Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Lee Bartlett

SOURCE: "Gary Snyder's Han-Shan," in Sagetreib, Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring, 1983, pp. 105-110.

In the following essay, Bartlett discusses Snyder's translations of the works of seventh-century Buddhist poet Hanshan.

Kenneth Rexroth, whose fourteen books of translations include many poems from the Chinese, has argued recently that Chinese poetry probably began to influence a few English speaking writers when Three Hundred Poems of T'ang was translated into French free verse in the mid-19th Century. Certainly the English translations of early sinologist Herbert A. Giles, collected in his Gems of Chinese Literature, marked in their archaic and doggerel renderings no advance in verse, as Giles' short reworking of Wei Ying-Wu's "Spring Joys" makes evident:

     When freshlets cease in early spring
              and the river dwindles low,
     I take my staff and wander
              by the banks where the wild flowers grow.
     I watch the willow-catkins
              wildly whirled on every side;
     I watch the falling peach-bloom
              lightly floating down the tide. ...
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