Dreaming the Mountain

Poetry

Dreaming the Mountain

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“A moving depiction of a mind seeking freedom in a chaotic world: the doubts and certainties, the careful, profound observations, and, ultimately, the dedication to liberation.”—TRICYCLE MAGAZINE
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The North American debut of Tuệ Sỹ—poet, monk, scholar, dissident, and one of the great cultural figures of modern Vietnam—and a new bilingual edition to the Seedbank series.

Assembled and co-translated by Vietnamese poet and essayist Nguyen Ba Chung and acclaimed American poet Martha Collins, Dreaming the Mountain reflects a lifetime of creation, crisis, and commitment. With poems presented on facing pages in Vietnamese and English, this volume includes the early imagism of Tuệ Sỹ’s Zen studies as a scholar and critic, midlife work that represents his attempted retreat from the devastation of war and subsequent years of imprisonment, and late, elliptical poems that give intensely lyrical expression to a lifetime of profound experience. From the “fleeting dream of red blood at dusk” to the quiet determination of one who sets out to “repaint the dawn,” these poems reflect the journey of an artist who speaks for his country, who captures its darkness and its light.

At once personal and universal, coolly observant and deeply compassionate, the poems of Tuệ Sỹ bring singular attention to a fleeting, painfully beautiful world.

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Keywords: 
Vietnamese, Vietnam, Laos, zen, Southeast Asia, Buddhist, Buddhism, war, dissident, dissidence, philosophy, scholar, prison, meditation, colonialism, imperialism, ontology, Nature, Ho Chi Minh, translation, lifetime, poetry, poetry in translation
ISBN:
9781639550180
Publish Date: 
06/13/2023
Pages: 
168
Size: 
8.5 × 5.5 × 0.75 in
Weight: 
7.7 oz
Author

Tuệ Sỹ is the author of Dreaming the Mountain.

Translator

Nguyen Ba Chung is the co-translator of Dreaming the Mountain. He is a writer, poet and translator. 

Translator

Martha Collins is the co-translator of Dreaming the Mountain and Black Stars. She has also published eleven volumes of poetry. 

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