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The Complete Cold Mountain: Poems of the Legendary Hermit Hanshan
A fresh translation--and new envisioning--of the most accessible and beloved of all classic Chinese poetry.Welcome to the magical, windswept world of Cold Mountain. These poems from the literary riches of China have long been celebrated by cultures of both East and West—and continue to be revered as among the most inspiring and enduring works of poetry worldwide. This groundbreaking new translation presents the full corpus of poetry traditionally associated with Hanshan (“Cold Mountain”) and sheds light on its origins and authorship like never before. Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt honor the contemplative Buddhist elements of this classic collection of poems while revealing Hanshan’s famously jubilant humor, deep love of solitude in nature, and overwhelming warmth of heart. In addition, this translation features the full Chinese text of the original poems and a wealth of fascinating supplements, including traditional historical records, an in-depth study of the Cold Mountain poets (here presented as three distinct authors), and more.
274 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 26, 2018
39 people are currently reading
212 people want to read
About the author
Kazuaki Tanahashi
42 books60 followersKazuaki Tanahashi, born and trained in Japan and active in the United States since 1977, has had solo exhibitions of his calligraphic paintings internationally. He has taught East Asian calligraphy at eight international conferences of calligraphy and lettering arts. Also a peace and environmental worker for decades, he is a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 20, 2018
The translators offer good evidence that Hanshan was more than one man over a stretch of time. For one, it explains different references to Daoism and then Buddhism. Readers, too, will pick up on a different "voice" as they read. The latter Hanshan hectors a bit about meat eaters, for one. And the usual targets -- the rich, the vain, the chasers of fame.
Still, like a softly moving brook, this is about slowing down. Peaceful stuff. Subtle ads for doing something by doing nothing. Deep breath in. Deep breath out. Ahhhh:
I've wanted to move to East Rock
for so many years.
Yesterday I climbed the ivy-covered path,
but got stopped halfway up by mist and wind.
It was hard to press on, the narrow path grasping my robe,
the moss sticking to my sandals.
For now, I'll stay beneath the cinnamon tree
and sleep with the white cloud as my pillow.
I don't know about you, but I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to sleep beneath a cinnamon tree with a white cloud as my pillow. Really. This book makes excellent dipping material. Here, there, wherever. When you need a meditative calm....
Still, like a softly moving brook, this is about slowing down. Peaceful stuff. Subtle ads for doing something by doing nothing. Deep breath in. Deep breath out. Ahhhh:
I've wanted to move to East Rock
for so many years.
Yesterday I climbed the ivy-covered path,
but got stopped halfway up by mist and wind.
It was hard to press on, the narrow path grasping my robe,
the moss sticking to my sandals.
For now, I'll stay beneath the cinnamon tree
and sleep with the white cloud as my pillow.
I don't know about you, but I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to sleep beneath a cinnamon tree with a white cloud as my pillow. Really. This book makes excellent dipping material. Here, there, wherever. When you need a meditative calm....
July 5, 2019
The T’ang Dynasty hermit poet Hanshan, whose name translates as Cold Mountain, has long been a favorite of Buddhists and hipsters. According to legend, the original Hanshan lived far up in the mountains and wrote his poems on rocks and people’s houses. Jack Kerouac dedicated his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums to Cold Mountain, and in the same year Gary Snyder, a Buddhist as well as a Beat, produced a sheaf of Hanshan poems. Since then there have been at least five additional English translations of the Buddhist mountain man. These include The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, by Los Angeles-based poet and translator Bill Porter, who writes under the pseudonym Red Pine, as well as Robert G. Henricks’ The Poetry of Han-shan: A Complete, Annotated Translation of “Cold Mountain.”
In their new volume, The Complete Cold Mountain: Poems of the Legendary Hermit Hanshan, translators Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt offer readers another, more nuanced version of Hanshan, one suited to the spiritual seeker in us all. In addition to English versions of the poems (plus their Chinese originals), the book includes a bibliography, an index of first lines, footnotes to the poems as well as helpful essays by the translators.
In “A Study of the Poet” Tanahashi examines earlier compilations, translations & annotations and distinguishes them from his own work. His approach is edifying but also at times humorous as when he notes that “There is even one waterproof book with a title that can be translated as ‘Hanshan Poems for your Bath Time.’” Basing his analysis on the work of the Canadian Sinologist Edwin G. Pulleybank, who distinguishes two “Hanshans,” Tanahashi concludes that there were actually three poets who wrote under that name. “The original Hanshan,” he asserts, “lived in the late sixth to early seventh century, before Zen was widely practiced. He was a Daoist practicioner, and whether he later was influenced by Buddhism requires a further debate.” According to Tanahashi the two later Hanshans were definitely Buddhist, one who closely followed Hanshan’s poetic form (Early Middle Chinese rhyming) and the other who employed contemporary, i.e. Later Middle Chinese, rhyming.
