Posts Tagged ‘David Hinton’

The Moon & Monte Bello …

November 12, 2011

The arrival of cold weather moons on our mountain always moves me; there is a timelessness to the experience that connects me to time itself; by the simple act of raising a toast to the moon, one is at once at one with the past, with the elders, with a wisdom that skates upon the shimmering surface of mortality as a child does with the first icing down of the park.

The Moon & Monte Bello ...

 
I am reminded of a wondrous and beautiful poem by the great Chinese poet T’ao Ch’ien (written sometime around the year 400 C.E.), here translated by David Hinton (by far and away, in my humble estimation at least, the very best contemporary translator of ancient Chinese poetry):
 
After Kuo Chu-pu’s Poems

We had warm, wet weather all spring. Now,
white autumn is clear and cold. Dew frozen,

drifting mists gone, bottomless heavens
open over this vast landscape of clarity,

and mountains stretch away, their towering
peaks an unearthly treasure of distance.

These fragrant woodland chrysanthemums
ablaze, green pines lining the clifftops:

isn’t this the immaculate heart of beauty,
this frost-deepened austerity? Sipping wine,

I think of recluse masters. A century away,
I nurture your secrets. Your true nature

eludes me here, but taken by quiet, I can
linger this exquisite moon out to the end.

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Posted in Monte Bello, Wine & Poetry | Leave a Comment »

Don’t Tickle Me Elmo, Just Play Piano To The Sounds Of Me Drinking Wine!

June 27, 2011

Which is likely to go down as one of the weirder blog post titles in the 4488 history …

But, there is in fact a point.

Which is this; I was very recently scrolling & strolling through the search engine referral metrics that WordPress very kindly provides (please click here for compendiums of some of the rather more strange and wonderful items that have appeared in past queues), and I couldn’t help but notice the almost laughable omnipresence of The Muppet’s saxophone player, Zoot. I quite literally referenced him once, in a long ago post (found here), and ever since, he’s proven to be an unlikely evangelical inadvertantly proselytizing the gospel of Ridge. Blowing our tune, as it were …

So I was sitting here thinking about Zoot, and The Muppets. Which inevitably led me to thinking about Elmo. Which reminded me that today is Elmo Hope’s birthday! June 27, 1923!

I have great affection for people like Elmo Hope. Not only because he was a great artist, player, performer, and composer, but because he’s a tad unsung; he labored years under the shadows of giants like Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, and I am not sure he’s that well-known outside of — to borrow a quote from Bob Dylan — a small circle of friends.

Which leads me to think about Ridge. It’s a funny thing; amongst a small but admirably devoted cadre of loyalists, I think Ridge is fortunate to enjoy a rather exalted reputation. But conversely, I could probably stand up on our knoll and throw rocks at Cupertino for weeks on end, and probably not hit more than 5-6 folks who have any idea who we are, where we are, or what we do.

(disclaimer: i don’t actually throw rocks off the knoll.)

Which is kind of like being Elmo Hope. He could have probably thrown rocks at Manhattan all day, every day, and not have hit more than a few folks who knew just what a great player he really was.

So today, I am celebrating lives under the radar; the unsung artists of our times, those whose talents and contributions far exceed their recognitions. Do I include Ridge in these categories? Hard to say. On one hand, I certainly don’t wish to disparage those who do know us, and I certainly wouldn’t wish to sound ungrateful for whatever awarenesses and praises we’ve accrued over the years. But on the other hand, being on the “public” side of the Ridge enterprise, I am also acutely aware of just how short our shadow is often cast.

And speaking of shadows, I believe it was the very astonishingly great Michelangelo who is credited with stating that, “The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.”

And it was the very great poet Li-Po who wrote the following (translation by David Hinton):

Among the blossoms, a single jar of wine.

No one else here, I ladle it out myself.

Raising my cup, I toast the bright moon,

and facing my shadow makes friends three,

though moon has never understood wine,

and shadow only trails along behind me.

