5: A Few Words on Li Bai

Li Bai holds one of the most august thrones in the history of Chinese poetry, as Matt mentioned in the introduction to Li Bai he published here back in November. Li Bai was also a man of his time - a man, that is, on the border of many worlds.

I mentioned during my translations of Zhang Jiuling that, while Westerners tend to think of Chinese history as largely separate from the larger world, the Tang Dynasty was defined by international trade, border wars, and multiculturalism. The Tang capital at Chang'an, which is known today as Xi'an, was the gateway to the Silk Road, an intersection between the Turkic peoples of Central Asia and the Han Chinese. The spices, cloth, poetry, and blood of many cultures flowed through Chang'an, and left a mark that can be seen to this day in the city's cuisine, architecture, and cosmopolitan attitude. Li Bai's life story shares something of this character.

He was born either in southern Gansu province, or (according to some soruces) even further out on the Silk Road, near the modern city of Tokmok, in Kyrgyzstan. Contemporary biographical sources are sparse, but he apparently grew up speaking Turkish as well as Chinese. His family moved to the more central province of Sichuan during his youth, and in his childhood he was captivated by Daoist mysticism and swordplay. He was a frequent and, apparently, enthusiastic duelist. After achieving initial success at court, he offended a chief Imperial eunuch, and found his hopes of advancement within the Tang bureaucracy blocked. During the chaos surrounding the An Lushan Rebellion, Li Bai joined a smaller rebel faction, and was exiled to Anhui province after the rebellion's failure.

Li Bai spoke the Turkish language and fought in a Turkish general's rebellion against the Tang emperor, and yet his poems are a wellspring of Chinese culture. In this nationalist age, it can be hard to imagine someone straddling worlds and lives to such an extent. Then again, that's what many of us try to do today, with travel, with translation, and with the internet: introduce one world to another, or live one life in the context of many others. In that case, maybe we should be looking at artists like Li Bai to help chart the way.

5: Sharing Wine and the Night with a Recluse Beneath Zhongnan Mountain, by Li Bai (part deux!)

The last month has been a bit hectic for both Matt and myself - sorry for the confused schedule! I took a week off in London and never quite recovered. In light of some great vocabulary notes I received for the Li Bai poem I posted toward the end of November, I've decided to offer a revised translation. Commentary to follow!

005李白:下终南山过斛斯山人宿置酒

暮從碧山下, 山月隨人歸,
卻顧所來徑, 蒼蒼橫翠微.
相攜及田家, 童稚開荊扉.
綠竹入幽徑, 青蘿拂行衣.
歡言得所憩, 美酒聊共揮.
長歌吟松風, 曲盡河星稀.
我醉君復樂, 陶然共忘機.

Twilight from a green mountain falls; the
mountain moon follows a man's return.

And yet he looks back up the path he came,
a gray, gray slash on a blue-green ridge.

Watch him led to the house in the fields: a
child opens the chaste-wood gate.

Green bamboo lines the quiet way;
green vines brush the gown.

With happy words, reach a place of rest.
This beautiful wine, we scatter together.

The pine-tree wind sings long songs,
melodies sparse as the Milky Way's stars.

I am drunk, and you are once more happy.
Joyous, carefree - all forgotten, the world's designs.

---

mù cóng bìshān xià, shān yuē suí rén guī,
Twilight from green mountain down, mountain moon follow person return
què gǔ suǒ lái jìng, cāngcāng héng cuìwēi.
however look back place where comes path, gray gray across blue green hillside
xiàng xié jí tiān jiā, tóng zhì kāi jīng fēi.
watch taken by the hand to the farmer's house; a child opens the chaste-tree gate
lǜ zhú rù yōu jìng, qīng luò fú xíng yī
Green bamboo enters the secluded path, Green radishes are brushed aside by the gown.
huān yán dé suǒ qì, měi jiǔ liáo gǒng huī.
Happy words receive this rest, beauty wine for a time share and scatter
cháng gē yín sōng fēng, qǔ jìn hē xīng xī.
Long songs hum pine wind, melodies all Milky Way sparse
wǒ zuì jūn fù lè, táo rán gǒng wàng jī
I drunk you again happy, happy and carefree all forgotten mechanism

Bonus Poem! Tao Qian, Miscellaneous Poems No. 8

Bo-nus! Tao Qian is one of China's greatest poets, and this is the beginning of one of my favorite of his poems.

Miscellaneous Poems, Number Eight

Human life is without root, fluttering like dust on unknown roads,
Scattering apart in the slowly turning wind; this is not its eternal form.
Just as it falls to the dirt, it becomes young brothers. What need have kin of flesh or bone?
Attain contentment and make of it pleasure, and with wine gather closer with your neighbors.
Glorious years do not come again, days dawn but cannot twice rise.
When you can, take advantage, for time attends not man.

Oh, the white sun rolls West, and the bleached moon leaves the Eastern cliffs.
Rolling, rolling, an endless distance glimmers; empty, empty, the middle of the sky.
The wind comes into my house and my chamber; in the middle of the night my pillow and mat are cold.
The air shifts, and I awake to the change; I cannot sleep and know the eternity of the night.
Desire for speech, with no one to talk to; I raise a cup and drink to my lonely shadow.
The sun and the moon meet men, then go; even those of will cannot win their release.
Memory of this fills me with bitter regret; at the last I know I cannot be at peace.

40: Midnight Four Season Song: Summer, Li Bai

Very sorry for the delay! Completely my fault, and so in recompense I'll offer another *bonus* translation tonight.

Midnight Four Season Song: Summer

On 300 li of Mirror Lake

young lotuses reveal flowers.

