Zen Poems of the Five Mountains (Studies in Religion / American Academy of Religion, No. 37)

By David Pollack

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0824507126
• ISBN13: 9780824507121
• Release Date: January 1985
• Publisher: Crossroad Pub Co
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Zen Waxes Poetic

This book consists of a fine selection of medieval Japanese poetry written in Chinese by monks of the leading Zen Temples of the day, the "Five Mountain" temples of Kamakura and Kyoto. David Pollack's translations do a wonderful job of staying true to the original while catching their refined, urbane literary tone in English, and he strikes a fine balance between those poems that explicitly thematize the monastic lifestyle and Buddhist religiosity on the one hand and poems less obviously religious on the topics of nature, the seasons, and everyday life on the other. The book also includes quite a few illustrations (landscapes, monk portraits, calligraphy) suitable to the "Five Mountain" cultural context, some of these by the poets themselves. The poems themselves are organized by general topic, so that one gets an interesting view of how different poets handled similar subject matter as well as a good general idea of what subjects were commonly treated. Everything from Meditation and Daily Practice to Weather and the Changing Seasons serve as topics for the monks' poetic efforts. If one is interested in the work of a particular poet, on the other hand, there is a handy index of poems arranged consecutively by poet in the back of the book, along with short biographies of each. Besides the fine quality of this book overall, it is especially a rarity because this form of poetry is often overlooked. Written in classical Chinese but written in Japan, it tends to fall between the cracks of academic specialization, and this period of Zen history is often retroactively criticized as being somewhat inauthentic by later sectarian polemics. All of which makes this fine volume even more of a treasure.