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February 20, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Award-Winning Translator of Chinese Poetry to Read at Smith College

NORTHAMPTON, Mass. -- Smith College will present a poetry reading by poet and distinguished translator David Hinton. The reading will be held at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 2, in Neilson Library Browsing Room and is free and open to the public.

Hinton has been hailed as "simply the best translator of Chinese poetry presently working in English." In the words of translator Burton Watson, "Hinton's translations, while remaining faithful to the meaning and spirit of the original, are consistently imaginative in language and effective as English poetry, and he has shown a remarkable skill in capturing the particular style and voice of the different poets he has tackled."

An internationally renowned expert on Asian culture and literature, and a preeminent translator of Chinese classics, Hinton is the first 20th-century translator to render the four masterworks "Chauang Tzu," "Mencius," "The Analects" and "Tao Te Ching" into English. His clear and exquisite translations of many T'ang dynasty poets, including Li Po, Wang Wei and Tu Fu, have introduced thousands of non-academic readers to a rich literary tradition. Hinton also translates contemporary writers such as Bei Dao.

His translations have won numerous distinguished awards, including the Academy of American Poets Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, fellowships from the Witter Bynner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.
Hinton's most recent translation, "Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China," is a hefty volume of the earliest and most extensive literary engagement with wilderness in human history. It is also a poetry that feels utterly contemporary. In addition to reading from this and other collections, and talking about the cosmology and the deep ecological worldview embodied in the poems, he'll also read poems of his own from "Fossil Sky."

Hinton makes his home in the mountains of rural Vermont -- a landscape that echoes, even while it does not mirror, the landscape of the poems he has translated to great acclaim.

The reading will be followed by book-selling and signing. For more information, contact Cindy Furtek in the Poetry Center office at (413) 585-4891 or Ellen Doré Watson, director, at (413) 585-3368.

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Office of College Relations
Smith College
Garrison Hall
Northampton, Massachusetts 01063

Marti Hobbes
News Assistant
T (413) 585-2190
F (413) 585-2174
mhobbes@email.smith.edu

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