What Sparks Poetry

Translation

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. 

In our series focused on Translation, we invite poet-translators to share seminal experiences in their practices, bringing poems from one language into another. How does the work of translating feel essential to the writing of one’s own poetry? Our contributors reflect on inspiring moments as intricate as a grammatical quirk and as wide-ranging as the history or politics of another place. 

David Hinton on Li Po’s “Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon”

Every poetry gets its deep form from its native cosmology. The native cosmology of classical Chinese poetry is a system we might now describe as deep ecology, in which humans are an organic part of the earth— a very contemporary insight, and altogether different from the Judeo-Christian worldview that has shaped Western poetry until very recent times, a worldview in which we are spirits visiting this merely material earth almost like aliens. The ecological implications of these two worldviews are obvious, and I’ve found that translating classical Chinese poetry is a way for me to make contemporary poetry that operates outside of the Western cosmological or mythological system, even so far as to register a very different sense of what the self is. In this poetry, identity can be so much a part of the empirical world that it actually becomes landscape, as in this poem by Li Po from the eighth century:

    Reverence-Pavilion Mountain, Sitting Alone

    Birds have vanished into deep skies.
    A last cloud drifts away, all idleness.

    Inexhaustible, this Mountain and I
    gaze at each other, it alone remaining.

And the fate of identity, our fate at the end of life, is also landscape in Chinese poetry, as when T’ao Ch’ien says in the fourth century: “Once you’re dead and gone, what then? Trust yourself to the mountainside. It will take you in.” Or indeed, as modern astronomy and cosmology has taught us, with its birth and death of stars and planets like ours, our fate is ultimately out there in the cosmos— a fact Li Po sensed beautifully in his “Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon,” a poem about drinking wine here in the Milky Way, which the Chinese call the Star River.

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David Hinton’s latest book, Wild Mind, Wild Earth: Our Place in the Sixth Extinction, which explores the confluence of ancient Chinese spirituality and modern Western environmental thought, was released by Shambhala on November 6.

Writing Prompt

In the spirit of Li Po’s “Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon,” look into the stars on a dark clear night while you sip a glass of wine or two. Then write a poem exploring how alone you feel; or perhaps in some intimacy with such vastness, not alone at all. A poem using words, or perhaps not using words.

David Hinton

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David Hinton

David Hinton has published many books of poetry, nonfiction, and translations of ancient Chinese poetry and philosophy. These books are all informed by an abiding interest in deep ecological thinking, in exploring the weave of consciousness and landscape. This work has earned wide aclaim and many national awards, and it can be visited at davidhinton.net. Hinton’s new book is: Wild Mind, Wild Earth: Our Place in the Sixth Extinction