I Ching: The Book of Change - Hardcover

Hinton, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374220905 ISBN 13: 9780374220907

Verlag: FARRAR STRAUSS & GIROUX, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

A master translator's beautiful and accessible rendering of the seminal Chinese text

In a radically new translation and interpretation of the I Ching, David Hinton strips this ancient Chinese masterwork of the usual apparatus and discovers a deeply poetic and philosophical text. Teasing out an elegant vision of the cosmos as ever-changing yet harmonious, Hinton reveals the seed from which Chinese philosophy, poetry, and painting grew. Although it was and is widely used for divination, the I Ching is also a book of poetic philosophy, deeply valued by artists and intellectuals, and Hinton's translation restores it to its original lyrical form.

Previous translations have rendered the I Ching as a divination text full of arcane language and extensive commentary. Though informative, these versions rarely hint at the work's philosophical heart, let alone its literary beauty. Here, Hinton translates only the original strata of the text, revealing a fully formed work of literature in its own right. The result is full of wild imagery, fables, aphorisms, and stories. Acclaimed for the eloquence of his many translations of ancient Chinese poetry and philosophy, Hinton has reinvented the I Ching as an exciting contemporary text at once primal and postmodern.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Hinton's many translations of classical Chinese poetry have earned wide acclaim for creating compelling contemporary poems that convey the actual texture and density of the originals. He is also the first translator in more than a century of the four seminal masterworks of Chinese philosophy: Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, Analects, and Mencius. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has won the Landon Translation Award, the PEN Translation Award, and, most recently, the Thornton Wilder Award for lifetime achievement from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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From the introduction: Primal emptiness separated into heaven and earth. That's how it all began. Before long, a pair of dragons emerged from Bright-Prosperity Mountain: Root-Breath and Lady She-Voice. Now, dragons in ancient China embodied the awesome force of change. A dragon was in constant transformation, writhing through all creation and all destruction, shaping itself into the ten thousand things tumbling through their traceless transformations. So perhaps the appearance of these dragons was the beginning of the ever-changing diversity of things we know as the Cosmos. The legend doesn't say. Root-Breath and Lady She-Voice were dragons, but dragons with human heads. They became the first couple, husband and wife, and Lady She-Voice gave birth to humankind. So you see, we are descended from dragons: we have dragon hearts pumping dragon blood, dragon minds thinking dragon thoughts. It was Root-Breath, our first-ancestor, who created the hexagrams. More dragon than human, his thoughts were almost indistinguishable from natural process itself, so when he shaped them into the hexagrams, those strange dragon-graphs expressed all phenomena in the endless process of change. Language is how we represent change, reality in its dynamic process of transformation. And it grows out of change. Hexagrams are the first stage in that emergence of language from change, that folding of the Cosmos around onto itself to name and describe itself. They are the most ancient form of language in this sense. Part dragon language, part human, they represent the movement of change at a more fundamental level than our languages can. Root-Breath's hexagrams were made up of six lines, each of which could be either a solid yang (male) line (-) or a divided yin (female) line (- -), thereby representing the two complementary cosmic principles whose dynamic interaction produces the process of change. And these lines were alive. Like dragons and the Cosmos itself, the hexagram lines were in constant transformation-yang becoming yin, and yin, yang-creating different hexagrams, each of which is defined by its particular configuration of yang and yin. So there are sixty-four hexagrams-every possible six-line combination of yang and yin lines-and these combinations describe every possible configuration in the process of change. The sixty-four hexagrams make up the actual text of the I Ching:I (Change) + Ching (Classic) = The Classic of Change or The Book of Change. The Book of Change and change itself: they emerged together at the beginning of things. ...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: FARRAR STRAUSS & GIROUX
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0374220905
• ISBN 13: 9780374220907
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 160
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar