Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei

Eliot Weinberger’s books of literary essays include Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing, The Ghosts of Birds, and Angels & Saints. His political writings are collected in What I Heard About Iraq and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he is a translator of the poetry of Bei Dao, the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, and the general editor of the series Calligrams: Writings from and on China. Among his translations of Latin American poetry and prose are The Poems of Octavio Paz, Paz’s In Light of India, Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia for Death, and Jorge Luis Borges’ Seven Nights and Selected Non-Fictions. His work has been translated into over thirty languages, and he has been publishing with New Directions since 1975.

Wang Wei (699-761) was a Chinese musician, painter, poet, and politician of the middle Tang dynasty. He is regarded as one ofthe most distinguished men of arts and letters of his era. About 400 of his poems survived and 29 of them are included in the 18th-century anthology Three Hundred Tang Poems. A large portion of his finest poems drew inspirations from the local landscape.