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James S. Jaffe Rare Books, LLC

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The Sonnets

BERRIGAN, Ted & Ed SANDERS 4to, original pictorial wrappers, rebound in navy blue cloth with a red plastic title-label on spine. A few small and shallow stains on the fore-edges of the pages, offsetting from the frontispiece, corners very slightly rubbed. A few small and shallow stains on the fore-edges of the pages, offsetting from the frontispiece, corners very slightly rubbed First edition. Limited to 300 copies. A curious copy, one of Berrigan's retained copies, presumably bound at his direction, and originally intended for Berrigan's close friend and editor of this book, the poet Ron Padgett. The title-page is signed by Berrigan below his printed name, and embellished in characteristic fashion by him: at the top of the page, surrounding the title, Berrigan has drawn Kilroy, one of his favorite cartoon characters; each of the printed sections of the title-page is also either boxed or circled by a figure resembling an apple. The title-page bears Berrigan's inscription "For Ron" and a few inches below, his note "Never sent it." [Ron Padgett suggests that he (Padgett) may have been out of town at the time of Berrigan's original intention.] On the next page, the dedication page, around the printed dedication to Joe Brainard, Berrigan has drawn a cross carried on a truck; and at the top of the page, there is an "Ouch" glyph drawn by Ed Sanders who is known for such drawings. Berrigan has corrected the text in four places, and he has annotated the biographical information on the colophon page: changing his birthday to December 7th, 1941, the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor - "a day that will live in infamy"; he has crossed through the word "serving" in the sentence "In 1954, he entered the U. S. Army, serving until 1957", and put the word serving in quotation marks; in the sentence, "He now lives in New York city with his wife and son . . ." he has added the words "& Daughter & Ed Sanders". In addition, in the margin, Berrigan has added notes on a number of subsequent works, including The Sonnets (Grove Press, 1967); Bean Spasms (Kulchur, 1967), a collaboration with Ron Padgett, and another collaboration with Padgett that was never published, "The Furtive Days (A Novel)", among others. In the colophon, where this copy's number is to be specified, Berrigan has written "800". Finally, on the verso of the dedication page, Berrigan has pasted a photostatic reproduction of a collage of photographs of himself. A row of the page numbers in the book is written on the rear endpaper, perhaps by the binder.
  • $4,000
  • $4,000
book (2)

The archive of David Hinton, poet and preeminent translator of classical Chinese poetry into English in the world today.

[ARCHIVES & COLLECTIONS] HINTON, David The archive spans Hinton's entire prolific career, and documents in the greatest detail his ground-breaking translations as well as his studies in ancient Chinese and Ch'an philosophy. Hinton has published twelve books of translations of classical Chinese poetry, seven translations of Chinese philosophy, and five books of his own poetry and criticism. Hinton is also the editor of two major anthologies of Chinese poetry:The New Directions Anthology of Chinese Poetry(2003) andClassical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), the poems in which he also translated. Hinton has translatedI Ching(2015),Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China(2005),The Analects of Confucius(1998),Chuang Tzu: Inner Chapters(1997),Bei Dao: Landscape Over Zero(1996) andForms of Distanceby Bei Dao (1994), as well as translations of Lao-tzu, Mencius, Li Po, T'ao Ch'ien, Wang An-Shih, Po Chu-I, Wang Wei and Tu Fu. He is the author ofAwakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry(2019),No-Gate Gateway: The Original Wu-Men Kuan(2018),The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape(2017);Desert: Poems(2018),Existence: A Story(2016),Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape(2012), andFossil Sky(2004). Two new books are forthcoming:China Root: Taoism, Ch'an, and Original Zen(2020), andSource Book: Readings in Original Zen(2022). The importance of classical Chinese Poetry, and classical Chinese poetry in translation, cannot be exaggerated; they have been transformative of modern English and American poetry.In his translations,Hinton hascreated a new literary tradition in English. And he has gone beyond that, to a kind of cultural translation that has become an original cultural and philosophical project. In addition to his translations, he has developed this project in numerous books of essays and poetry. Madeleine Thien, in a recent review inThe New York Review of Bookssuggests much of this when she writes:"Hinton's austerely beautiful translations assume that Chinese classical poetry cannot be severed from philosophy. Guided by each poem, he translates and internets Daoist concepts, refined over millennia, for which there are no precise English equivalents . . . Hinton's aim is to explore the most complex ideas of Daoism . . . In essence, he wants us to learn words again, and to momentarily set aside the philosophical assumptions of the English language. . .Hinton's translations have always gone against the grain. He has been building, translation by translation, an English language for a Chinese conceptual world . . . In the twentieth century, Chinese poetry was translated into the American idiom by modernists like Ezra Pound and later poets including Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder with a lightness of touch, a beguiling simplicity. Hinton is after the opposite: depth and boundlessness."[Alink to the full review is provided below.] Owing to the complexities of translating Chinese poetry, David Hinton's archive is invaluable in the detail in which it reveals the full scope of the myriad possibilities from which a translator must choose the words that will most faithfully convey the letter and spirit as well as the underlying philosophical intent of the original poems. The exactitude of Hinton's approach to the translation of classical Chinese poetry, and his original exploration of the philosophical ideas that infuse that poetry, provide an extraordinary, perhaps a unique, opportunity to study the interpretation and translation of this most difficult poetry by a modern master. The archive is in exceptional order, all translations with their variant possibilities meticulously filed neatly in individual folders, the entire archive amounting to 18 bankers boxes, plus Hinton's digital files.An inventory is available to interested institutions.
  • $225,000
  • $225,000