PO CHU-I: Selected Poems. Translated by Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, 172 pp., unpriced.

When he died at the age of 75 in 846, Po Chu-i left behind a legacy of some 2,800 poems. A civil servant, he early on wrote poetry critical of authority and was consequently demoted to the provinces. There he had the leisure to undertake serious religious study, particularly Ch'an, Zen-style meditation, and to write the poems for which he is now remembered.

By the time he was recalled to Ch'ang-an, he had completed a large body of work and even built himself a small thatch-roofed hut where he could meditate and write poetry. No longer did he criticize. Rather, once in the capital, he continued his vocation and polished his craft.

He also put his papers in order, arranging them in 75 "chapters," and had copies of each sent to temple libraries or to friends. As a result, his work has come down nearly complete -- 71 out of the original 75 chapters.

This means that we know much more about him than about his contemporary fellow poets, that he had a great influence on later poetry, and that we can more accurately appreciate his work. This, says his translator, Burton Watson, includes the simple-seeming poetry "depicting his daily mood and activities," portraying "a man of quiet contentment."

From the large number of poems available, Watson has chosen 128, plus a short prose piece about the "grass-thatched hall." This the translator originally included in his beautiful collection "Four Huts: Asian Writings on the Simple Life" (Shambhala, 1994). Always difficult to obtain and now apparently out of print, this work deserves attention and it is good to have it again available.

Po's style is simple and free of literary allusions. A perhaps apocryphal story says that in order to ensure that his works were easily comprehensible, he would, when he finished a poem, read it to an old person and change any words or expressions that could not be easily understood.

It is this ease of comprehension that makes him so readable over 1,000 years later. This, and his wonderful appreciation of the ordinary that collapses time and makes the most distant events seem like yesterday. For example, this four-line description of an afternoon at the local temple:

Amusing myself with rocks, I sit peering into the valley. Searching for blossoms, I wander round and round the temple. Again and again I hear the birds talking, and here and there the voice of the stream.

How skillfully the quotidian has been assumed (and how skillfully translated) -- the "round and round," "again and again" and "here and there" suggesting the habitual of the everyday. Or:

I wondered why the covers felt so cold, then I saw how bright my window was. Night far gone, I know the snow must be deep -- from time to time I heard the bamboos cracking.

An everyday experience has been noted and at the same time re-created. As we read, we relive the experience: waking up cold, seeing the intense light, the bamboos testifying to the weight of the snow.

Simple though the originals may be, this kind of simplicity is the most difficult to translate. Not that it has not often been attempted. There are Arthur Waley's translations and those of Howard Levy and David Hinton. The poem on Emperor Hsuan-tsung and the beautiful Yang Kuei-fei has been translated so many times that it is not included in this collection.

Watson has widely translated the Chinese and Japanese classics, been awarded translation prizes, and become one of the most respected translator of Asian literature. He is also, I think, the best. This is because he manages to find the proper tone -- and tone is the most important element in any translation.

Finding it presumes not only a full knowledge of the language one is translating from, but, much more important, an acute sensitivity to one's own language -- the tongue one is translating into. Here is another example of what Watson can do:

Parasol tree by the well, cold leaves stirring; nearby fulling mallets that speak an autumn sound: I sleep alone facing the eaves, wake to find moonlight over half the bed.

The words are more single-syllable than not, and they are all common words -- which we suddenly realize when we reach the uncommon one, "fulling," put there for contrast.

This is because the experience is a common one -- so common, in fact, that verbs can be left out, and pronouns. And yet, in every common experience lies a precious particularity. Though sleeping alone, Po finds that he is in bed with the moon. This delicate nuance lies unnoticed until we pick it up and examine it, contrasting it with the cold, the coming autumn. We then experience something as solitary as did the poet. He has re-created his experience for us and a splendid translation has carried it to us.