NIGHT WITHOUT END

 

Chinese Poetry in Translation:

 

Pound, Waley, Rexroth, Hamill, and Sze

 

 

By

 

Robert Milo Baldwin

 

 

Without knowledge of the original language, it is impossible to judge the accuracy of a translation. As Sam Hamill laments:

When an otherwise notable translator like Stephen Mitchell muddies the waters with something as irresponsible as his wild interpretation of Lao Tzu s Tao Te Ching passed off as translation, it is like a virus in a computer that begins to invade other programs. Mitchell writes that he felt no compunction to study the original Chinese because he somehow got the transmission directly from his Zen Master, so felt free to interpret Tao Te Ching freely. In at least a couple of chapters, there is not as much as a single word brought over from the original. The problem with this kind of practice is that the naive reader might assume that the English bears some resemblance to the original, which all too often simply isn t so. Or as Chuang Tzu would say, Not quite there yet, eh?

 

What can be judged is the work in its new language, whether it is fine literature in its own right, and the effect it may have on contemporary letters. Much of Ezra Pound s work may seem unimportant to us now, but his groundbreaking translation of Chinese poetry set the stage for the imagist movement that still, in one way or another, often dominates contemporary poetry.

In 1915, Pound published Cathay, 14 poems translated from the Chinese but actually taken largely from Ernest Fenollosa s notes and cribs to ideograms of Li Po (Pound referred to him by the Japanese version of his name Rihaku). Li Po was and is one of the greatest Chinese poets. Sam Hamill says:

Despite a complex vocabulary and rich, varied meters, he claimed to have never revised a poem. Legend says he drowned in the Yellow River, drunk, trying to embrace the reflection of the moon in 762.

 

As for Pound s translations, Kenneth Rexroth called them Pound s best verse, and he s probably right. But as Hamill points out, Pound s translations depended on Fenellosa, who knew little Japanese and almost no Chinese, and who in turn relied on two Japanese professors also not fluent in Chinese. Despite this, Cathay opened the doors to American modernism, and is responsible for the personal tone of much of this century s shorter lyrical verse rooted in imagism. Here, perhaps, is Pound s best known work from Cathay, an elegant but lucid quatrain entitled The Jewel Stairs Grievance.

The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,

It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,

And I let down the crystal curtain

And watch the moon through the clear autumn.

 

The delicate sensitivity, the emotions not said but implied through images these are skills for any age.

Pound s pioneering work, even if he lacked knowledge of the original language, was soon followed by Arthur Waley someone who has received far less credit than Pound but whose work provides a deeper understanding of the spirit and art of the original poetry.

Waley s translations appeared in 1919. Broader and deeper than Pound s slim volume, Waley translated poetry from a greater spectrum of time and included poetry from ancient, medieval, and the later Chinese. Like Pound, Waley s work was lucid and imagistic. Also like Pound, he translated it as free verse, including a fu (prose-poem) from the fourth century BCE. Waley described the originals as having a gentle and reflective attitude often missing from Western poems. His translations are free verse, but the originals are not. In the preface to the 1940 revision of his earlier work, he states:

Chinese traditional poetry is very similar to our own. Its lines have a fixed number of syllables and rhyme is obligatory; so that old Chinese poetry strongly resembles traditional English verse, and is not at all like the free verse of Europe and America today.

 

Waley explained that most of the poems he translated were in lines of five syllables or lines of seven syllables, recreated in our language so that a stress in English would represent a syllable to achieve a meter similar to the original.

I have not used rhyme, because what is really, in the long run, of most interest to American readers is what the poems say; and if one uses rhyme, it is impossible not to sacrifice sense to sound. For that reason, I have chosen poems which say something interesting. Those are the ones that translate best. It does not at all follow that they rank highest as poetry in the original; but with very few exceptions the poems in this book are by poets whom the Chinese themselves have always greatly admired. I have not attempted to set up any new gods.

 

My version of Waley s 1940 edition is what now would be considered coffee-table size. It s cloth-bound in time-dulled orange and fits inside a hard-cover box to protect it. Published by Knopf, they rarely make books like this anymore, and I discovered it in the most unlikely of places Alpena, Michigan while visiting in-laws, and taking time one summer afternoon to explore the old part of town near the waterfront, sip a cappuccino at the front counter of a used bookstore, and luckily locate Waley s gem in the poetry section in the back. Sometime in the early 1990 s, it cost all of ten dollars. I knew about Waley from the notes in the back of Rexroth s books, but I had never seen a book by him or searched for it. I simply stumbled onto it.

