The Wheel River Anthology translated by Harry Gilonis

Description

In eight-century China the poet, painter, widower and former civil-servant Wang Wei retired to a country-estate on the Wang, or “wheel-rim” river, near the Souch Hills, to write poetry… Here, in correspondence with a younger poet, Wang Wei wrote the quatrain poems since gathered together as the “Wheel River Poems”.

A sequence of 2 x 20 quatrains, in essence call-and-response, written by both poets on the landscape features around Wang Wei’s country property, the Wheel River anthology has long been recognised as a classic of Chinese poetry, one of the outstanding achievements of the Tang Dynasty. These new “faithless” translations by London based poet Harry Gilonis build upon the achievements of earlier translations in the collection eye-blink (London: Veer Books, 2012).

Taking liberties with traditional translational modes, these poems compel readers to perform the imaginative leaps and creative readings demanded by their Chinese original.