Waiting for the Owl: poems and songs from ancient China
210 x 210 mm, 96 pp, colour cover with col. illustrations
December 2009
Price $AU 29.95
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About the book
Here are poems by Chinese rulers, officials, statesmen, soldiers, concubines, recluses and hard-drinking iconoclasts, dating back to the 2nd century BC and beyond. Not weighed down by the accumulation of literary tradition, these verses are more direct and personal, less allusive than the beautiful but stylised works of later times. The same appealing Daoist philosophy underlying Singing of Scented Grass will again delight the readership that so readily embraced the first timeless collection.
The graceful lucidity of the book's design makes the poems accessible and attractive to the general reader as well as to the specialist in the field. This beautiful book brings a significant work of scholarship to the general public in a volume that joins the beauty of the poetry with brush painting responses by Susan Collis, as well as giving the original Chinese ideograms. The book also includes selections from the inner chapters of the Zhuangzi and a handful of Johnston's poems reflecting on them.
Reviews
'What comes through Johnston's work is that rare but necessary thing with translation of the first order: an intimate feel for the original, and a vigorous intuition with regard to what might be done with it in English; it is that same intellectual grasp of the Mandarin that gives his poems their stamp of authority. It is a rare event that a scholar with a literary touch, a scholar with a powerful mind who is also a poet, devotes himself to works of translation. His projects can only enrich Australian letters in a major way.' - Barry Hill