In the fifth month Xi Shi plucks,

others fill the shore watching.

Then, back to the boat without attending the moon,

returning to the House of the King of Yue.

5: Sharing Wine and the Night with a Recluse Beneath Zhongnan Mountain, by Li Bai

Apologies for a late post! In my defense, I've been in London the last four days, wandering about with friends and enjoying some pints -- a past-time which Li Bai, whose poems I turn to this week, would have respected. So, without further ado:

005李白:下终南山过斛斯山人宿置酒

暮從碧山下, 山月隨人歸,
卻顧所來徑, 蒼蒼橫翠微.
相攜及田家, 童稚開荊扉.
綠竹入幽徑, 青蘿拂行衣.
歡言得所憩, 美酒聊共揮.
長歌吟松風, 曲盡河星稀.
我醉君復樂, 陶然共忘機.

Twilight from a green mountain falls; the
mountain moon follows their return,

but lonely they walk upon the path, a
gray, gray slash on a blue-green ridge.

Watch her led to the house in the fields: a
child opens the chaste-wood gate.

Green bamboo lines the quiet way;
green vines brush the gown.

With happy words achieve at last this rest,
beauty and wine all shared and scattered.

The pine-tree wind sings long songs,
melodies exhausted by sparse river stars.

I am drunk, and you are once more happy,
joyful, all the seeds of care forgotten.

---

mù cóng bìshān xià, shān yuē suí rén guī,
Twilight from green mountain down, mountain moon follow person return
què gǔ suǒ lái jìng, cāngcāng héng cuìwēi.
however lonley which comes path, gray gray across blue green hillside
xiàng xié jí tiān jiā, tóng zhì kāi jīng fēi.
watch taken by the hand to the farmer's house; a child opens the chaste-tree gate
lǜ zhú rù yōu jìng, qīng luò fú xíng yī
Green bamboo enters the secluded path, Green radishes are brushed aside by the gown.
huān yán dé suǒ qì, měi jiǔ liáo gǒng huī.
Happy words receive this rest, beauty wine for a time share and scatter
cháng gē yín sōng fēng, qǔ jìn hē xīng xī.
Long songs hum pine wind, melodies all river star sparse
wǒ zuì jūn fù lè, táo rán gǒng wàng jī
I drunk you again happy, happy and carefree all forgotten (root cause, seed)

39: Women In and Around Chinese Poetry

You may have noticed that one of the tags on the Four Seasons: Spring translation is "female-voiced poetry". Like Du Fu in The Beautiful Woman, Li Bai in his Midnight Four Season Songs is impersonating, or at least focusing on, the voice of, a young woman. This was (and continued to be) a common practice among male Chinese poets, going back at least to Qu Yuan's Li Sao, and possibly as far back as the Book of Songs, which includes many poems in a woman's voice that may (or may not) have been recorded or composed by men. Not that there weren't a number of well-known women writers of poetry; indeed, in the case of Midnight Four Season Songs, the female-centric poems of a male author are patterned after the much older work of a female poet. That Li Bai would and even could make this choice is of great significance; it means that by his day (8th century CE, the High Tang), the activity of men engaging in explicit literary impersonations of women had grown to involve the work of women themselves -- all to say nothing of the way such literary gender games naturally interacted with works of other genres (eg in the frontier or garden poem). Never a simple matter, the use of a female voice in a poem by a man became a sort of nexus of layered representation. On the one hand, Li Bai, the quintessential "poet of personality" known almost more for his image and lifestyle than his work (remember his many names), is inevitably closely linked to the appearance of his work as a powerful figure in his own right, a sort of inevitable, ghostly overlay above the text itself. On the other hand, unlike in some of his other more famous poems, here he writes not of himself but of a series of women, in the style of a specific woman. What are we to make of this?

There is an enormous amount to say about the topic of women in Chinese poetry, and I won't attempt to go any further in one post. For more, I recommend the book Women Writers of Traditional China, by Kang-yi Sun Chang and Haun Saussy.

39: Midnight the Poet, and Silkworms

A few notes:

The Midnight of the title refers not (or, given that this is Medieval Chinese, not only) to the time of night, but to a person. Specifically it refers to a woman of the Jin Dynasty (265-420) who took Ziye, here translated as "Midnight", as a pseudonym and under that name authored a series of poetic songs known by the same name: Midnight Four Season Songs (子夜四时歌). Though her work is much longer than Li Bai's (compare Ziye's and Li Bai's) and of quite different subject matter, Li Bai's poems explicitly take Ziye's song-poems as their model. Both Li Bai's Midnight Four Season Songs and the original also go by the name "Midnight Wu Song" (子夜吴歌), since the original Four Season Songs were in the Han "Music Bureau" (乐府) style, and would have been sung to the "Wu tune" (they were "吴声歌曲").

The silkworm is a potent symbol throughout Chinese literature, so it bears mentioning a few facts about it. While there exist wild silkworms, the silkworms that are used to produce most silk (bombyx mori) are a domestic creature bred by and entirely dependent on humans. Their primary food is the leaf of a white mulberry tree, though they can eat leaves of other types of mulberry trees. Mulberry trees take decades to mature, which combined with the skill involved in breeding and caring for the silkworms creates high barriers to entry, even in ancient China where such skills were originally developed. Indeed, silk-making was a jealously guarded industry, especially once Silk Road trade had begun to take off in the Han Dynasty (see History of Silk). During the Tang Dynasty, special land-use laws carved out exceptions from the then-standard "equal-field system" for land where mulberry trees grew, since it could be used to produce silk -- testifying both to the special status of silk producers and the economic importance of the silk trade vis-a-vis other industries. Silk manufacture's cultural pedigree was unique: by the mid-Tang (early to mid 8th century CE), silk had been produced in China for millennia, and in large amounts since the Han. Only since around the 6th century CE had it begun to be produced in other parts of the world, escaping the efforts of Chinese silk interests to prevent the knowledge from leaving China. From all of this we can infer that when the young woman of the poem gathers mulberry leaves, she is raising silkworms, and if the silkworms go hungry she has either left them or imagines leaving. They, like small children, cannot feed themselves, and depend on their 'mother' -- a metaphor relevant also for the fact that silkworm raising in Imperial and pre-Imperial China was often associated with women rather than men.

