Return to Songshan

There's a promising site called Mountain Songs that "connects ancient (and some modern) Chinese poetry to the sites where the poetry was written or written about. It enables you to experience the same sights that the poets themselves viewed hundreds of years ago." It's not all that clear yet - for example when I looked up Wang Wei I wasn't sure what landscape is shown in the photograph. But you can look up a few of the mountains that Wang Wei wrote about in his poems, such as Mount Sung or Sōngshān: "Setting sun floods autumn mountains. Sōngshān towers high in the distance, / Coming back, I shut my door on the world..."

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Postscript 2023

Mountain Songs, with the links I included above, has disappeared from its original place and is now harder to find, but it does still exist at a new address: https://mountainsongs.mishanghai.org/index.php

The 'About Us' tab gives no information on the authors and still says the site is under construction. However, Bill Porter wrote about Mountain Songs in his 2016 book about a thirty day journey round the sites of Chinese poetry, Finding Them Gone (p361). The site was created by Gary Flint, who travelled all over China photographing mountains and compiling translations. His 'technical adviser' was Robin Chang (Chang Ch'i). Flint sadly died of cancer in 2009, three years after I wrote this post on my blog. He had been a classmate at Reed College of Gary Snyder, whose translations of Han Shan first got me interested in Chinese poetry. 

In 2011 Mountain Songs was the fifth recommendation for classical Chinese poetry by Qiu Xaolong, on the Five Books site. Here's what he says of Gary Flint:

For a few years he worked and lived in Shanghai, where I met him. We would talk about poetry and poetry translation over dim sum, but he passed away over a year ago. I chose his website because he so selflessly dedicated his time, energy and money to create it. He collected translations by other translators, and also published some of his own. The website is still available because a friend of his, in memory of him, is keeping it up. Poetry translation is difficult, and he did it simply because of his passion for it. Anybody who loves Chinese poetry can go to the website. So I felt I had to mention it in his memory.