The Heart of Cold Mountain: Transcreations of the Taoist Hermit Poet Han Shan

These 40 poems are transcreations of translations of Chinese poems by the poet Cold Mountain, or Han Shan. By transcreations, I mean they are reworkings and interpretations of at least three translators of each poem (I myself know no Chinese). By triangulating those three translations, one can come to a place between the three, and quite possibly a closer approximation to the original. As to the translators, I have relied on a core of five. I visited Red Pine and Hendricks for all 40, Burton Watson for 24, Tanahashi/Levitt for 22, and Snyder for 14. But who is Cold Mountain? The truth is no one really knows. Is he even a single person? Edwin Pulleyblank concludes there were two poets. Tanahashi surmises from his own analysis there were three including one who was “a dedicated or fully inclined Daoist.” My own reading had lead me to a similar conclusion two years ago. There must have been at least two poets, and the forty poems I’ve transcreated are, I simply sense, most of the major nondual Taoist poetry, as compared to the lesser Buddhist religious poems within the collection. I feel these are the heart of Cold Mountain.