39: Midnight Four Season Songs: Spring, Li Bai

Taking a cue from Max's series of four Zhang Jiuling poems (starting here), I'm starting a series of four by Li Bai. There's a whole lot going on here, from big new themes like the Tang frontier and female-voice poems by men, to some fascinating references to folks like Xi Shi and Ziye (her original work here). Hopefully I'll also get into some of the settings of these as well, and describe places like Yumen Guan and Chang'an. Now, poetry:

Midnight Four Season Songs: Spring

In Qin the young girl Luofu

gathering mulberry at grassy water's edge.

White hands on dark green stalks,

Red ornaments flashing in the bright day.

The silkworms hunger, the lady yearning to go.

Of five horses departing, none will leave a trace.

子夜四時歌：春歌，李白

秦地羅敷女，採桑綠水邊。

素手青條上，紅妝白日鮮。

蠶飢妾欲去，五馬莫留連。

Qín dì luófū nǚ，cǎisāng lǜshuǐ biān.

Sùshǒu qīng tiáo shàng，hóngzhuāng báirì xiān

Cán jī qiè yù qù，wǔ mǎ mò liúlián.

4: On Oranges and Government

What is Zhang Jiuling getting at in this week's poem? In the first three Poems of Encountering, his focus progressed from the purely natural world, to the intersection of the natural world and the lonely hermit, to the hermit himself. Then comes this fourth poem, which returns from the hermit to nature again, but reads differently to me than the first poem with its careful opposition of kingfishers and swans.

The Fourth Poem of Encountering begins with Zhang meditating on the red tangerine. In the tradition of Qu Yuan, he uses the tangerine to comment on politics and politicians: in the fair-weather climate of the Imperial court, he says, it is truly remarkable that a man in a position of influence could remain uncorrupted, or evergreen. When Zhang asks why the tree is secluded, he means, why keep such a person away from court? Why would you exile him to Hubei province, to live out his life as an isolated scholar? Why can honest men not survive in government?

The fourth verse takes an abrupt turn from this simple and well-trod metaphor to questions of cosmic significance. Fate creates the conditions of the world. All actions are tied to other actions. The universe is an immense network of cause and effect, where events set the stage for their own recurrence. Violence creates pain, pain creates anger, anger creates violence again, naturally and without end. Children growing recreate their parents in themselves. This is Zhang's answer to the question, why can honest men not survive in government? In the end, fault does not lie with a political faction, or a rival. Honest men can't survive in government because all actions have consequences.

This understanding transcends the simple framework of the First Poem of Encountering, where envy, and human attachment to high office are the problems, and detaching oneself from those is the solution. The final couplet of the Fourth Poem anchors this cosmic statement in reality: A tree grows and bears fruit. In Chinese, we call a "result" 结果 jiéguǒ; the second character literally means "fruit." The honest man acts, and his actions achieve results. Yet his growth to maturity, and his actions, cast shadows. The shadow and the tree and its fruit cannot be separated from one another. They are all part of the same great system. Consequences are born in the moment of action.

The common narrative of the exiled official describes a man wrongfully accused, betrayed, and set aside to watch his country destroy itself. Zhang, in these poems, tells a different tale, in a kind of triumphant realism: the exiled official has done his honest work, and he has been set aside. His sacrifice is complete. This is the heart of the Encounter of the poem's title: the encounter of courage and honesty with their necessary consequences. For the rest of his life, the honest man may struggle to accept the consequences of his choices, but he could not have acted any other way. The tangerine grows in secluded valleys, but at least its heart does not wither in the cold.

4: Alluding to Qu Yuan

This poem is a great example of the intertextuality Matt mentioned last month, and a good introduction to Qu Yuan 屈原, a master of Chinese verse -- arguably the first master of verse, as he is apparently the first Chinese poet to have his name directly associated with his works. Qu Yuan lived some three centuries before the Common Era, during the period of history called the Warring States, when the territory that is now the Chinese heartland was ruled by, well, warring states. The fiefdoms that took power as the Zhou declined were eventually devoured into seven large nations, and Qu Yuan worked as a high minister for the king of Chu, one of the seven.

At the time of Qu Yuan's life, another of the Seven Kingdoms, the Kingdom of Qin, was growing ever more aggressive, the ruling family's ambitions given strength by the rise of a philosophy of meritocratic totalitarianism (more or less) called Legalism, which a philosopher friend of mine describes pithily as "Evil Daoism." Qin scored a sequence of decisive military victories, and seemed a threat to all seven kingdoms, including Chu. Qu Yuan advocated an alliance between the six kingdoms against Qin, but he was betrayed for his trouble and sentenced to exile in Hubei province. Exiled and beset by deep depression, he composed poetry. If you think this sounds familiar, you're absolutely right. Many Chinese poets have walked the path of exile and literature; Qu Yuan is noteworthy, though, because even if he did not walk it first, he is the first one we remember. He is, quite literally, the one they made the holiday after.

