Poetry
輞川集
Not translated into English
Wang Wei · 750
Synopsis
Twenty five-character quatrains, each devoted to a site on the estate that Wang Wei owned on the banks of the Wang River, at the foot of the Qinling Mountains. His friend Pei Di answers each piece with a quatrain on the same place, and the collection brings together the two series, which follow the two poets' walk through the estate. The best-known piece, the one on the deer enclosure, opens on an empty mountain where no one is to be seen.
Context
Wang Wei had acquired at Lantian, south of Chang'an, a vast estate that had belonged to the poet Song Zhiwen; he spent there the three-year mourning that followed his mother's death. The twenty sites were also the subject of a scroll painted by him, now lost, of which later copies survive. This quatrain of the deer has been translated a great many times; Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz compared more than nineteen versions of it. An English translation by David Hinton devoted to the collection is announced for December 2026.
Who it is for
Forty very brief quatrains, to be read in pairs; they can be found in French in the translations of Wang Wei's work.
Prizes and reception
Britannica notes that his poems appear in almost all Chinese anthologies, alongside those of Li Bai and Du Fu.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.