Seeking the Cave

September 15, 2014
Amiable wanderings to China's Han-shan in search of both the "cold mountain" and the poet who took his name from that wild place. Han-shan, the Tang dynasty poet, went for hundreds of years without being much honored or remembered; indeed, we've lost any record, if any ever existed, of when he lived and died, his real name and other such biographical data. It was only in the 1950s and '60s, thanks in part to accidentally simultaneous English translations by Gary Snyder and Burton Watson, that American readers discovered a corpus augmented in the 1980s by versions by Bill Porter, aka Red Pine. Lenfestey (Earth in Anger: Twenty-five Poems of Love and Despair for Planet Earth, 2013, etc.), a former academic and advertising executive, turned a couple of life crises to advantage by traveling to China to see for himself the poet's mountain fastness and the people who live there today, including an odd assemblage of hermits, monks and expats. The journey he recounts is less philosophically charged than Porter's Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits (1993), and the paths he took are perhaps less hair-raising than in decades past thanks to official efforts at encouraging tourism, but Lenfestey's eye is a good, clear one, and he delivers some vivid notes on the Middle Kingdom: "The oppressive grayness tasted of dust and smoke and pollution in some ghoulish brew, but the scramble of traffic...seemed not dissimilar from that of any urban megalopolis of the late twentieth century." The author even found an oddly gregarious hermit-and, crediting his bravery, tried her cooking-while serving up a just-right assortment of poems by the cave-dwelling poet who, even now, doesn't get much love in his own country, even as he figures, at least in Lenfestey's mind, as "the older brother America never had." A record of travels in search of something the author didn't know he'd lost; well worth the attention of other seekers, as well as fans of Tang poetry.

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