"9/9, Thinking of My Brothers East of the Mountains"
The Selected Poems of Wang Wei
translated by David Hinton

Wang Wei:

Wang Wei was born in 701 C.E. (or perhaps 699) to a distinguished family among the Tang intelligentsia. He passed the national examinations at a young age, in 721, and was appointed to a position in the government bureaucracy. A career as a government official helping the emperor care for the people was generally assumed to be the only proper place for intellectuals in the Confucian order, and it was their primary source of prestige and financial security. With the exception of a decade-long period of exile and travel at the beginning of his career, Wang Wei enjoyed a long and successful career in the government, virtually all of it in Ch'ang-an, the capital. Ch'ang-an was the very cosmopolitan center of Chinese civilization, and Wang Wei was a widely-admired figure (poet, painter, and musician) at the center of the capital's literary and social world. The only interruptions to his life in Ch'ang-an were several brief provincial positions and a period of seclusion in Ch'i-shui. A more dramatic interruption came in 755 with the An Lu-shan rebellion, when rebel armies conquered much of northern China, including the capital. Wang was placed under house arrest in a Ch'an monastery and eventually forced into service for the rebel government, a serious breach of integrity. When loyal forces eventually retook the capital, Wang nearly lost his life because of his seemingly traitorous actions, but when it became clear that he had struggled to avoid serving the rebels, he was exonerated.

Although it is clear that he found his truest self in mountain solitude, Wang never left political life for the life of a recluse in any definitive way. He somehow cobbled together his career as a renowned hermit in whatever free time his office job allowed. This time was spent primarily at the Wheel-Rim River house that Wang owned for most of his working life: it was located in the Whole-South Mountains just south of Ch'ang-an, and was therefore only a short journey from the capital. And when he died in 761, Wang Wei was buried there.

David Hinton:

David Hinton's many translations have earned wide acclaim for recreating the classical tradition as compelling contemporary poetry. His many honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. Mr. Hinton has established himself as the premier Chinese translator of our generation.... He is a national treasure" (William Mullen, The New York Sun).

About The Selected Poems of Wang Wei:

Wang Wei (701-761 C.E.) is often spoken of, with his contemporaries Li Po and Tu Fu, as one of the three greatest poets in China's 3,000-year poetic tradition. Of the three, Wang was the consummate master of the short imagistic landscape poem that came to typify classical Chinese poetry. He developed a landscape poetry of resounding tranquility wherein deep understanding goes far beyond the words on the page — a poetics that can be traced to his assiduous practice of Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism. But in spite of this philosophical depth, Wang is not a difficult poet. Indeed, he may be the most immediately appealing of China's great poets, and in Hinton's masterful translations he sounds utterly contemporary.

"Wang Wei is one of those model poets, personally and artistically flawless, who occur very rarely in the history of literature."
— Kenneth Rexroth

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