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GARY SNYDER’S SEVENTEEN T’ANG POEMS: AN ANTI-CLIMAX
AFTER HIS “COLD MOUNTAIN POEMS”
By Ling Chung
G
ary Snyder has published two clusters of
renderings from classical Chinese poetry — one
while in his twenties, the other in his sixties. The
“Cold Mountain Poems” were published in the
Evergreen Review in 1956, and his renderings of
seventeen T’ang poems 1 were published in The Gary
Snyder Reader in 1999. The reception of these two
renderings varied greatly: the “Cold Mountain Poems”
became a phenomenon because they were immensely
popular among the Beats as well as the Hippies and
have been canonized as classics of English translation
from Chinese literature, whereas his seventeen T’ang
poems have aroused neither general public nor critical
attention. Interestingly, both groups of renderings are
based on Snyder’s homework in Professor Shihhsiang
Chen’s seminar course on T’ang and Sung
poetry from 1953 to 1955, when he was enrolled in
the Oriental Language Department as a graduate
student at the University of California, Berkeley. In
Susan Kalter’s article “The Path to Endless: Gary
Snyder in the Mid-1990s,” the impact of the “Cold
Mountain Poems” on Snyder’s own poetry is
discussed in detail, whereas his seventeen T’ang
Poems are not even mentioned. Why have these two
renderings been received so differently by the public
and the critics How valid do the seventeen T’ang
poems seem as poetry and translation
The popularity of the “Cold Mountain Poems” in
the 1950s and 1960s in the United States owes much
to their timeliness and to the publicity of Jack
Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums.1 The carefree loner’s
lifestyle and the Zen philosophy of Han-shan (Cold
Mountain), an enigmatic T’ang poet who probably
lived in the 7th century, coincidentally met the
spiritual need and the imagination of the Beats, the
Flower Children, and the Hippies. In addition, in his
autobiographical fiction, The Dharma Bums, Jack
Kerouac describes in detail how Japhy Rider (an
assumed name of Gary Snyder) translates the Cold
Mountain poems and how both Cold Mountain and
Snyder are great dharma bums — enlightened
Buddhist bums. After the publication of The Dharma
Bums in 1958, both Han-shan and Snyder became
gurus of the younger generations in the late 1950s and
the 1960s. Since then, the “Cold Mountain Poems”
have been selected in several important anthologies of
classical Chinese literature in translation. 2 Thus, Hanshan
is canonized in the United States and enjoys the
fame of a major poet, a status he did not attain in
China during the course of a millennium. Snyder
revised the 17 T’ang poems almost 30 years after their
drafts were written. Therefore, they should bear the
mellowness of time, for Snyder’s poetic skill is finer,
his understanding of Asian cultures more profound,
and his grasp of Chinese poetic forms and English
poetic language more thorough. However, there is no
large audience awaiting them as there was for the
“Cold Mountain Poems.” Furthermore, the 17 T’ang
poems were written by 11 different poets, so the
renderings lack the focus of a single author, whereas
Cold Mountain, a crazy and wise Buddhist and Taoist
demi-god, is such an attractive and legendary figure.
When Snyder published the “Cold Mountain Poems”
in 1956, it was the first time Cold Mountain had been
translated into English. On the other hand, these 17
T’ang poems, written by Tu Fu, Po Chü-I, and Wang
Wei, have been translated into English over and over
through the 20th century. Therefore, their diverse
reception was foreseeable.
Many critical responses to the “Cold Mountain
Poems” focus on their linguistic and artistic
achievements. Critics such as Herbert Fackler, Jacob
Lee, and Bartlett Lee compare Snyder’s renderings
with those by Burton Watson and/or Arthur Waley. As
far as artistic superiority goes, Snyder’s 17 T’ang
poems have their merit and uniqueness, too.
Compared with the “Cold Mountain Poems,” they
exhibit more thoroughly some modes of classical
Chinese poetry, including the omission of subject,
article, and verb, the imitation of some syntactical
traits of the Chinese original, such as the word order
and the repeated words tieh tzû, the caesura, and the
use of punctuation and typographical space.
Apparently, Snyder is again experimenting with
English poetic language. The most obvious Chinese
poetic modes in these 17 renderings are the word
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