique poète et l'un des plus grands de la Chine ancienne. On peut s'interroger sur certains parti-pris romantiques du traducteur. Au regard du texte chinois, il semble qu'une version plus sèche pourrait imposer de manière plus flagrante encore le génie souverain, et tellement moderne, de l'irascible Han Shan. En l'état, un livre de chevet.
One person found this helpful
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Marcolorenzo
5.0 out of 5 stars Chinese Buddhist master poet d.841
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 4, 2008
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Bilingual edition with Chinese calligraphic text on the left-hand page and very good English translations on the facing right-hand page. These poems have deeply influenced Seamus Heany's works and that is how I came to know them. The translation presented in this edition is a very fine work in itself, done by a poetic scholar of Cold Mountain who lived and followed the traces of the poet in China for many years. Each poem is 8 lines in length and there are 307 of them all of which are copiously annotated with very detailed footnotes on the left-hand page under the Chinese text. Also included are 49 poems by his colleague (Shih-te) and 4 by (Feng-kan) This edition also includes several photos of the places where the poet lived and worked and a graphic map of China of the time of the poet. Many of these poems are little gems of insight and wit or of sarcasm and bitter irony. They are like seeds, seminal works which I think caused Seamus Heany's mind to take off in poetic flight.
They may do the same for any serious poet who discovers them.
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johno
5.0 out of 5 stars great book, :)
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 21, 2020
Verified Purchase
Another great translation by red pine, I absolutely love it, all of red pines books have lovely smooth covers, very tactile. Highly recommended, red pine is a brilliant translator of Taoist, and Chinese Buddhist works, with plenty of commentary, and foot notes, makes the translations so much easy to understand.
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Guy
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in Canada on September 17, 2016
Verified Purchase
just what I was lookin for
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