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.
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