Kindred a moment with moon and shadow,

I’ve found a joy that must infuse spring:

I sing, and moon rocks back and forth;

I dance, and shadow tumbles into pieces.

Sober, we’re together and happy. Drunk,

we scatter away into our own directions:

intimates forever, we’ll wander carefree

and meet again in Milky Way distances.

And it is me who says, here’s to you Elmo, or should I say Hope, and to you, shadows, and to all who wander carefree amongst ye … I raise you a toast; a Syrah dark as a shadow …

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Posted in Wine and Jazz | Leave a Comment »

More Ancient Chinese Wine Poetry

July 1, 2009

As you may have noticed from a previous post (to be found here), I very much enjoy reading ancient Chinese and Japanese poetry, and I’m especially fond of the role wine often plays in these works. Accordingly, I’ve got a few more oeno-poetic items to peruse …

The first poem I want to look at is by the great Sung Dynasty poet Su Tung p’o, who lived from 1037 to 1101.

SuTungPo

Not only is this a stunningly beautiful poem, with a stunning wine image in its volta, it is also an excellent occasion to showcase just how much translation can affect our experience of a poem. Accordingly, I’ll excerpt from two different translations, one by Kenneth Rexroth and one by David Hinton. First, the Rexroth translation (in whose hands the poem in entitled “The Red Cliff”), with the excerpt below being the closing few lines of the poem:

Let people
Laugh at my prematurely
Grey hair. My answer is
A wine cup, full of the
Moon drowned in the River.

And now, the David Hinton translation, who titles the poem “At Red Cliffs, Thinking Of Ancient Times.” And again, the closing lines:

Surely spirits of that ancient time
roam here, smiling at all these feelings
and my hair already turning white.
Our life’s like dream,
so pour out the whole cup, offering to a river and its moon.

Wow! What a difference, eh? Both renditions are stunning to me, but so, so very different. For my purposes here though, what’s most important is the image of the wine cup; it’s utterly indispensable to the potency of the volta in both translations.

Here is another beautiful poem, with wine a little more incidental, but still vital. (The poet is Lu Yu, a late Sung Dynasty poet).

LuYu

I will admit that, despite the comparatively limited role wine plays here, I really wanted to include this poem because it has such a fantastic, and fantastically long, title:

“7th Moon, 29th Sun, Yi Year of the Ox: I had a Dream Last Night in Which I Met a Stately Man, and at First Sight We Were Like Old Friends. He Had Written Pages of Lovely Poems Long Ago, All Perfectly Pure and Simple. I Started Reading Through Them, but Woke Before I Could Finish. To Record What Happened, I’ve Written This in Long Lines”

Whew! Anyhow, the poem (in a Hinton translation):

This traveler is an instant friend, utterly clear and true:
even before we dip out wine, we share kindred thoughts.

The pillow is cold, but I don’t understand it’s all a dream
in the clear night. I just savor that vision of an old sage.

Star River tipped, Dipper sunk, ancient histories empty,
mist scatters and clouds leave. Our two bodies are mirage,

and mind is perfectly clarity. It sees through this illusion.
Awake, you can’t avoid it: all things the same bittersweet.

 

Will someone please remind me to “dip out wine” the next time I have wine? I think we need to incorporate more ladels into the tasting experience …

 

Anyhow, one last poem, one I consider to be just an absolutely quintessential expression of the metaphysical, naturalistic, cosmologically integrated  joys of drinking wine. It’s a Rexroth translation of another work by Su Tung P’o, titled “Moon, Flowers, Man”:

I raise my cup and invite
The moon to come down from the
Sky. I hope she will accept
Me. I raise my cup and ask
The branches, heavy with flowers,
To drink with me. I wish them
Long life and promise never
To pick them. In company
With the moon and the flowers,
I get drunk, and none of us
Ever worries about good
Or bad. How many people
Can comprehend our joy? I
Have wine and moon and flowers.
Who else do I want for drinking companions?

