Red Pine gathers and translates 126 poems of China’s greatest lyric poet, Xin Qiji, in his latest bilingual collection, If a Mountain Lion Could Sing. Visiting the very places where Xin composed his stanzas—the cassia trees of the Wu River, houseboats along the Yangzi, mountain monasteries—and paying respects at the poet’s grave, Red Pine makes a spiritual and physical exercise of translation. Written over 800 years ago, and to melodies since lost, Xin’s verses still leap across centuries, mapping real and interior landscapes, relaying universal concepts of duty and solitude, love and nostalgia. Though “true mirrors are hard to come by,” Xin’s poems serve as haunting reflections of a man who sang with “heroic abandon.
ISBN: 9781556596865
Format: Paperback