Oh yes: in his depression, Qu Yuan wrote a sequence of poems about government, loyalty, duty, and sorrow, that have been the touchstones of Chinese romantic verse for two millennia. Then he walked into a lake carrying a heavy rock, and drowned. Villagers raced out in their fishing boats to save them, but they were too late. Unwilling to let such a great man be devoured by the beasts of the water, they threw rice and dumplings into the lake: eat this, but leave his body unharmed. When that failed, they beat the water with their paddles to frighten hungry fish away. Every year to this day, on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month of the Chinese calendar, people around the world race their dragon boats into the lake to save Qu Yuan, and always fail; they throw rice into the water so the fish will not devour him.

It looks sort of like this.

In the end, Qu Yuan proved right. The combination of the political control granted by Legalism, and the military leadership and ambition of a ruling family rightly measured against the early Caesars and Phillip and Alexander of Macedon, proved too much for the other six kingdoms. In 221 BCE, the Qin unified all China under a single banner, and commenced a rule infamous for bloodthirsty suppression of dissenting opinion, bookburning, and the murder of scholars. The Qin lasted for only fifteen years before they were toppled by a peasant rebellion led by the charismatic Liu Bang, who founded the Han Dynasty, but they left deep marks on China.

One of Qu Yuan's poems was an extensive poem praising the red tangerine, called 橘颂 júsòng, "Tangerine Ode." Here, Qu Yuan praises the tangerine for the same reasons as Zhang Jiuling (perhaps I should write that the other way 'round, of course), citing the value of its remarkable constancy. Reading this poem biographically, you hear Qu Yuan's lament for the world of human affairs, where constancy is not so highly regarded, or rewarded.

Zhang takes this poem as his base, establishing the scene and alluding in the same breath to Qu Yuan, with whom all his readers would be familiar. Then he asks why the tree is so secluded, thereby raising the question: why has he been banished? Why was Qu Yuan banished, for that matter? Why are men of good faith banished from the halls of power?

I'll get to those questions, and the poem's overall meaning as near as I can fathom it, tomorrow.

4: Fate and All It Encounters

I had trouble translating this week's poem, which was a shame considering that it's the last we'll hear from Zhang Jiuling for a while. One of the lines that bothered me the most was the following couplet:

運命唯所遇，循環不可尋

which I ultimately translated as:

Fate and everything it meets: a
wheel whose end we cannot seek.

There are some things that bother me about this translation, including the almost-rhyme between meet and seek, which feels ugly to me. Then again, there's a similar vowel rhyme in the original, between yù, the last character of the first line, and xún, the last character of the second line, so maybe I shouldn't worry about it.

The first line is the only instance in these four poems of the character 遇 yù, which as you might have noticed is one of the two characters used to name the whole set: 感遇四首, the "Feeling / Encountering Four Poems," which I've translated as "Four Poems of Encountering" and has been translated elsewhere (esp. by Witter Bynner) simply as "Thoughts," which I feel doesn't express the complexity of 感遇. I translated 遇 in the poem as "meet" rather than "encounter" for metrical reasons.

The second line, though, is the source of my confusion. Broken down into its components, it reads: 循環 (circle, cycle) 不可 (cannot, must not) 尋 (seek). How does a cycle we cannot seek square with "fate and all it meets"? Or a cycle that cannot be sought? Seems unlikely: fate is all around us, inescapable. What, then, are we to make of this line?

There is a tight parallelism between the two lines, which helps:

運命 唯所 遇
循環 不可 尋
(noun) (adverb) (verb)

It seems clear from this that the cycle is (or is closely connected with) fate; I tried to emphasize this by enjambing the two lines in English. Moreover, the two adverbial phrases are opposite in meaning, at least as I read them: 唯所 includes all possibilities, while 不可 denies possibilities. Then, if we think of 遇 as the ongoing process of meeting, might not 尋 be the ultimate result of seeking? In Japanese, 尋 means "to fathom" (according to my dictionary), and 尋找 in Chinese can mean "to find" as much as "to seek." So, is it possible that the cycle, rather than being impossible to find, is simply impossible to follow through to the end (because it is endless)? And then, y extension, can fate cannot be worked through to the end?

Maybe. Then again, maybe I'm just crazy.

4: Some Changes Around Here

One of the great things about this project has been the feedback we've received from people who have studied Tang poetry a great deal longer than we. Matt's attracted most of that feedback, because he's more social about his interests than I am--I'm one of those writers who regards society like a sheer cliff over deep water: if you jump off and know what you're doing, you know you'll have an experience like no other, refreshing and exhilarating and rewarding, but before you jump you always have this creeping feeling that you're about to make a horrible mistake. Despite this, I get to benefit from the conversations Matt has, because he tells me about them.

As a result of Matt's chat with his friend Lucas, I'm trying out two experiments with this poem. First, I've placed the character-by-character translation below the full translation, for reasons I outlined in my response to Matt's excellent post on the questionable value of character-by-character translations. Second, I've posted the verse in traditional Chinese characters, rather than the simplified characters we've used thus far. Look at the difference between the two "spellings" of our poet's name, Zhang: 張 is what it looks like in traditional, as opposed to the simplified 张. Note the extra lines on the right side.

Chinese characters have thousands of years of history behind them, rising out of the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty (1600 BCE) through their codification under the Qin (221 BCE) and beyond. These developments were sometimes matters of convenience, and sometimes of political import. Confucius regarded 正名 zhèngmíng , the rectification of names, as a key responsibility of good government - he was referring to the proper use of language in general, but it's good to bear this in mind when thinking about the import of language and writing in Chinese history. Anyone who's seen the movie Hero by Zhang Yimou has seen the import that character forms can have: the heroes of that film die (essentially) on behalf of a character set.