All of this is fascinating, but the heart of this book, as with any translation, is the poems themselves. As Canadian blogger Ian Chadwick notes in another context: “Translating poetry to another language is always rife with complexity. Translating terse ancient Chinese Ch’an [Zen] poetry triply so. Each version is coloured by the nuances of the translator’s own beliefs, education and experiences.”
Rather than addressing these complications head-on, Peter Levitt in his introduction finesses the complexity, invoking what he calls “a modest kind of alchemy” According to Levitt, the two translators would have to meet “this hard-to-find hermit poet” not just in the Chinese ideographs, “but in that place before the poems were written, the source that caused him to write in the first place—namely, what he experienced in his body, heart and mind.” How does one enter so completely into the work of another being? Levitt’s answer seems to echo his own Buddhist practice and involves a “kind of transmission, or intuitive knowing, . . . [that comes] from receiving the things of the world just as they are.”
Obviously, this is not going to be a “literal” word-for-word translation, nor even a “poetic” translation, but rather an attempt to delve into and recover the spiritual treasure which first gave rise to Hanshan’s poems. We can get a sense of the uniqueness of their approach by comparing their version of a Hanshan poem (one of the most famous) with those of two other recent translators.
Here’s Gary Snyder’s version, from the mid-60’s:
Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail.
In summer, ice doesn’t melt
The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.
How did I make it?
My heart’s not the same as yours.
If your heart was like mine
You’d get it and be right there.
Here’s another American version, this one by Red Pine from 1983.
People ask the way to Cold Mountain
but roads don’t reach Cold Mountain
in summer the ice doesn’t melt
sunny days the fog is too dense
so how did someone like me arrive
our minds are not the same
if they were the same
you would be here
Now here’s the Tanahashi / Levitt version:
You ask the way to Cold Mountain,
but the road does not go through.
In summer, the ice is not yet melted,
the morning sun remains hidden in mist.
How can you get here, like I did?
Our minds are not the same.
When your mind becomes like mine,
you will get here, too.
We notice numerous small differences. Tanahashi & Levitt regularize the poem’s punctuation, giving the reader clear signposts as to when to pause, when to stop. To my eye, this change makes their version decidedly less “poetic” but easier to read. Also compared to Snyder, their diction is simpler. Instead of “blurs in swirling fog” we get “remains hidden in mist.” Again, the effect is less poetic. But note that compared to Red Pine, the same line seems more mysterious, more poetic. Red Pine’s version—“sunny days the fog is too dense”—reads as explanatory, whereas “the morning sun remains hidden in mist” achieves metaphoric, almost metaphysical impact.
Most importantly, the Tanahashi/Levitt version lessens the distance between poet and reader, suggesting a greater intimacy in the shared striving for enlightenment. Instead of “if” in the two earlier versions, we get “when,” the implication being that the reader like the poet is already on the path to Cold Mountain and will eventually arrive there. It has the feel of sitting in dokusan with a wise and friendly teacher—more optimistic, more encouraging.
This is a wonderful book, in which we meet not just the Old Master himself, but also a couple of his brightest students. I urge readers to add it to their collection, in the section marked How-To-Live.
In their new volume, The Complete Cold Mountain: Poems of the Legendary Hermit Hanshan, translators Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt offer readers another, more nuanced version of Hanshan, one suited to the spiritual seeker in us all. In addition to English versions of the poems (plus their Chinese originals), the book includes a bibliography, an index of first lines, footnotes to the poems as well as helpful essays by the translators.
In “A Study of the Poet” Tanahashi examines earlier compilations, translations & annotations and distinguishes them from his own work. His approach is edifying but also at times humorous as when he notes that “There is even one waterproof book with a title that can be translated as ‘Hanshan Poems for your Bath Time.’” Basing his analysis on the work of the Canadian Sinologist Edwin G. Pulleybank, who distinguishes two “Hanshans,” Tanahashi concludes that there were actually three poets who wrote under that name. “The original Hanshan,” he asserts, “lived in the late sixth to early seventh century, before Zen was widely practiced. He was a Daoist practicioner, and whether he later was influenced by Buddhism requires a further debate.” According to Tanahashi the two later Hanshans were definitely Buddhist, one who closely followed Hanshan’s poetic form (Early Middle Chinese rhyming) and the other who employed contemporary, i.e. Later Middle Chinese, rhyming.
All of this is fascinating, but the heart of this book, as with any translation, is the poems themselves. As Canadian blogger Ian Chadwick notes in another context: “Translating poetry to another language is always rife with complexity. Translating terse ancient Chinese Ch’an [Zen] poetry triply so. Each version is coloured by the nuances of the translator’s own beliefs, education and experiences.”
Rather than addressing these complications head-on, Peter Levitt in his introduction finesses the complexity, invoking what he calls “a modest kind of alchemy” According to Levitt, the two translators would have to meet “this hard-to-find hermit poet” not just in the Chinese ideographs, “but in that place before the poems were written, the source that caused him to write in the first place—namely, what he experienced in his body, heart and mind.” How does one enter so completely into the work of another being? Levitt’s answer seems to echo his own Buddhist practice and involves a “kind of transmission, or intuitive knowing, . . . [that comes] from receiving the things of the world just as they are.”
Obviously, this is not going to be a “literal” word-for-word translation, nor even a “poetic” translation, but rather an attempt to delve into and recover the spiritual treasure which first gave rise to Hanshan’s poems. We can get a sense of the uniqueness of their approach by comparing their version of a Hanshan poem (one of the most famous) with those of two other recent translators.
Here’s Gary Snyder’s version, from the mid-60’s:
Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail.
In summer, ice doesn’t melt
The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.
How did I make it?
My heart’s not the same as yours.
If your heart was like mine
You’d get it and be right there.
Here’s another American version, this one by Red Pine from 1983.
People ask the way to Cold Mountain
but roads don’t reach Cold Mountain
in summer the ice doesn’t melt
sunny days the fog is too dense
so how did someone like me arrive
our minds are not the same
if they were the same
you would be here
Now here’s the Tanahashi / Levitt version:
You ask the way to Cold Mountain,
but the road does not go through.
In summer, the ice is not yet melted,
the morning sun remains hidden in mist.
How can you get here, like I did?
Our minds are not the same.
When your mind becomes like mine,
you will get here, too.
We notice numerous small differences. Tanahashi & Levitt regularize the poem’s punctuation, giving the reader clear signposts as to when to pause, when to stop. To my eye, this change makes their version decidedly less “poetic” but easier to read. Also compared to Snyder, their diction is simpler. Instead of “blurs in swirling fog” we get “remains hidden in mist.” Again, the effect is less poetic. But note that compared to Red Pine, the same line seems more mysterious, more poetic. Red Pine’s version—“sunny days the fog is too dense”—reads as explanatory, whereas “the morning sun remains hidden in mist” achieves metaphoric, almost metaphysical impact.
Most importantly, the Tanahashi/Levitt version lessens the distance between poet and reader, suggesting a greater intimacy in the shared striving for enlightenment. Instead of “if” in the two earlier versions, we get “when,” the implication being that the reader like the poet is already on the path to Cold Mountain and will eventually arrive there. It has the feel of sitting in dokusan with a wise and friendly teacher—more optimistic, more encouraging.
This is a wonderful book, in which we meet not just the Old Master himself, but also a couple of his brightest students. I urge readers to add it to their collection, in the section marked How-To-Live.
August 22, 2019
Brilliant.
September 3, 2019
Ancient Buddhist Chinese poet hermits go and live in nature. Often beautiful, often cryptic. They were taken up by beat generation poets like Gary Snyder as the original drop-outs from society. The introductory material is very helpful to get a historical overview, and the notes explain a lot of the Buddhist references.
March 12, 2019
A superb collection of Zen poetry, which I enjoyed much. Simple, direct, with images drawn from the mountainous venue of what is now purported to be possibly at least three Hanshans. For readers not interested in the extended, more technical section concluding the opus, the poems and notes easily would be enough to be worth taking this journey with the Hanshans.
August 31, 2024
Remarkable. The poems themselves are highly variable, some simple and funny, others stern and hectoring. But taken as a whole, highly engaging.
What makes this a 5 star is the unobtrusive scholarship that reverentially untangles the diversity of the poems. The (tentative) conclusion is that Hanshan is most likely (at least) three different poets writing across decades if not centuries with widely different approaches to the poems' style and subject matter.
What makes this a 5 star is the unobtrusive scholarship that reverentially untangles the diversity of the poems. The (tentative) conclusion is that Hanshan is most likely (at least) three different poets writing across decades if not centuries with widely different approaches to the poems' style and subject matter.
February 7, 2026
Half of the poems are beautiful moments about contacting oneness in impermanent moments. The other half mock you and tell you why you’re such a piece of shit who will never know happiness. Gotta respect it.
November 29, 2019
We all at some point deep down long for the quiet perfection of Cold Mountain, though not without it's own lonely suffering even if briefly attained.
A good translation with background and study, though many poems lose essential meaning without use of end notes or an understanding of the cultural norms and references of the period. Still worth it for the many that ring as clear and true of our essential being and humanity today as they did millennia ago.
A good translation with background and study, though many poems lose essential meaning without use of end notes or an understanding of the cultural norms and references of the period. Still worth it for the many that ring as clear and true of our essential being and humanity today as they did millennia ago.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews