The book of the mounts and the seas

THE BOOK OF THE MOUNTS AND THE SEAS (SHANHAI JING).-Edition of Yao Ning and Gabriel García Noblejas. Kapok tree. Madrid. 2000

We have had to wait until the year 2000 to see published for the first time in Spanish, "The book of the mounts and the seas", known in Chinese as the Shanhaijing. This book is a fundamental work in the history of the Chinese culture, with his publication an explicable lack fills only for the physical and mental alienation that governs the relations between the Chinese world and the Hispanic world.

"The book of the Mounts and the Seas", in an elegant and didactic translation of Yao Ning and Gabriel García Noblejas, who take several works published in the last years, and they are seen ready to raise the translation to the art category, it is basically a geographical, compiled agreement, in most cases of more ancient sources, between the Vth century and the IInd century before our age.

In him, as in the Herodoto books, there is described of systematical and detailed form the geography of the world known by the Chinese of that epoch, with his plants, animals and his indigenous populations. Many of the places and situations described along the book have been identified by the scholars, different ones, whose place or explanation remains a little darker, have given place to all kinds of lucubrations. It is for it that for some the Book of the Mounts and the Seas is a mythology book, for others of geography, or of ethnology, or of natural sciences.

For the long time, the "Book of the Mounts and the Seas", has been considered to be one of the props on those that there has supported this magic and mythical reality lived by the Chinese in his voluntary isolation, in which dragons and phoenix had an existence as real as tigers and lions. From the last century there have been realized numerous attempts of interpreting the symbolic content of the same one, there, every paragraph, every line, it has given place to endless speculations. It is curious to mention the debate that developed in the middle of the XIXth century, when some authors were identifying the "men with pens" with the natives of New Mexico decked for his magic dances, establishing another series of resemblances and similarities between the descriptions of the book, and the ancient culture of these peoples.

Nowadays, it keeps on being a fundamental base in the investigation of the ancient ethnology of China, the zoology, and the mythology, the references to the same one multiply to the rhythm that the pocket editions do it. It seems that all the worries have capacity in this book

The Book of the Mounts and the Seas is a book to read slowly. And in fact, his division in small chapters corresponding to the described areas, is required that should be read thus. To read and to reread, since with every reading we are penetrating more into the worlds dreamed or lived by the Chinese travelers of hace 3 milleniums. A story, an agreement, a trip, a sleep.

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