In the Forest of Faded Wisdom: 104 Poems by Gendun Chopel, a Bilingual Edition

by Gendün Chöphel, Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Translator)

In a culture where poetry is considered the highest form of human language, Gendun Chopel is revered as Tibet’s greatest modern poet. Born in 1903 as British troops were preparing to invade his homeland, Gendun Chopel was identified at any early age as the incarnation of a famous lama and became a Buddhist monk, excelling in the debating courtyards of the great monasteries of Tibet. At the age of thirty-one, he gave up his monk’s vows and set off for India, where he would wander, often alone and impoverished, for over a decade. Returning to Tibet, he was arrested by the government of the young Dalai Lama on trumped-up charges of treason, emerging from prison three years later a broken man. He died in 1951 as troops of the People’s Liberation Army marched into Lhasa.Throughout his life, from his childhood to his time in prison, Gendun Chopel wrote poetry that conveyed the events of his remarkable life. In the Forest of Faded Wisdom is the first comprehensive collection of his oeuvre in any language, assembling poems in both the original Tibetan and in English translation. A master of many forms of Tibetan verse, Gendun Chopel composed heartfelt hymns to the Buddha, pithy instructions for the practice of the dharma, stirring tributes to the Tibetan warrior-kings, cynical reflections on the ways of the world, and laments of a wanderer, forgotten in a foreign land. These poems exhibit the technical skill—wordplay, puns, the ability to evoke moods of pathos and irony—for which Gendun Chopel was known and reveal the poet to be a consummate craftsman, skilled in both Tibetan and Indian poetics. With a directness and force often at odds with the conventions of belles lettres, this is a poetry that is at once elegant and earthy. In the Forest of Faded Wisdom is a remarkable introduction to Tibet’s sophisticated poetic tradition and its most intriguing twentieth-century writer.

Genres: Poetry, Buddhism

199 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2009

About the author

Gendün Chöphel (Tibetan: དགེ་འདུན་ཆོས་འཕེལ, Wylie: dge 'dun chos 'phel) (1903–1951) was a Tibetan artist, writer and scholar. He was born in 1903 in Rabkong, Amdo. He was a creative and controversial figure and he is considered by many to have been one of the most important Tibetan intellectuals of the twentieth century.

Gendün Chöphel was a friend of Rahul Sankrityayan. His life was the inspiration for Luc Schaedler's film The Angry Monk: Reflections on Tibet and The Madman's Middle Way: Reflections on Reality of the Tibetan Monk Gendun Chophel. He is best known for his collection of essays called Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Pilgrimage, written during his time in India and Sri Lanka in between 1934 and 1946. These essays were critical of modern Hinduism, Christianity, and British imperialism. While condemning places and events like the Black Hole of Calcutta and the Goa Inquisition, he praised certain British colonial practices like the abolition of sati.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Mesoscope]

I'm not entirely sure why scholars continue to translate volumes of Tibetan poetry. Still less do I understand why I keep reading them, although in this case I have an excuse. I consider Gendun Choephel to be one of the great geniuses of Tibetan culture in the last 200 years, and any new publication of an English-language work treating the iconoclastic savant is a work worth embracing, more or less.

That being so, whatever the virtues his verse may possess in the original Tibetan, to my ear its music is lost almost completely in Lopez's translation. The poetics of Tibetan are not amenable to free translation -- verse is defined more by puns and complex networks of allusions and wordplay than by images, scansion, or lyrical melody. Those elements are almost entirely lost in this volume, and for some reason Lopez does not bother to explain what is there in footnotes or commentary.

What we are left with, then, is a fairly typical set of emphatic devotional "songs" praising this deity or that. They are not wholly without interest and some of them have a certain force of imagery. On the whole, though, they appeal to my interest primarily as a completist when it comes to learning as much as I can about the renegade Gelukpa from Amdo.

[Andrutto]

Every page is a masterpiece, to be savored again and again. A very helpful inclusion of the Tibetan original text should be a standard for translations such as this.
The translator did an excellent job.

[Kyren]

An excellent bilingual edition of much of the extant poetry of the famous modern Tibetan poet and scholar Gendun Chopel. The Tibetan is beautifully and well-translated into English in a way that is compellingly accessible for any reader interested in reading Tibetan poetry in translation. The translator's introduction familiarizes the reader with a helpful sketch of Chopel's background to contextualize much of his poems.
The side-by-side English translation next to the Tibetan (in the U-chen script) makes this a useful work for both scholars and students of Tibetan language. I will be using this book for a class I'm teaching next quarter!