On Gary Snyder’s Tradaptation of <em>Cold Mountain Poems</em> and its Spiritual Salvation and Literary Enlightenment in Postwar America

Cold Mountain Poems (CMPs), which have been neglected in the history of Chinese literature for ages, captured the attention of most Americans immediately after its being translated into America by the American poet Gary Snyder in 1950s, however. It is Snyder that reconfigured and recreated a sagacious Chinese Chan Buddhist poet Han-shan (literally, Cold Mountain), the acknowledged author of Cold Mountain Poems, in his translation for the postwar Americans in the midst of varied social problems and cultural identity crisis after World War II. Snyder eventually found in his translation of Cold Mountain Poems a back-to-nature remedy of spiritual salvation and literary enlightenment for the beat generation and even the entire American literary community at large then and after, by means of his delicate transcreation of Han-shan images in line with American expectations at the time as well as by means of his skillful tradaptation of the realistic elements of self-expression, self-identification and self-actualization in Cold Mountain Poems and also by means of his profound exploration of the Chan Buddhism aesthetics and philosophical mediation in classical Chinese landscape poems and Chinese hermit culture