LAUGHING LOST IN THE MOUNTAINS:
Poems of Wang Wei
translated by
Tony Barnstone
Willis Barnstone
Xu Haixin
University Press of
Paper, 174 pages
ISBN 0-87451-564-5
The translations of Wang Wei s poems by Willis and Tony Barnstone, along with Xu Haixin, shine like the surface of a smooth pool of water. And like such a pool, there is much to see beyond the surface just as Wang Wei intended. Writing in the Tang Dynasty from 701 to 761, he wrote poems that portray philosophical meaning far deeper than his simple words and images might at first suggest. Also a painter, his poems are often described as spoken paintings, his paintings as silent poems. As Willis Barnstone says:
an elegant poverty of characters is his strength. With few words he achieves a quiet lucidity. In our century Wang Wei has been translated more often than any other Chinese poet, and perhaps a reason for his appeal to English-speaking readers lies in the absolute clarity of his imagery. We find a minimalist presentation that is paradoxically resonant with allusions and levels of interpretation.
Yet such clarity is not so much an explicit statement as that which is implied by an image with an image from nature most often a mirror to reflect the narrator s inner emotion. As with most Chinese poets, Wang Wei was first a scholar who passed examinations to obtain a government post, and, as with many other Chinese poets, he fell from favor, exiled to a far-off province. He married, his wife died, he took a vow of celibacy which lasted 30 years, he wandered from province to province, became a dutiful student of Zen, worked as a censor (one who must report wrongdoings), was imprisoned, and became a reluctant bureaucrat. Upon his death, the emperor asked that all of Wang Wei s poems be collected, resulting in a collection of approximately 400 poems, of which a contemporary scholar said were only a tenth of what had been written the rest lost in the turbulent years leading up to the An Lushan rebellion. What remains is the work of a master that might be imitated but not duplicated and not overcome:
Slender clouds. On the pavilion a small
rain.
Noon, but I m too lazy
to open the far cloister.
I sit looking at moss so
green
my clothes are soaked
with color.
The immediate change and punch of emotion in the last line is something few poets achieve. The weaving of an image from nature with a form of personal confession is what draws us deep within the pool of the poem. In so doing, Wang Wei often paired lines in a couplet so that an event or emotion would be paralleled by an image from nature. This was nothing new but a classic poetic form. He simply did it bar better than most. Consider this short poem on the ancient theme of demise in spring, a time normally for hope but also a time when none, ironically, can be found:
Walking on willow tree roads by a river
dappled with peach blossoms,
I look for spring light, but am
everywhere lost.
Birds fly up and scatter floating
catkins.
A ponderous wave of flowers sags the
branches.
Or the lines from this poem, written after the advance of years, and written in response to a question that, with age, no longer matters:
The wind blowing in the pines loosens my
belt,
the mountain moon is my
lamp while I tinkle my lute. You ask,
how do you succeed or
fail in life?
A fisherman s song is
deep in the river. )
Often, Wang Wei did not simply parallel an image with an emotion but joined the two with a verb. In the lines above, the narrator did not loosen his belt the wind did. In the prior poem, the moss was so green it soaked into the narrator s clothes. In another poem, the mountains drink the sun s last rays. In yet another, the spring wind aches with departure. A sudden moon alarms mountain birds. And Each peak longs to enter your abode.
If often images come alive with the narrator s emotion, there is also a profound respect for what is transient, and also for the smallest of things we often overlook. When Wang Wei sets out on the river to pick lotus flowers, he doesn t splash as I pole my boat, / afraid of wetting the flower s red blouses. When he visits a former official who has forsaken position and power, he succinctly says:
Back there we have carriages and official hats.
You prefer picking ferns
in this unknown place.)
And when it comes to interminable emotions, he condenses what could have been two parallel lines into one: Eyes reach for their limit. Feelings go beyond sight. And for love gone wrong: My heart is afraid of empty rooms I don t dare go into.
These are poems to learn from, to contemplate as one would the best of things, and to praise as the highest form of art. That they now exist in our language is a debt to scholars with poetic minds and emotions. That we can read them, feel them, and consider them as something we ourselves experience is our good fortune.
#