Review by Mitch Hall of

“The Egret Lifting from the River: David Hinton on the Wisdom of Ancient Chinese Poets”

by Leath Tonino

(The Sun, January 2015, Issue 469, pp. 4-13)


Leath Tonino’s in-depth interview of David Hinton, a poet, essayist, scholar, and translator of classical Chinese poetry and philosophy, was, for me, a pleasurable and fascinating read. Through the interview, we get glimpses of Hinton’s self-effacing character, his lifestyle in a small, rural town in central Vermont, the impressive scope of his literary contributions over a span of more than three decades, the rivers-and-mountains school of Chinese poetics, the socioeconomic class background of its creators, the down-to-earth Taoist and Ch’an Buddhist cosmological premises of this tradition, the consciousness manifested in the poems, the relevance of this consciousness to today’s spiritual and ecological challenges, linguistic differences between Chinese and English, ontological implications of these differences, insights into impermanence and change, the limitations of language, and much more. Whereas Hinton has translated the poetic legacy of “the longest literary engagement with wilderness in the history of the world,” as well as “all four of the Chinese philosophical masterworks,” namely the Tao Teh Ching, Analects of Confucius, Mencius, and Chuang Tzu, he stated, “I am uneasy with any portrayal of myself as a master of sagely wisdom.” For readers with interests in such cultural, historical, literary, philosophical, spiritual, and ecological issues, I recommend reading the interview. It stimulated in me an interest in exploring Hinton’s work, starting with his translations in Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China. The full text of LeathTonino’s interview of David Hinton is available at the Interview link on Hinton’s own website:
<http://www.davidhinton.net/#!interview/c10gw>.