Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom (Copper Canyon Classics)

Very Aubrey Beardsleyesque draftsmanship. You buy this book for the illustrations. It is fun to read the Chinese text and compare it to the translations, too, but it is the pictures that grab you. Buy it for all your sakura and hanami-loving friends.

All lovers of asian poetry, mysterious history, divine drawing, and plum blossomswill enjoy this book.Thank you once again, Red Pine, for deep-translation.with pleasureMichael McClure

quick service good price unique fascinating

My husband enjoys the book.

I didn't care for the book and donated it to the library, it may be someone else's cup of tea.

These 100 poems, organized into 8 sections paralleling the life of a plum blossom (Buds, … Opening, Radiant, Fading, and Forming Fruit). Starting with “A southern branch erupts with buds”, Pines translation, offers deeper understanding of the “politics’ of the writer Sung ,, for example “Sung uses such references to show his dissatisfaction with court policies”. How Red Pine knows the full story of these poems is beyond me, such as His Shuh a famous beauty of 5th century BC China. For the tea drinker #4, refers to “crab eyes” as the tiny bubbles that first break the surface when warming water, For the bird watching, “stork beak” offers a glimpse of the crane as a symbol of transcendence, different than the stork, or a different poem advise ‘don’t quarrel with a snipe”, and such poems as Oriole Flying through the Willows, and Osprey riding the wind, are pure joy. When I retire, I want to use the words of Tien, when asked a bout a job said “he would like to go with a group of young men to the countryside in spring, wash away the dust of the past year in the river, dry off in the breeze at the rain-dance alter, and return home signing”. (poem 69)

Personally, I enjoy brief, short poetry (examples inc. haiku by basho and “Fireflies” by Tagore). I have read very little by the Chinese poets. I was pleasantly surprised by this book by Sung Po-jen (this particular translation by “Red Pine”). I definitely appreciate the pairing of a wood block image with a facing page with a poem and commentary. It helps me to better visualize what the poem is about. I also appreciate the use of humor interspersed throughout. Really good book, IMHO.

Imagine making the micro-stages of a plum blossom's growth the basis of a startling series of nature poems. But this is what Po-Jen Sung manages to do, and Red Pine's translation seems elegent and luminous and baffling in all the right places. The poet is never at a loss for the perfect image. He is intuitive and always flowing with the spirit of the inner details. This is visionary poetry at its best -- and the woodcuts of each of the flower's stages are incomparable. A must read. Thanks to Red Pine for this deeply moving work.

Award winning translator Red Pine presents us with a revised edition of his translation of Sung Po-jen's delightful 'Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom', which was first published in 1238 and is generally regarded as the earliest printed art book. It is presented here in its original form as a series of woodblock prints, along with Red Pine's delicate, graceful, and learned translations of the accompanying poems. He also, as ever, provides the necessary framework to understand the poems giving both context and explications of the poems, which are allusive in a manner not appreciable to someone without a deep knowledge of Chinese history and literature.This is another excellent work by Red Pine whose works have delighted me over many years. Thank you Red Pine.Also of interest may be Red Pine's translation of the  Poems of the Masters: China's Classic Anthology of T'Ang and Sung Dynasty Verse , which contains poems by such greats of Chinese poetry as Li Bai (701-762 CE), Du Fu (712-770 CE) and Wang Wei (699-759 CE) (this anthology was the 2004 'Finalist for PEN Center USA Literary Award in Translation'). Red Pine has also produced  In Such Hard Times  a collection of poetry by the Tang Dynasty poet Wei Ying-Wu (737-792 CE) (This volume won the American Literary Translators Association's 2010 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize). Poems of the Masters: China's Classic Anthology of T'Ang and Sung Dynasty VerseIn Such Hard Times

From the preface to the first edition in 1261 : it is like sugarcane - the more you chew the better it gets ! Exquisite legacy from an age when people cultivated leisure - to be savoured at leisure.

excellent great read and nice topic I love plum blossoms in the Spring so beautiful in the trees great book