J.P. Seaton, one of our most important translators of Chinese poetry, has had a long association with The Literary Review. This chapbook collects his contributions to TLR. A number of the poems have been reprinted in books, as noted below.

Ten Poems by Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-1072): printed Vol.23, No. 4 (Summer 1980), marked the first appearance of J.P.Seaton's translation work in The Literary Review. Several of these poems later appeared in his Love and Time: Selected Poems of Ou-yang Hsiu (Copper Canyon, 1989).

J.P.Seaton served as guest editor for Vol. 32, No. 3 (Spring 1989). Titled “An Answering Music: American poets and Chinese poetry,” it offered new and selected (often the translators' own favorites) translations by 47 American poets and scholars, including Pulitzer Prize winners Carolyn Kizer and Gary Snyder. Seaton's poem contributions included anonymous poems from the Yuan Dynasty, two poems by Tu Fu, and five poems by Yuan Mei. The National Endowment for the Arts supported the issue, including paying translators $30 per poem. Seaton's favorites included a poem from The Wine of Endless Life, still in print and available from White Pine Press, two poems by Tu Fu, China's greatest poet, from Bright Moon/Perching Bird (Wesleyan, 1987), and five poems by Yuan Mei that would appear in I Don't Bow to Buddhas (Copper Canyon, 1997).

Two more poems by Yuan Mei (1716-1798) and two by China's first great modern poet(!), T'ao Ch'ien (365-427), were included in a selection of Chinese poems published in Vol. 35, No. 1 (Fall 1991).

Vol. 38, No. 3 (Spring 1995) included a selection of poems by sixteen Chinese poets, translated by seven American poet/translators, with an introduction entitled “Traces: Fifty Generations of Zen Poetry.” J.P. Seaton's contributions, in addition to the introduction, included poems by the Zen monk Seng Yu (first half of the 6th cent. CE); a poem by the T'ang Monk Ling Yi (d.762CE) ; the only extant poem of an otherwise unknown T'ang poet Cheng Fu (d.848); four poems by Kuan Hsiu (832-912 CE) a Zen Master who was also a major innovator as a portrait artist; a poem by the Ching Yun, a late T'ang monk famous for his poetry and his calligraphy; a poem by Yuan Mei, a extraordinarily popular lay poet whose work shows the influence of Zen on poets of all philosophical stripes; and two poems by Ching An, a great monk/Abbot poet of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Vol. 39, no.4 (Summer 1996) “World Views: New Writing About Nature,” John E. Becker, Guest Editor, included another poem by Kuan Hsiu.

Vol. 41, no.4 (Summer 1998) included a pre-publication selection of poems by the six translators involved in the production of The Clouds Should Know Me by Now, "Getting Past Words: A Thousand Words from the Zen Tradition." The two-page introduction to the selection has been published in the online version of Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition . It was around this time that the translator, attempting to find a way to mirror various forms of emphasis used in the original Chinese, began experimenting with center justified lines