, Han Shan, the poet, or perhaps poets, since no-one is sure that we are dealing with just one man, lived over a thousand years ago during the Tang dynasty, and took the nom-de-plume from the name of his country refuge; it means simply 'cold mountain'.

The poems are written in standard five and eight syllable lines, whilre Han Shan's language is simple, and often even vernacular. For the Chinese reader accustomed to the florid sophistication and complexity of the Tang Golden Age, Han Shan's poems may seem bare and stark. Indeed, until the twentieth-century Han Shan was hardly anthologized at all in China. Rather it was the Japanese who placing Han Shan in the context of Zen Buddhism, started to value the Chinese poet's simplicity. In this century Han Shan has found avid readers amongst Westerners such as American poet Beat generation Gary Snyder, and the poet-translator of this volume, Peter Stambler. In a sense, it was the modern Japanese and Western reader who unearthed and reinvented Han Shan.

What is striking for the modern reader is Han Shan's easy relationship with Nature. For while for the Taoist and the Zen Buddhist, Han Shan's poems may represent a spiritual quest, they also vividly celebrate a natural world from which modernity now separates us. In fact, it is difficult to read these poems today without a sense of loss for a Nature from which we are now so far removed. In the age of globalized communications and pollution, how would any of us nowadays know how to emulate Han Shan's retreat to the mountains? And yet in reading these poems we realize that even the world of a millennium ago was marked by a sense of human alienation represented in these poems by descriptions of loneliness and despair.

The American poet terms his versions 'encounters', and the reader should not come to this book expecting close translations of a ninth century poet. Rather these are the lyric mediations of a twentieth-century poet attempting to reimagine the poetic sentiments of a Tang dynasty scholar-hermit and translate them into a lyricism understandable to our own century.

But a lot has changed in a thousand years. What Stambler attempts to negotiate here is more than a cultural gap, it is a temporal gulf. Our problem with reading (and in a sense translation is the closest form of reading) poems written under historically different social and economic conditions is that we may either seek in them the universal that seems to transcend time and place, or to romanticize and exoticize the differences. In giving the Chinese original above each English version Stambler's translations, however, overtly focus the bilingual reader's attention on the difference between his words and those of his Chinese predecessor writing a millennium ago. At times Stambler parallels the Chinese poet's sentiments for a few lines at a time only to diverge and digress with his own reflective conclusions. This is Burton Watson's quite 'faithful' rendering of a standard Han Shan poem:

People ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain? There is no road that goes through.
Even in summer the ice doesn't melt;
Though the sun comes out, the fog is blinding.
How can you hope to get there by aping me?
Your heart and mine are not alike.
If your heart were the same as mine,
Then you could journey to the very center!


This is Stambler's, which he entitles 'I Sketch a Map in a Cup of Tea':

Travelers wonder how to reach Cold Mountain.

No road stretches so far; the streams end far below.
Summer ice darkens the greens.
Sunrise labors to burn off the mist.

How did a gray squat thing like me arrive?
I make my journey sitting still.

That is a marked divergence. And yet, it is not objectionable for a poet to produce 'versions' rather than translations. There are some fine precedents; the Victorian poet, Ernest Dowson's versions of Verlaine spring to mind.

However, in reading these poems, unless the reader is bilingual, the distance between the Chinese and Stambler's English 'encounters' is not easy to judge, and the distance is sometimes considerable. The standard and most 'faithful' translations of Han Shan's poems remain those by the American scholar Burton Watson whose translations may be stiffer but are certainly much closer. Freer and more stylish translations were made by the Beat generation American poet Gary Snyder. But in any case how 'close' to the original can we come? Even for those who read with ease the pre-modern Chinese language it is impossible to stand in shoes of ninth-century readers. Stambler's versions read well and stand as poems in their own right. But the reader who wishes a closer rendering of Han Shan should turn to other translations.