Poetry From the Sixth Century

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32382, 22 August 1970, Page 4

Poetry From the Sixth Century

Cold Mountain. By Han-shan. Translated and edited by Burton Watson. Jonathan Cape. 76 pp. Few books of poetry have titles as significant as this one, in which the title is perhaps more meaningful than the poet’s name. If Han-shan ever existed (and even this is in doubt), all reliable biographical information apart from the tenuous internal evidence of the poems has been lost long since; all that remains is a collection of about 300 poems, dated by scholars as somewhere between the sixth and the ninth centuries. Mr Watson’s selection of one hundred of these seems to be based on his personal preference, and they are arranged to give a loose sense of chronological development. Thus the book is divided into two clear sections: “early” pieces, mostly celebrating life in a rural community, and the “cold mountain” poems, in which the poet becomes a recluse somewhere in the T’ien-t’ai range. The first group contains a number of pieces which are patently inferior in quality to the rest, simply glorifying commonplace ideas which had much earlier become platitudes. It is uncertain whether Han-shan was essentially a religious poet, but some of the fixed attitudes in these poems could support this view. On the other hand, the Cold Mountain poems (about the last 60 in this selection) show a very changed attitude to his environment, and a much more personal vision. If the cold mountain is, as some scholars assert, nothing more than a state of mind, it was only when Han-shan reached it that he found a significant poetic vocation. The early poems, though certainly readable for their warm, intimate style, seem beside the maturity of the cold mountain very much the work of an apprentice poet.