Traditional characters have roughly the same forms as those of the clerical script used in the fifth century CE. In the late nineteenth and early 20th century, Chinese scholars and statesman concerned with the country's modernization advocated a shift away from traditional characters, which they judged to be too complex to write and, more importantly, too difficult to teach. China at this point had a very low literacy rate compared to Western countries, and the thought was that public education required simpler characters. In the darkest of the "sick man of Asia" days, some scholars even advocated for abandoning the Chinese language altogether, in favor of the more "modern" language of (I kid you not) Esperanto.

To make a very long story unconscionably short and open the gates for gross overgeneralization, the Qing dynasty fell apart at the beginning of the 20th century, and early attempts at democracy devolved into the autocratic Guomindang on the one hand and the revolutionary Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the other. Then the Imperial Japanese invaded and brutalized as much of China as they could get their hands on, while the Guomindang resisted with organized and the CCP with guerrilla warfare. The Japanese lost the war, but the CCP didn't stop fighting - the Guomindang lost control of China to Mao's CCP soon after, ultimately taking refuge (as Ming Dynasty loyalists did before them) on the island of Formosa, or Taiwan. To this day, the heirs of the Communists control the mainland, and the now-representative democracy that succeeded the Guomindang controls Taiwan.

The government of the People's Republic of China (set up by the CCP) undertook a number of reforms soon after their victory in 1949, including the simplification of the character sets, along lines proposed at the beginning of the century. The simplified forms, like 张 instead of 張 or 说 (speak) instead of 說, or 爱 love instead of 愛, were not created wholesale: many were cursive abbreviations of the traditional characters, used in private correspondence and in calligraphy, while some, like the change in the character for "love," removed elements of the initial composition (to quote a writing group friend, the science fiction writer John Chu, the simplification process "took the heart (心) out of love.")

Nevertheless, as the PRC propagated its simplified characters, the Taiwanese government, eager like many governments in crisis to preserve its authority with appeals to traditional values, held firm to the traditional character set. Meanwhile, overseas Chinese communities continued to use the characters that they always knew. Entering Chinatown in New York or Boston or San Francisco, you're more likely to encounter traditional Chinese than simplified, though this is starting to change. The simplified / traditional character debate is politically fraught, concerning the obvious tensions between the PRC and Taiwan, but also the PRC's relish in the glories of China's past, and the legally-enforced use of "standard" characters and "common" dialect. Those interested in the subject can check out Wikipedia's page dedicated to the debate.

This isn't a soapbox, nor is it a political blog (though if we're to believe Aristotle, man is a political animal, so we shouldn't ever expect politics to be far from any subject of human concern). I'm a man of peace, and limited understanding, and I think that if we're trying to translate these poems accurately we should present them as their poets originally conceived them, in traditional characters.

tl;dr: You'll notice more lines in the Chinese around here in the next few weeks. Do not adjust your television set.

4: Fourth Poem of Encountering, by Zhang Jiuling

A few changes to format here; I'll discuss them tomorrow. For now, enjoy my meager attempt at our last Zhang Jiuling poem for a little while!

004张九龄:感遇四首之四

江南有丹橘，經冬猶綠林。
豈伊地氣暖，自有歲寒心。
可以薦嘉客，奈何阻重深。
運命唯所遇，循環不可尋。
徒言樹桃李，此木豈無陰。

Zhang Jiuling: Four Poems of Encountering, Number Four

The Southlands have a red tangerine, that
endures the winter in still-green groves

In a realm of such mild weather
it has a heart to bear the cold.

You might give it to noble guests;
Why is it secluded so deep?

Fate and everything it meets: a
wheel whose end we cannot seek.

Someone says: tree, peaches, plums,
how can this wood not have shadows?


Jiāngnán yǒu dān jú, jīng dòng yóu lù lín.
River south has red tangerine, endure winter still green forest
qǐ yí dì qì nuǎn, zǐ yǒu suì hán xīn
how this place air warm, self have severe cold heart
kě yǐ jiàn jiā kè, nài hé zǔ zhòng shēn!
may be present good guest, nevertheless how kept heavy deep
yūn mìng wéi suǒ yù, xún huán bù kě xún.
luck / life (fate) think so encounter, cycle not can search
tú yán shù táo lǐ, cǐ mù qǐ wú yīn?
disciple say tree peaches plums, this wood how could not (shade, yin)?

On the Nature of Character Translations

Recently my friend Lucas suggested that character-by-character translations of Chinese poetry, like the ones we offer, are generally misleading and confusing to lay readers. A couple nights ago at dinner I was asked about such translations and also found I had a much harder time than I would've thought explaining why we publish them. I'm not done with them necessarily, but I think it's very much worth a discussion.

Why do we do them? I generally take the following two reasons most seriously. For my part, before any consideration of the reader, I find it helpful in my process of close reading. It forces me to think actively about each character, not just rely on a higher-level understanding of the 'sense' of a line. Where character-by-character translations relate to close reading, I associate the practice with the book 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by Eliot Weinberger (which I have enjoyed a lot, but find less and less useful the more translating I do; most of the translations in it just aren't very good).

The other argument is that such translations might help the lay reader better understand the 'relationship' between the original and the translation -- they highlight the process of translating and in particular the distance between these two languages. Readers can examine the translator's art-in-progress, and better understand the nature of the choices he or she makes. All elements of translation that may normally be ignored.

