"Why don't you just translate it as it is, five signs, five words?" asks the Jack Kerouac character of the Gary Snyder character, who is translating Han-Shan in Kerouac's book, The Dharma Bums, which Kerouac dedicated to Han-Shan... "What's those first five signs?"... And so the Jack Kerouac character and the Gary Snyder character consider the merits of word for word transliteration. Remarkably, Robert Henricks adopts something of Kerouac's approach in translating Han-Shan, not resulting – as Kerouac seems to have anticipated – in poems of resonant imagery – but, rather, in concatenated wordiness – nouns strung together by articles, prepositions and conjunctions, words and phrases piling up, choking the road to these Cold Mountain poems.

Consider this couplet from Henricks' poem 3, a representative translation: "The dew sheds its tears on thousands of kinds of plants, / While the wind sighs and moans through pines that are all the same". Compare that with Gary Snyder's translation (1958, poem 1): "A thousand grasses bend with dew, / A hill of pines hums in the wind". And Burton Watson's translation (1962, poem 48): "A thousand different grasses weep with dew / And pines hum together in the wind". And Red Pine's (1983, poem 3): "a jungle of plants weeps / a forest of pine sighs".

Any exhaustion readers may experience upon engaging Henricks' word-heavy poems seems to reflect Henricks' suspect familiarity with the original T'ang Chinese. That's according to Victor Mair (1992, Journal of the American Oriental Society 112:269-278), who reviews the shortcomings of Henricks' translation and describes as a "graphemic fixation" the habit of some scholars, Henricks apparently included, to impulsively translate each character, rather than recognizing when multiple characters denote single English words. If Mair's critique accurately portrays Henricks' method, it may explain why Han-Shan's poems and readers suffer so acutely by Henricks' translation, a disappointing reality accentuated by Henricks' misfortune of having the translation by Red Pine (aka Bill Porter) as the standard many readers will want to consult. (Red Pine's translation, The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, is newly back in print, and Mair – notwithstanding his praise for Henricks' translation of the Guodian Laozi – also prefers Red Pine over Henricks.) Henricks points out that he and Red Pine "translate in quite different styles."

Henricks presents his Han-Shan translation as a thorough scholarly edition, for use by general readers, T'ang dynasty specialists, and Buddhist scholars. To that end, Henricks includes in the book a finding index, cross-referencing his poems with those of four previous English translators – Although not with Red Pine, which is an unfortunate oversight, since Henricks' poems and Red Pine's are numbered similarly but not identically (a source of inconvenience, which couldn't someone have attended to, before accessioning Henricks into Electronic Library?).

Nonetheless, regardless of who translates Han-Shan, or for that matter, regardless of who Han-Shan might have been and when he might have lived, he comes to us as a T'ang dynasty poet who speaks from that moment in antiquity when the Tao met the Buddha – and contemporary readers can't get enough of the combustion contained in the poems. The upshot being, as I read the poems, Han-Shan experienced the Dharma and can't help telling his readers about it. He's less constrained by duality than are the rest of us and takes up topics experiential, religious and secular, 'rats around his rice jar' and all. A lay recluse, he tells us the Cold Mountain landscape is an expression of his mind.

Henricks' translation, notes, and appendices explicate the Taoist and Buddhist references, elucidating the more abstruse (evocative or not) translations of others, which positions the book as a helpful annotation. The appendices include, in addition to the finding index, a summary of the internal evidence for dating Han-Shan, an index to the themes of the poems, and an index to the Buddhist terms, metaphors and stories in the poems.

2 Beatles rating