Hanshan (poet) - Translations

Translations

The poems have often been translated, by Arthur Waley (1954), Gary Snyder (1958), and Burton Watson (1970), among others. The first complete translation to a western language was into French by Patrick Carré in 1985. There are two full English translations, by Robert G. Henricks (1990), and Red Pine (Copper Canyon Press, 1983, 2000). There is a collection of 130 of the poems, Encounters With Cold Mountain, by Peter Stambler. And there is a collection of 96 poems, Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry, by Wandering Poet (2005, 2012), which contains all of the poems written at Cold Mountain, and none of the biographical, religious or political poems.

Little is known of his work, since he was a recluse living in a remote region and his poems were written on rocks in the mountains he called home. Of the 600 poems he is thought to have written at some point before his death, 313 were collected and have survived. Among the 57 poems attributed to Han-shan's friend, Shih-te, 7 appear to be authored by Han-shan, for a total of 320. The authority for the total number of poems written is the following poem, translated by Wandering Poet:

My five word poems total hundreds

Seven word seventy-nine

Three word twenty-one

Altogether maybe 600 poems

All written on ancient rocks

Boasting, my brushwork is strong

Who understands my poems

Is the mother of Buddha

(The "words" refer to how many Chinese characters are in each line of the verse, not how many are in the whole poem. All of Han-shan's poems have an even number of lines, i.e., 4, 8, 10 or 14, with an odd number of characters in each line throughout the same poem, i.e., 3, 5 or 7. For example, many if not most of the five-character poems were written with eight lines for a poem of 40 characters in total. Also, most Chinese words are one character each but some are two characters, so there is not always an exact equivalent between the number of characters and number of words.)

All translations here are Red Pine's, except where noted.