Leath Tonino - About David Hinton 中译

About David Hinton

Leath Tonino

David Hinton’s interest in ancient Chinese poetry grew from a youthful fascination with ecology, Eastern religion, and the American landscape poets of the West Coast. He earned an MFA in poetry from Cornell University in 1981 and was busy working on his own poems when he first encountered the writings of eighth-century Chinese author Tu Fu, said by some to be history’s greatest lyrical poet. Hinton was not particularly impressed by Tu Fu until he discovered a book in the Oriental collection at the New York Public Library that showed thirty-six of poet’s works in every stage of translation – from the original Chinese characters, to word-for-word English translations, to more poetic translations, to prose versions. The translation he’d been reading had failed to capture the full scope of the poems, and soon he began making his own. He returned to Cornell to study Chinese and continued his language studies in Taiwan, moving there in 1984.

In the decades since his return to the United States, Hinton has lived with the poems of Tu Fu, Li Po, Wang Wei, and many others, learning to recreate their voices in English. He recognizes that translation is all about disappearing into another author’s work, and humility is key. “I’m uneasy with any portrayal of myself as a master of sagely wisdom,” he writes. But he does speak knowledgeably and passionately about the spiritual underpinnings of the Chinese poetic tradition, which dates back 3,500 years and is steeped in Taoism and Ch’an Buddhist philosophy. (Ch’an is more familiar to Americans by its Japanese name, Zen.) Hinton often refers to Taoism and Ch’an as one spiritual tradition, because Ch’an is an extension of Taoism, and both philosophies focus on the world that we perceive through our senses, rather than on an afterlife or abstract spirit realm. For Ch’an-Taoism, there are only the “ten thousand things” – the diverse, ever-changing reality of which we are a part.

Though he occasionally teaches at Columbia University in New York City and Freie Universität in Berlin, Hinton has managed to build a career mostly outside of academia. He is the author of the experimental epic poem Fossil Sky and a book of essays titled Hunger-Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Literature, about China’s spiritual ecology and his own repeated walks up a mountain near his home. He is best known, however, for his translations of poets in the rivers-and-mountains tradition, which he’s collected in Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China. He is also the first person in more than a century to have translated into English all four of the Chinese philosophical masterworks: the Tao Te Ching, the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, and the Chuang Tzu.

I met Hinton for this interview at his small house on a dead-end dirt road in East Calais, Vermont. A tall, thin man with wavy gray hair, he welcomed me from the top of some slate stairs set into a grassy slope. For many years Hinton worked part time as a stonemason to play the bills, and the landscaping on his property is a testament to his skill and aesthetic sensibility. I noticed a pair of damp leather boots drying in the sun, then saw that Hinton was barefoot. He explained that he had stepped into a creek on a hike with his daughter. It was a fine summer afternoon, warm and still. We took seats on a back patio, where we could watch the birds and clouds as we talked.

Hinton’s voice is gravelly, and he pauses before answering questions. He regards the world with wonder and comes across as simultaneously cerebral and earthy. After nearly two hours of conversation, when I took a minute to replace the batteries in my audio reorder, he quietly drifted over to nearby flower garden, plucked a single weed, contemplated it, then moved on to the next. I had the sense that if I hadn’t called him back, he would have spent the rest of the afternoon happily wandering.