{"id":296,"date":"2008-01-04T21:33:20","date_gmt":"2008-01-05T01:33:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2008\/01\/04\/breyten-breytenbach-empty-mountain\/"},"modified":"2009-08-08T21:46:45","modified_gmt":"2009-08-09T01:46:45","slug":"breyten-breytenbach-empty-mountain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2008\/01\/04\/breyten-breytenbach-empty-mountain\/","title":{"rendered":"Breyten Breytenbach, “to empty the mountain (for wang wei)”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Halfway through life’s journey I discover the Way
\nWind fleet-footed, heavens still, long-armed monkeys crying.
\nNow that I’m old I live near green mountains,
\nWater so clear and sand so white,
\nBackwards the birds fly
\nI wander alone there
\nAnd with no mouth-companion enjoy unfolded silence.
\nThe endless river rolls its waves hour upon hour<\/p>\n

But cannot bring to heel the moon;
\nAfter my long illness I scale the heights;
\nLoitering to where the stream sinks in moss
\nI rest and watch how clouds appear;
\nPassing on, I meet the old neighbor
\nAnd forget to return and chatter above and below
\nIn one moving sand of words: Oh, we live in desperate times
\nAnd mourn our hair of snow
\nSqueezed by poverty, we even give up the wine!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"breyten-breytenbach.gif\"
From Windcatcher: New & Selected Poems 1964-2006<\/i><\/a>. The poem “today I went down<\/a>” is also available online, as are PDFs of poems published in Harper’s<\/i><\/a>. I first discovered Breytenbach’s work through a profile in Lawrence Weschler’s wonderful book Calamities of Exile<\/i>, which underscored the essentialness of social justice in Breytenbach’s writing and his personal activism. (He was jailed in his native South Africa for seven years for his political activities, after illegally reentering the country after more than 15 years of exile.) See, also, Breytenbach’s open letter about contemporary Africa<\/a>, and another open letter to Ariel Sharon<\/a> published in The Nation<\/i>.<\/p>\n

And what about Wang Wei<\/a>? One of the finest poets of the Tang Dynasty, who has been repeatedly translated into English; see, for example, several versions of “Deer Park Hermitage”<\/a> spanning most of the 20th century (and one from David Hinton’s excellent 2006 renditions).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Halfway through life’s journey I discover the Way Wind fleet-footed, heavens still, long-armed monkeys crying. Now that I’m old I live near green mountains, Water so clear and sand so white, Backwards the birds fly I wander alone there And with no mouth-companion enjoy unfolded silence. The endless river rolls its waves hour upon hour […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}