I think objections to this kind of 'intermediate translation' deserve to be taken seriously, though. For one, it may be completely wrong to see character-by-character translations as legitimately representative of an intermediate step in the translator's process. Translation requires not only an engagement with the meaning of each individual character, but a series of parallel engagements with phrases, and verses, and the poem as a whole. Grammar is not something one considers wholly separately from individual words. It cannot be that distinct. The meanings of words affect instantly their position vis-a-vis other words, and a word's place in a phrase or in the context of the poem as a whole affects its individual meaning. When readers examine a character-by-character translation, they may imagine, then, that it represents how the Chinese "works" at a deeper level; that simply is not the case. Character-by-character translations are more properly conceived as reducing the original Chinese, by stripping it of its grammar and context, to a form more conducive to certain kinds of analysis (though potentially less conducive to the best, most subtle and complete analysis).

Further, Lucas points out that such 'word-for-word translations as intermediate step' are not generally done when translating other languages. Honestly, I think the reason word-for-word isn't done when translating other languages into English might have more to do with the relative youth of sinology as a field. Plus it's just so easy to work character by character compared to word by word in other languages, because it happens that Chinese does not conjugate or decline. That is, of course, an explanation and not a justification.

I remember when I first read "19 Ways", I pored over the character-by-character translation. Years later I read it again and thought, "I can't believe I ever looked at it like that, what a fool I was." And as I kept looking at it I thought again, "No, no, that isn't even right" (I think they had 但 as "but" instead of "only"). So I was potentially mislead both by the format and by their execution of the format. Maybe the solution is relegating one or two example character-by-character bits to an appendix, with appropriate caveats about the particular nature of character-by-character translation, for the obsessive lay reader. Perhaps it can be safely done if the caveats are well written. What do you think?

6: The Poet Transcendent, Banished from Heaven

In the middle of his life, the poet Li Bai, also known in the West as Li Po or Li Bo (both inexact reproductions of an 'old style' Mandarin) and to sinologists as Lǐ Bhæk (a reconstruction of the actual contemporary pronunciation of his name), met the famous elder poet He Zhizhang in the Daoist Temple of the Violet Pole, in modern-day Shandong. Learning that such a literary eminence was present, Li Bai introduced himself and presented several of his latest poems. He Zhizhang read at first slowly, then eyes sliding down the paper, then looked up in wonderment. “Can you be the Jin Star Taibai(1), descended from Heaven?" Thus did Li Bai become known as "the banished immortal" (谪仙), and later, the "Poet Transcendent" (诗仙).

Likely born in modern-day Kyrgyzstan, in a town then known as Suiye and within the sphere of influence of the Tang Empire, Li Bai grew up in the Sichuan town of Qinglian and read widely as a child, including many Daoist and astrological texts of a mystical bent. His association with the hermetic intellectual tradition, in particular its Daoist elements, prompted him to choose for his own "pseudonym" the name "Retired Scholar of Qinglian" (青莲居士), after the town where he grew up. As a boy and young man, he is said to have practiced martial arts, and bragged of his skill with a sword. In later years, after traveling the length and breadth of the empire, his wandering and youthful combats earned him the name "the Poet Knight-errant" (诗侠).

In casual description of Tang poetry, or of Chinese poetry generally, Li Bai and Du Fu are known as the greatest Chinese poets of any era, most commonly called the Poets Transcendent and Sage, respectively (诗仙 and 诗圣). Though the trajectories of their careers were quite different, they met twice and thought highly of each other, the younger Du Fu especially thinking enormously of Li Bai. In one poem, Du Fu placed Li Bai among other great poets of the age as one of the "Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup" (饮中八仙).

During the Tang, as for much of Chinese history, an educated man possessed many names beyond his surname. He was born with a "milk name" (乳名) given by his parents, acquired nicknames from his friends, was given a "courtesy name" (字) upon maturity, chose for himself a "pseudonym" (号) and possibly also a pen name, and if he had particular status, may have been given one or more additional nicknames and or posthumous names. Li Bai had more names than even the average Tang gentleman, but as he has faded into history they have only grown in number.

(1) The Jin Star (金星), also called Taibai (太白), refers to Venus. He Zhizhang's comment makes even more sense given that Li Bai's courtesy name was Taibai, chosen presumably for its connection with the same star.

6 - Li Bai, Drinking Alone Under the Moon

Terribly sorry for the delay! Here then, we have one of the most famous poems in the whole Chinese canon, or at least the first verse. Like many poems in the 300 Poems of the Tang (including Zhang Jiuling's Poems of Encountering) it was anthologized only in part, and I imagine there are many who never come across the other verses. This verse, however, stands alone quite well -- enjoy!

月下独酌

花间一壶酒,独酌无相亲。

举杯邀明月,对影成三人。

月既不解饮,影徒随我身。

暂伴月将影,行乐须及春。

我歌月徘徊,我舞影零乱。

醒时同交欢,醉后各分散。

永结无情游,相期邈云汉。

under moon alone drink

flower middle one pot wine, alone drink no mutual dear-friend

raise glass invite bright moon, face shadow become three people

moon since not understanding to-drink, shadow follows follows my body

temporary companion moon and shadow, make merry must up-to spring

I sing moon wavers/moves-back-and-forth, I dance shadow disordered chaotic

sober time with share joy, drunk after each separate scatter

forever bound-together not-limited sentiment wander, together meet far-away Milky Way

_____

Drinking Alone Under the Moon

Among the flowers my jug of wine,

I drink alone without companion

I raise my glass to the bright moon,

facing my shadow we are three

Moon knows not of drink, and

Shadow merely follows my body.

