Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese

Available in limited quantity After years of passionate labor, the late Sam Hamill translated both familiar and little-known Chinese poems from three millennia (330 BC to the 16th century) to compile the most comprehensive collection of its kind. Crossing the Yellow River:Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese represents a “lifetime’s devotion to the classic originals,” in the words of W. S. Merwin, begun when Hamill was introduced to classical Chinese by Kennth Rexroth and the Beat poets of the late 1950s. Unlike earlier translators of Chinese and Japanese poetry, Hamill attempts to bring the poems into English with their directness and simplicity intact, at the same time attempting to remain true to the poet’s original message. Hamill includes the rarely-translated social poems of Tu Fu, the poems and songs of Tzu Yeh and Li Ch’ing-Chao, and lyrical selections from Li Po, Shih Ching, Wang Wei, Su Tung-p’o and others. Hamill’s introduction provides the most definitive overview to date o