Like other translators, Waley was drawn to Li Po from the T ang period, one of the greatest periods of poetry anywhere, anytime. This is from Drinking Alone by Moonlight.

A cup of wine, under the flowering trees,

I drink alone, for no friend is near.

Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,

For he, with my shadow, will make three men.

The moon, alas, is no drinker of wine;

Listless, my shadow creeps about my side.

Yet with the moon as friends and the shadow as slave

I must make merry before the Spring is spent.

To the songs I sing the moon flickers her beams;

In the dance I weave my shadow tangles and breaks.

While we were sober, three shared the fun;

Now we are drunk, each goes his way.

May we long share our odd, inanimate feast,

And meet at last on the Cloudy River of the sky.

 

The Cloudy River a new and different way, for those of us in the West, of considering the Milky Way. Li Po s work was greatly celebrated, as it still is. So too was the work of Po Chu I, another leading T ang poet, about whom Rexroth had this to say:

More varied in his subjects than the others, he was a master of poignant, unforgettable phrases, many of which could be excerpted and stand alone as separate poems. It is this latter characteristic as much as anything else which accounts for his tremendous popularity with the classical poets of Japan, where, as Arthur Waley points out, he is revered as a god of poetry. He was a great favorite of Waley s, whose translations of Po Chu I are among the finest poems of the twentieth century, and who also wrote an excellent biography of Po which everyone interested in Chinese verse, culture, or history should read. It is unequaled as an introduction to the life of the T ang Dynasty.

 

Waley writes that Po Chu I called attention to the intolerable sufferings of the masses, and his enemies banished him to a remote province, though banishment meant being a governor. After his governorship he lived in a village where he took in two singing and dancing girls, maintained a recipe for sweet wine, then sporadically served in one government post after another until his later years spent collecting his work. Says Waley:

The most striking characteristic of Po Chu-i s poetry is its verbal simplicity. There is a story that he was in the habit of reading his poems to an old peasant woman and altering any expression which she could not understand.

 

In contrast, as today, the poems of many contemporaries were mere elegant diversions which enabled the scholar to display his erudition, or the literary juggler his dexterity. According to Po himself, many of his miscellaneous stanzas were a momentary sensation or passing event, such that A single laugh or a single sigh were rapidly translated into verse. While he wrote satire, for which he was banished, and long romantic poems, for which Waley says no other poet in the world has ever enjoyed greater contemporary popularity, he rightly considered content more important than form or manner. In 830 CE he wrote The Cranes.

The western wind has blown but a few days;

Yet the first leaf already flies from the bough.

On the drying paths I walk in my thin shoes;

In the first cold I have donned my quilted coat.

Through shallow ditches the floods are clearing away;

Through sparse bamboos trickles a slanting light.

In the early dusk, down an alley of green moss,

The garden-boy is leading the cranes home.

 

W.S. Merwin has said that Waley s work has had a subtle but pervasive influence on poetry written in English, that his accomplishment was revolutionary, and that it is impossible to imagine poetry in English without the presence and example of Waley s Chinese poems. How did he do it? Not by literal translation, nor paraphrase, but by Considering imagery to be the soul of poetry, and neither adding images of his own nor suppressing the original. The best poetry of today, and the poetry of the highest order yesterday and as far back as you can find it, turns on the image matched to the emotion and music of the language, something Rexroth took to the next level.

While Waley asserted that the most conspicuous feature of European poetry is its pre-occupation with love, and that the Chinese poet more often recommends himself not as a lover, but as a friend, Rexroth turned this concept on its head with Love and the Turning Year, published in 1970, thirty years after Waley s second edition. Contrary to Waley, Rexroth said, We are often told that the Chinese seldom write love poems. This is not true. Rather, Rexroth explained, from the beginning of Chinese poetry, in The Book of Odes, there was a great deal of love poetry.

Whether Waley or Rexroth is correct doesn t matter. Like Waley s work, Rexroth s translations stand on their own, and he offers them with no pretense to scholarship or to mastery of that complex subject, Sinology. Rather, he translated the pieces he enjoyed reading, including poems by over 40 poets and numerous anonymous songs, such as this one:

Night without end. I cannot sleep.

The full moon blazes overhead.