These temporary fellows, Moon and Shadow,

this happiness is made to end like the spring

I sing and Moon wanders

I dance and Shadow shakes

Still sober we are merry together,

though after we have drunk we will separate

Would that I were with you forever, no pain of parting,

together among the faraway stars

3: Terms of Art (and Religion)

Yesterday I introduced the basic tenants of Buddhism, and discussed how it arrived in China and became a part of Chinese thought by the time when our poets lived and wrote. Today I'm going to focus the poem's Buddhist language.

The first of these is the second line of the first couplet:

滞虑洗孤清
zhì lǜ xǐ gū qīng
sluggish consider wash alone clear

The character 滞 zhì dictionary-translates as "sluggish," but can also be read as "congealed" (which is its meaning in Japanese). Thoughts, the detritus of experience, accumulate in the mind as karma; they attach to things, and cause suffering. To alleviate suffering, we wash those accumulated thoughts away. This doesn't mean that a Buddhist wants to eliminate cognition--quite the opposite. Think of thought as blood. When blood flows freely through the body, the body is healthy. When blood clots and hardens, though, it is life-threatening. Buddhism observes that human thought is mostly clotted: when we see the world we see our preconceptions of it to the exclusion of the world itself. The monk, by "washing" his thoughts, returns their clear and liquid state.

空意 kōng yì, in the third couplet, is another interesting example. In order to liberate the mind from suffering, Buddhism advocates realizing that things as you think of them have no independent, eternal identity. Everything is causally connected to everything else. No phenomenon can be isolated from other phenomena. As such, the world is "empty" - nothing exists in and of itself. (In this way Buddhism has a lot in common with certain threads in Catholic thought, though I'm sure any good theologian would have serious issues with this position of mine.)

In the poem, 空意 kōng yì might mean "the meaning of emptiness," or else "the emptiness of meaning" - that is to say, the emptiness of inherent meaning. I chose to translate it as "emptiness" alone, relying on the degree to which the association between Buddhism and emptiness exists in American culture. This also saved me from having to decide one way or the other on the meaning of 空意, and then having to fit "meaning" into the weird rhythm structure I attempted in this translation. Then again, maybe the elision is too convenient. What do you think?

3: Boo-dhism

Sorry about that; I needed to fit some kind of Halloween reference, and it's hard to shoehorn thrills and chills into Zhang Jiuling!

Matt asked me to talk about Buddhism in the third Poem of Encountering. For those of you with no experience of Buddhism whatsoever, the Buddha's most basic teachings are:

1. There is suffering in life.
   
2. Suffering comes from attachment to things.
   
3. Suffering can cease when attachment to things ceases.
   
4. There is a path out of suffering.
   

The "path" is the Middle Way of moderation, care, and compassion. Buddhism first came to China in the Han dynasty, carried by traders along the Silk Road and by pilgrims from India. It reached full flourishing under the Tang dynasty, when our poets lived and wrote. Bodhidharma, the founder of Chan (Zen) Buddhism in China, came from the West (that is, India) in the 5th century, and his movement flourished under the Tang alongside native religious and philosophical movements like Daoism and Buddhism. In fact, the three traditions were seen as complementary, and a term, Three Teachings (三教), arose to refer to all at once.

When I was a child, learning about this stuff for the first time, the fact that these three religious existed side by side without sectarian violence blew me away. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but the fact of the matter is that Zhang Jiuling was educated in the Confucian system, and surrounded by and familiar with Buddhist and Daoist teachings. The tension between Confucian thought, which emphasized engagement with the official world and duty, and Daoist or Buddhist thought, which placed less importance on worldly affairs, can be seen throughout these three poems. Daoism, with its emphasis on natural behavior and "flying free," is all through the first of these three poems; the image of the hermit-monk stretches between Daoism and Buddhism, but the poem's language, especially its emphasis on washing the mind and on freedom from attachment to worldly affairs, seems explicitly Buddhist to me. The anxiety I mentioned yesterday, though, is all Confucian.

Tomorrow, I'll focus on the way the specific words Matt mentioned, and the role they play in the poem. As per usual, this topic could consume another week all by itself!

3: What We Talk About When We Talk About Encountering

(With apologies to Raymond Carver)

Matt requested some discussion of the Buddhist themes in the comments to the last post, and I'll oblige tomorrow. Tonight, I want to talk about this poem as part of the sequence of 感遇 (gǎnyù) poems.

Zhang Jiuling's first poem compared two types of birds - the lone swan flying over the ocean, and the kingfishers nested in the high tree. Zhang's sympathy appears to be first with the swan, claiming that as he wanders high and far, the arrows of men cannot harm him. However, Zhang writes this poem after being banished from the imperial court and sent to a distant province. In fact, his position has a great deal in common with the kingfishers, who, nesting in the tall tree, are nevertheless vulnerable to the "golden bullets" of a hunter's sling.

Similarly, in the second poem, we naturally project Zhang onto the hermit wandering the lonely valley among the cinnamon and lotus flowers in the autumn and spring. However - and I'm going with Matt's excellent read on the character 折 zhé as "select" in the sense of "pluck" or "pick" - by the end of the poem there's considerable ambiguity as to whether the poet identifies more with the peaceful religious hermit or the flowers, which, rejoicing as they grow, don't care whether they might be picked by the hermit. However, we're not certain whether it's a good thing for the flowers to be plucked. Zhang and his readers certainly thought that the hermit was a virtuous figure, but is being picked by a hermit an honor for the flowers, or certain death? This is particularly interesting given the form Zhang's exile took: he was selected (picked / 折'd) by the Emperor as a governor of a backwards province, and in the process ripped out of his flowering, carefree life at court.

