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Award-Winning Translator of Chinese
Poetry to Read at Smith College
NORTHAMPTON, Mass. -- Smith College will
present a poetry reading by poet and distinguished translator David Hinton.
The reading will be held at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 2, in Neilson
Library Browsing Room and is free and open to the public.
Hinton has been hailed as "simply the best translator of Chinese
poetry presently working in English." In the words of translator
Burton Watson, "Hinton's translations, while remaining faithful
to the meaning and spirit of the original, are consistently imaginative
in language and effective as English poetry, and he has shown a remarkable
skill in capturing the particular style and voice of the different poets
he has tackled."
An internationally renowned expert on Asian culture and literature,
and a preeminent translator of Chinese classics, Hinton is the first
20th-century translator to render the four masterworks "Chauang
Tzu," "Mencius," "The Analects" and "Tao
Te Ching" into English. His clear and exquisite translations of
many T'ang dynasty poets, including Li Po, Wang Wei and Tu Fu, have introduced
thousands of non-academic readers to a rich literary tradition. Hinton
also translates contemporary writers such as Bei Dao.
His translations have won numerous distinguished awards, including the
Academy of American Poets Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, fellowships
from the Witter Bynner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts,
the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.
Hinton's most recent translation, "Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry
of Ancient China," is a hefty volume of the earliest and most extensive
literary engagement with wilderness in human history. It is also a poetry that
feels utterly contemporary. In addition to reading from this and other collections,
and talking about the cosmology and the deep ecological worldview embodied
in the poems, he'll also read poems of his own from "Fossil Sky."
Hinton makes his home in the mountains of rural Vermont -- a landscape
that echoes, even while it does not mirror, the landscape of the poems
he has translated to great acclaim.
The reading will be followed by book-selling and signing. For more
information, contact Cindy Furtek in the Poetry Center office at (413)
585-4891 or Ellen Doré Watson, director, at (413) 585-3368.
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Office of College
Relations
Smith College
Garrison Hall
Northampton, Massachusetts 01063 |
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Marti
Hobbes
News Assistant
T (413) 585-2190
F (413) 585-2174
mhobbes@email.smith.edu
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