Books by Hanshan
Cold Mountain Poems
by Gary Snyder, Hanshan
The best of Hanshan's beloved poems—among the earliest of Zen-style Buddhist poetry, beloved by the Beat Generation—here newly translated and organized thematically in a beautiful Pocket Poets hardcover
Often ranked among the most inspiring works of world literature, the poems of Hanshan (whose name means Cold Mountain), were traditionally thought to have been written at least twelve centuries ago on rock walls by a Buddhist monk living in the mountains of southeastern China. The best of his poems, collected here and organized by theme, reflect the sense of humor, deep love of solitude, and vivid descriptions of nature that have endeared these poems to generations of readers.
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.
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$20.00
Cold Mountain Poems
by Gary Snyder, Hanshan
In 1953, Gary Snyder returned to the Bay Area and, at age 23, enrolled in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, to study Asian languages and culture. He intensified his study of Chinese and Japanese, and taking up the challenge of one of his professors, Chen Shih-hsiang, he began to work on translating a largely unknown poet by the name of Han Shan, a writer with whom the professor thought Snyder might feel a special affinity. The results were magical. As Patrick Murphy noted, "These poems are something more than translations precisely because Snyder renders them as a melding of Han Shan's Chinese Ch'an Buddhist mountain spirit trickster mentality and Snyder's own mountain wilderness meditation and labor activities." The suite of 24 poems was published in the 1958 issue of The Evergreen Review, and the career of one of America's greatest poets was launched.
In 1972, Press-22 issued a beautiful edition of these poems written out by hand in italic by Michael McPherson. We are doing a new augments edition based on the old, with a new design, a preface by Lu Ch'iu-yin, and an afterword by Mr. Snyder where he discusses how he came to this work and what it meant to his development as a writer and Buddhist.
On May 11, 2012, for the Stronach Memorial Lecture at The University of California, more than fifty years after his days there as a student, Snyder offered a public lecture reflecting on Chinese poetry, Han Shan, and his continuing work as a poet and translator. This remarkable occasion was recorded and we are including a CD of it in our edition, making this the most definitive edition of Cold Mountain Poems ever published.
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Cold Mountain 100 Poems
by Hanshan
This collection is one of the earliest and most important works of Chinese Buddhist poetry and is especially influential in the later literature of the Zen Sect of Buddhism, which looked back to these poems as a classic of Zen literature. The poems cover a wide range of subjects: the conventional lament on the shortness of life, bitter complaints about poverty, avarice, and pride, accounts of the difficulty of official life under a bureaucratic system, attacks on the corrupt Buddhist clergy and the foolish attempts by Taoists to achieve immotal life, and incomparable descriptions of the natural world in a mountain retreat. These poems represent the largest number so far made available in English and are important both as vivid descriptions of the wild mountain scenery in Han-shan's home, Cold Mountain, and as metaphors of the poet's search for spiritual enlightenment and peace.
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$14.95