 

Just lovely.

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Posted in Viticultural Salmagundi, Wine & Poetry | 2 Comments »

Li-Po and T’ao Ch’ien: Chinese Wine Poetry

June 11, 2009

There are few poets or poetic traditions that can evoke the magic of wine in more poignant and elegant fashion the the great poets of the early Chinese tradition. Some 1200 years ago, some of the most beautiful poems I have ever had the joy, honor, and pleasure of reading were written, and Li-Po is perhaps the greatest Chinese poet of them all. I love his writing for so many things, certainly one of which is his love of wine, and his uncanny ability to weave it into the stunning context of his otherworldly wisdom and insight. Never has wine seemed so mystical, so perfect, so holy, so infused with pathos, so real, than in the following:

“Drinking Alone Beneath The Moon”

Among the blossoms, a single jar of wine.
No one else here, I ladle it out myself.

Raising my cup, I toast the bright moon,
and facing my shadow makes friends three,

though moon has never understood wine,
and shadow only trails along behind me.

Kindred a moment with moon and shadow,
I’ve found a joy that must infuse spring:

I sing, and moon rocks back and forth;
I dance, and shadow tumbles into pieces.

Sober, we’re together and happy. Drunk,
we scatter away into our own directions:

intimates forever, we’ll wander carefree
and meet again in Milky Way distances.

 

This particular translation is by a gentleman named David Hinton, who is, for my money, absolutely and unqualifiedly the most brilliant translator of ancient Chinese poetry into English working today, or ever. The art and craft of translation is a vexing one, and there are traditionally thought to be two schools existing on two ends of a spectrum: on one end is the idea that one translates for accuracy, to the letter, regardless of how the poem may read in English. The goal is to get the poem right linguistically. On the other end is the idea that you translate not the letter of the poem, but the spirit. The idea is to get the poem right conceptually. Given how different are the English and the Chinese languages, this conundrum of how to translate is all the more front and center, and it’s all the more difficult to reconcile the two sides.

There was a great wave of translation of both Chinese and Japanese poetry in this country starting in the late 40s through the 60s; it seemed essentially to accompany the rise of The Beat Generation, and their slow morphing into what later became The Hippies; the counter-culture through this period became fascinated with, for lack of a better term, “The East”; Zen Buddhism, Meditation, Yoga, etc., and poetry came along as an integral part of the experience. To my mind, the most notable translators of this era were Gary Snyder (whose translations of Han-Shan’s “Cold Mountain Poems” pretty much remain the gold standard), Kenneth Rexroth, and Robert Bly, among others. In varying ways, all three of these translators were essentially “spirit” translators. Alternatively, academia was the realm of the “literalists,” Burton Watson probably being the most influential.

David Hinton for me does the seemingly implausible; he perfectly constructs a balance between the two schools, managing to maintain what might be said to be the awkward structures and ungainly phrasings of the original Chinese, yet manages to extract exquisite English poems from this source material. Put another way, they may be in English, and read beautifully as such, but they still feel Chinese. Reading them, they unfold unlike any other translations I’ve ever read; I think he’s done an extraordinary job, and accordingly, given us all an extraordinary gift from an extraordinary time.

I’ll leave you with one other example, a beautiful poem by T’ao Ch’ien  called “Drinking Wine,” as translated by David Hinton:

“Drinking Wine”

I live here in a village house without
all that racket horses and carts stir up,

and you wonder how that could ever be.
Wherever the mind dwells apart is itself

a distant place. Picking chrysanthemums
at my east fence, I see South Mountain

far off: air lovely at dusk, birds in flight
returning home. All this means something,

something absolute: whenever I start
to explain it, I forget words altogether.

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Posted in Viticultural Salmagundi, Wine & Poetry | 1 Comment »

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