With In the Forest of Faded Wisdom, Donald S. Lopez, Jr., brings to a Western audience the poetic work of the once controversial but now iconic Tibetan intellectual Gendun Chopel (Dge-'dun-chos-'phel, 1903–51). The value of compiling an anthology of Gendun Chopel's poetry in a bilingual version (Tibetan and English) cannot be underestimated. Although Gendun Chopel is considered “Tibet's greatest modern poet” (p. 1), only his life, philosophical views, and historical writings have been available to a specialized Western audience; his poetic output has been neglected by researchers so far. This book begins to address that scholarly gap.

For readers who are not familiar with Gendun Chopel, Tibetan poetry, or Tibet, In the Forest of Faded Wisdom will act as a great introduction to a refined, tongue-in-cheek, and moving oeuvre. It also will give a glimpse into self-reflection on Tibet and its neighbors in the second quarter of the twentieth century, as well as Tibetan Buddhism, history, and culture. (One may also read with benefit Lopez's The Madman's Middle Way: Reflections on Reality of the Tibetan Monk Gendun Chopel [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009].) Lopez's synthetic introduction to the current book is extremely useful and a must-read for anyone who is interested in twentieth-century Tibet and Tibetan poetry. He offers an outline of the author's life and puts into context some of the poems translated. Lopez also provides a brief but enlightening overview of classical Tibetan poetry.

The book is arranged into five thematic parts: Buddhism, autobiography, the world, ancient history and love, plus a few poems written directly in English, with the source of each poem indicated in a footnote. This division gives a welcome coherence to the poems in the absence of chronological certainty; most of the poems were published decades after their author's demise. Religious poems (poems 1–30) emulate themes that will be familiar to readers of Tibetan masters' poetry: impermanence, selflessness, and illusion. They also include traditional tributes to Buddhas and bodhisattvas—though, surprisingly, only one homage to a personal lama. In the second part (31–52), Gendun Chopel unveils himself as a helpless man in an unkind society, oscillating between doubts about his own capacities and pride in his own knowledge. The third part, more heterogeneous, describes Gendun Chopel's surrounding world (52–81): he describes the foreign lands and political systems he has seen, and scorns his fellowmen's hypocrisy, wondering how his works will be received. In eight poems or “songs,” as Lopez labels them (82–89), Gendun Chopel celebrates the mighty Tibetan empire (seventh to ninth century) and describes his painstaking efforts at its “impartial analysis” (p. 153). Finally, his poems about love (89–104) praise carnal love, and are extracts from a versified work for which Gendun Chopel is also famous, 'Dod pa'i bstan bcos, translated in prose under the title The Tibetan Arts of Love (trans. Jeffrey Hopkins [Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion, 1993]).

One of the most striking features is the personal tone of the poems, and the relatively discrete use of Indian rhetorical embellishments, an otherwise compulsory hallmark of Tibetan learned poetry since the thirteenth century. Gendun Chopel's poems are highly “autobiographical” (p. 1). This is a key to their obvious modernity: the author, an individual located in time and space, does not hide behind selfless rhetoric, literary figures, or elaborate stock phrases. The exceptional wealth of his personal experiences (he traveled extensively in India and Sri Lanka for twelve years) and knowledge of Tibetan religion, traditions, and history, as well as his insatiable curiosity, give his poems a singularity that is often lacking in more classical poetry.

Two remarks can be made about the translations. First, although many poems teem with cultural and religious references (pp. 31, 39), Lopez often leaves them unexplained. Some readers would have found explanatory notes useful, but this may be a deliberate choice on the part of the translator, who may have wished to expose the poems in their nudity, unhampered by outside comments. Second, the translations remain extremely close to the Tibetan phrasing. This is a blessing for students of Tibetan language or non-native Tibetan speakers, as almost every verse can be superimposed onto the English version. Still, this literality is not without drawbacks. While it is convincing for some poems (p. 55), the fluidity of the Tibetan reading is sometimes lost in the name of fidelity to the original (pp. 25, 69, 113).

With these cautions in mind, this anthology must be celebrated as a much-awaited introduction to the poetic magnum opus of the most prominent and free-minded Tibetan intellectual of the first half of the twentieth century, revered as the founder of modern Tibetan poetry and unanimously considered by contemporary Tibetan poets to be an unsurpassed model. It can only be hoped that analyses of each of these poems will soon follow, as well as other instances of such bilingual anthologies, revealing to Western readers a too often ignored vibrant facet of Tibetan civilization: Tibetan belles-lettres.