David Hinton has translated many volumes of classical Chinese poetry, and he is the first translator in over a century to translate the four seminal masterworks of Chinese philosophy: Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, Analects, and Mencius. His most recent books are Fossil Sky, a poem composed on a large maplike sheet (Archipelago); The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan (Archipelago); and Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China (Counterpoint). The poems featured here are from The Mountain Poems of Wang Wei, a collection to be published by New Directions in 2005.

Hinton has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1997, he received the Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. Hinton lives in Vermont and has a website at www.davidhinton.org.