Những đỉnh núi cao chọc thủng
bầu trời lạnh lẽo;
quang cảnh
mà tu viện hướng tới.
Sao băng bay
vào những tán cây thưa thớt;
mặt trăng di chuyển theo một hướng,
mây theo hướng khác.
Rất ít người đến
đỉnh núi này;
không có sếu bay đến tụ tập
trên những cây thông vút cao.
Một nhà sư Phật giáo,
tám mươi tuổi,
chưa bao giờ nghe nói
về các vấn đề thế gian.
OVERNIGHT AT A BUDDHIST
MOUNTAIN TEMPLE
Translations by Mike O’Connor In: The Clouds Should Know Me By Now: Buddhist Poet Monks of China Wisdom Publications, 1998, pp. 11-42.
Massed peaks pierce
the cold-colored sky;
a view
the monastery faces.
Shooting stars pass
into sparse-branched trees;
the moon travels one way,
clouds the other.
Few people come
to this mountaintop;
cranes do not flock
in the tall pines.
One Buddhist monk,
eighty years old,
has never heard
of the world’s affairs.
Jia Dao [779-843] CHIA TAO WAS A BUDDHIST POET of the Middle T’ang dynasty. Born into an impoverished family near today’s Beijing, he became a Ch’an (Zen) monk early in his youth, with the religious name Wupen. While scant biographical detail of his monastic days exists, his official biography does note that upon arriving at the Eastern Capital, Lo-yang, Chia Tao wrote a poem protesting a curfew forbidding monks to go out after noon. The poem caught the sympathetic eye of the eminent Confucian poet Han Yu (768–824) and led to the latter becoming Chia Tao’s poetry mentor.
Lê Vĩnh Tài, the poet and translator born in 1966 in Buon Ma Thuot, Daklak, Vietnam. The retired doctor is still a resident of the Western Highlands and a businessman in Buon Ma Thuot.
Nguyễn Thị Phương Trâm 
Love the imagery here!
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Me too, it is good seeing you
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