Far off in the night I hear someone call.

Hopelessly I answer, Yes.

 

He also presents incomparable short pieces by several poetesses who possess a skill far beyond the words themselves. An excerpt from a poem by the poetess Li Ch ing Chao in the 11th Century:

In the East Enclosed Garden

We got drunk one evening.

The wine s secret perfume has never

Left my sleeves.

 

Then this poem of longing, unrequited love, and a sexual allusion only a scholar would know:

. . . . . Gently I open

My silk dress and float alone

On the orchid boat. Who can

Take a letter beyond the clouds?

 

Li Ch ing-chao lived from 1084 to 1151 and wrote in the final years of the Sung dynasty. According to Rexroth, she is China s greatest poetess. Through him, she speaks to us now.

I am afraid I cannot keep

The pear blossoms from withering.

 

And this:

 

I pick a plum branch,

But my man has gone beyond the sky,

And there is no one to give it to.

 

Rexroth also gives us the other two great T ang poets from the 8th Century not included in Waley s book Wang Wei and Tu Fu. His notes on both are enlightening. As to Wang Wei:

His poems have a compactness and ordonnance which makes them seem much more architectural or classical than many others on that same subject. In this they resemble his paintings, which survive in copies, and which are as tightly organized as a Cubist s. His poems are inexhaustible expressions of the Doctrines of Mind Only and The Void; yet they are as unpretentious (if not casual) as those of Lu Yu who wrote 11,000 poems. Wang Wei is one of those model poets, personally and artistically flawless, who occur very rarely in the history of literature.

 

Not only a poet, Wang Wei is credited with the invention of the contemplative landscape painting, considered one of the greatest calligraphers whose style is still imitated, and, as the leading musician of his day, he was appointed Minister of Music, a position far more important in Chinese civilization than it would seem to us. Consider Bird and Waterfall Music.

Men sleep. The cassia blossoms fall.

The Spring night is still in the empty mountains.

When the full moon rises,

It troubles the wild birds.

From time to time you can hear them

Above the sound of the flooding waterfalls.

 

This is complex in its simplicity, while much of today s poetry is simple in its complexity for lack of something lucid to say.

While Waley favored the poetry of Po Chu I, Rexroth focused his attention on Tu Fu and translated his work at length in One Hundred Poems from the Chinese.

Tu Fu is, in my opinion, and in the opinion of a majority of those qualified to speak, the greatest non-epic, non-dramatic poet who has survived in any language. Sappho, for instance, can hardly be said to have survived. He shares with her, Catullus, and Baudelaire, his only possible competitors, a sensibility acute past belief. Like them, he is possibly paying the price of such a sensibility considered neurasthenic and the creator of an elaborate poetic personality, a fictional character half mask, half revelation.

 

Rexroth chose only the poetry of Tu Fu s that was simple and direct, with a minimum of allusion.

Screech owls moan in the yellowing

Mulberry trees. Field mice scurry,

Preparing their holes for winter.

Midnight, we cross an old battlefield.

The moonlight shines cold on white bones.

 

He also refused to be blind to Tu Fu s flaws, whom he described as a valetudinarian, referring to himself at the age of 30 as a white-haired old man living in a thatched hut, which actually was palatial by most standards. Wealthy or not, he died largely unknown and believing he was a failure although today he is held in as great esteem as Li Po, if not greater. What stands out for Rexroth is Tu Fu s humanity, as deep and wise as Homer s.

Tu Fu comes from a saner, older, more secular culture than Homer and it is not a new discovery with him that the gods, the abstractions and forces of nature, are frivolous, lewd, vicious, quarrelsome, and cruel, and only men s stead-fastness, love, magnanimity, calm, and compassion redeem the nightbound world. It is not a discovery, culturally or historically, but it is the essence of his being as a poet. If Isaiah is the greatest religious poet, Tu Fu is not religious at all. But for me his response to the human situation is the only kind of religion likely to outlast this century. Reverence for life, it has been called. I have saturated myself with his poetry for forty-five years. I am sure he has made me a better man, as a moral agent and as a perceiving organism. I say this because I feel that, above a certain level of attainment, the greatest poetry answers out of hand the problems of the critic and the esthetician. Poetry like Tu Fu s is the answer to the question, What is the purpose of art?

