{"product_id":"introduction-to-the-introduction-to-wang-wei-9781894078092","title":"Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei","description":"\u003cp\u003eIntroduction to the Introduction to the Introduction by Andr Alexis For me  reading the Introduction was like being caught in a spring shower while waiting for the 41  and running into a library to get out of the rain and  because the rain lasts  wandering the aisles on the fifth floor  taking books from the shelves (Waleys translations from the Chinese  a work by Roland Barthes  an oversized book about eastern birds...)  draping my winter coat on a chair and sitting down to read. My coat smells of wet coconut matting  and the library is warm  and I fall asleep  my head on the desk  and dream about a strange library filled with impossibly rare and impossibly beautiful works: Waley on birds  Barthes translations from the Chinese  an oversized book about rain... And when I wake  moments later  after what seems like hours  I have the momentary and vivid conviction that  if I listened properly  I could translate water into any language at all. Pain Not Bread is a collaborative writing group formed in 1990 by Roo Borson  Kim Maltman and Andy Patton. In Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei  they occupy the border created by translation  allusion and echo  and make it into habitable space  a place where the subtle sensitivities of poets from the troubled late Tang Dynasty (Wang Wei  Li Bai  Du Fu  ...) blend with our own millennial anxieties. What do poets do in a difficult time? Its as though Pain Not Bread were talking and drinking with their Tang contemporaries on some old rickety ferry making its way back and forth between English and Chinese  Chinese and English  in the process weaving together a music of supreme nuance and tonal registration  a mode of speaking and feeling which is \"undisfigured by sentiment\" and yet riddled with its own mortality.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67929910378549,"sku":"ByrdShop_1894078098","price":248.92,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9781894078092.jpg?v=1794200929","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/introduction-to-the-introduction-to-wang-wei-9781894078092","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}