 

If Rexroth gave us more than Pound and Waley, Hamill built yet again on this foundation. Although Hamill lacks Rexroth s biographical notes, he asserts an accuracy in translation that Rexroth did not. Where Waley and Rexroth generally used a single uninterrupted stanza for each poem, Hamill translated most with couplets. Here s why:

Rexroth, who is very good at locating the personal voice and situation of Tu Fu in his translations, makes no effort at recapturing the formal end-stopped couplets of the original. The couplet is the fundamental unit of classic Chinese poetry and Tu Fu its greatest master.

 

When Hamill began translating Tu Fu in the mid-1970s, he looked up each character and annotated each poem before attempting a draft of his own, then turned to translations by Florence Ayscough, William Hung, Rexroth, and others. What I found was often surprising. He asserts Rexroth relied too heavily on Ayscough or French translations and provides a specific example in Tu Fu s New Year s Eve at the Home of Tu Wei. Here is Rexroth s version:

In the winter dawn I will face

My fortieth year. Borne headlong

Towards the long shadows of sunset

By the headstrong, stubborn moments,

Life whirls past like drunken wildfire.

 

And Hamill s version:

 

Seeing the year end at a brother s home,

we sing and toast with pepper wine.

 

The stable is noisy with visitors horses.

Crows abandon trees lit by torches.

Tomorrow morning I turn forty-one.

The slanting sunset shadows lengthen.

Why should one exercise self-restraint?

I may as well stay drunk all the days of my life.

 

Two quite different poems, both fine in their own right in English, with Hamill s version containing more specific detail to build to the emotion and meaning he asserts was actually intended by Tu Fu. What Tu Fu valued, Hamill says, I value. This devotion to poetry from 1,200 years ago is rooted in a basic view of life:

The human condition remains relatively unchanged over a millennium or two. And I agree with Stanley Kunitz that poetry has its source deep under the layers of a life, in the primordial self.

 

Some things don t change the conflicted soul of the poet, of any man or woman, of those who feel and see more than others might. This from Tu Fu s poem to Li Po:

Poets must live without success,

driven on by daemons.

 

Remember the ghost of poor Ch u Yuan

send him a poem down the river.

 

Li Po and Tu Fu were contemporaries and friends one of them famous, the other known only to a small circle of poets around Li Po, who reached past the world of success and failure, as here:

You ask why I live

alone in the mountain forest,

 

and I smile and am silent

until even my soul grows quiet.

 

The peach trees blossom.

The water continues to flow.

 

I live in another world,

one that lies beyond the human.

 

In such a world, Li Po could disappear, so that only the natural world remained. According to Waley, the Taoists embraced the theory that by bringing himself into harmony with Nature man can escape every evil. As part of this theory, consider Li Po s poem Zazen on Ching-t ing Mountain.

The birds have vanished down the sky.

Now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,

until only the mountain remains.

Less well known that Waley, Pound, Rexroth, or Hamill, the translations of Arthur Sze rival their accomplishments. And just as the poets they translated may be better known, Sze has focused on other Chinese poets also deserving our attention, including Li Ho, Lin Shang-yin, Mu Chih Yuan, Shen Chou, and Pa-ta-shan-jen. From the late 17th and early 18th Centuries, here is a fine quatrain from Pa-ta-shan-jen:

Spring mountains have no near or far.

A thought of the past instantly becomes a forest.

With no place where clouds are not flying,

how did a worldly thought come to mind?

 

Hamill bluntly and forcefully supports the importance of the Eastern Canon: Anyone who believes for a minute that Confucius is not as important as Plato is suffering severe tunnel vision. Rather, to understand something about Asian poetry is to establish kinship in a great and powerful tradition.

What Hamill seeks, as should we, is the energy from the exploration and influences of many traditions, not just the Chinese. For him, we live in the greatest time for poetry since the T ang:

American poetry has flowered precisely because we have brought these and many, many other masters into good American English. When I survey the great literary influences in our poetry of the last fifty years, I must include beside the many East Asians such poets as Rilke, Akhmatova, Rumi, Georg Trakl, Odysseus Elytis, George Seferis, Yannis Ritsos, Valery, Neruda, Garcia Lorca, Cavafy, Sappho, Paz, and dozens more. Their influences have provided sustenance and inspiration and models for forms and styles for hundreds of our poets. There are more terrific poets writing in America today than have lived here in the past two hundred years, and much of what they do, from surrealism to language poetry, sonneteering to organic verse, is a direct or indirect result of the arts of translation.

 

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