In this poem, Zhang's focus shifts from the natural world to the hermit himself: a religious recluse living away from the urban press of humanity in some secluded valley, meditating and perfecting his mind (more on which later). Of the ten characters in the poem's first couplet, two (独 dú and 孤 gū) emphasize the solitary, lonely nature of the hermit's retreat. The hermit, isolated from the universe, achieves perfection by contemplating emptiness. What a fitting image for a poem by a man separated from his society!

But Zhang doesn't stop there, of course. In the last two lines, he arrives again, strangely separate from what at first appeared to be the main character of the poem:

From flying or sinking affairs am I cut off;
what comfort do I gain from dedication?

In contrast to the first two lines, which contain two characters meaning "lonely," the last two lines contain two characters, 自zǐ and 吾wù, that both mean "I" - in the same position as the two "lonely" characters in the first couplet. It seems likely to me that this is an intentional parallelism (and one almost impossible to capture in English translation, of course). The emphasis on the personal pronoun is weird in a a poem like this: the Tang poet has many different ways to narrate or describe a situation, yet here Zhang draws our attention to an "I" in a manner most uncharacteristic of a Buddhist monk.

I see a few different possibilities here:

1. The monk is talking. A Buddhist sage seems unlikely to communicate in such a self-centered manner. Maybe I'm misreading the line, but I think this is the least probable option.
   
2. Zhang is talking, and the "dedication" in the last line is meant to be read as "dedication to the Emperor" or "the court." In that case, he might be saying: "look at this monk! When I am distant from court, I feel really, really sad -- what does that idle dedication gain me? I should start meditating like the monk here."
   
3. Zhang is talking, and the "dedication" in the last line refers to Buddhist practice. In this case, Zhang is wistfully confessing his inability to focus on contemplation like the ideal monk: "all this meditation doesn't help me; what comfort can I gain from dedicating [myself to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha]?"
   

Regardless of which interpretation we choose (or others I've missed that y'all should feel free to point out for me), thinking about the last three poems this way has given me a lot of respect for Zhang's mastery of perspective and subtlety. I wonder where he'll take us next.

3: Zhang Jiuling, Four Poems of Encountering #3

The 300 Tang Poems opens with four Zhang Jiuling works, of which you've seen two aready. This one is less famous than the first pair, which has made it harder to find good annotations. Be prepared for retractions and madness to come!

003
张九龄:感遇四首之三

幽人归独卧,滞虑洗孤清。
持此谢高鸟,因之传远情。
日夕怀空意,人谁感至精?
飞沈理自隔,何所慰吾诚?

yōurén guī dú wò, zhì lǜ xǐ gū qīng
hermit return lonely bed, sluggish consider wash alone clear

chí cǐ xiè gāo niǎo, yīn zhī chuán yuán qíng.
hold this wither tall bird, (therefore) spread far feeling

rìxì huài kōng yì, rén shéi gǎn zhì jīng
day night cherish empty meaning, people who feel to perfect?

fēi shěn lǐ zǐ gé, hé suǒ wèi wù chéng
fly sink at a distance I cut off, how that which console me sincere

---

The hermit returns to the solitary bed,
agglutinate thoughts washed lonely and clear.

Hold these to thank the soaring birds;
Because of them his mind spreads far.

Day and night embracing emptiness--
who on earth can know such perfection?

From flying or sinking affairs am I cut off;
what comfort do I gain from dedication?

9: Pronouns

In my translation, unlike many other translations of this poem, I chose to avoid the English first person until the line

焉知二十载,重上君子堂。

How could I know it would be twenty years

before I climbed again into your family's halls?

This despite the fact that the original has no first-person pronoun in that line, or in any of the lines preceding it. This brings up once more one of the trickiest issues in the translation of Classical Chinese into English. The whole poem "For the Recluse Wei Ba" is presented as one man's address to his old friend. In English, we would naturally expect such a document to make extensive use of "I", but of course, this poem does not. So the translator instead must choose: avoid the same pronouns the Chinese uses and risk awkward English, or add pronouns where there are none in the original and risk changing the meaning.

I decided that I thought the first four lines sounded more like musings about people in general, rather than necessarily referring to the poet and his friend, and so left out English personal pronouns to try and capture this sense of generalization. This inevitably leaves out some of the original, which can be read either to sound general or to sound specific. Compare my first translation with the following alternate translation of the beginning:

Human lives cannot see one another, moving

like the stars Shen and Shang.

What night could be like tonight, when we

share the lantern's glow?

I find that this alternate sounds much more personal and specific thanks to the "we" there. Nonetheless I think I can get away with my original translation, odd as it is, because of the 人生 (human life) in the first line. The sense of big-picture those characters carry seems to me to carry over into the next few lines. In addition, I feel like avoiding the more specific pronouns in English gets closer to the vagueness of the original -- that is, the way it can be read to imply either that we are talking about the poet and his friend, or about people in general. There will always be a problem, however, in that whenever I do start using "I" or "we" it risks sounding like a 'harder' transition than the original merits. I wonder now if I should move the transition from general to specific up earlier into the poem?

9: Stars

Max has asked about two issues that I really ought to get into: the stars Shen and Shang, and my use of the pronoun "they" in the beginning of the translation, only to switch to "I" later on. First, stars:

人生不相见,动如参与商。

These human lives do not see each other, moving

like the stars Shen and Shang.

Shen and Shang are individual stars, the first lying within the constellation of Orion (specifically corresponding to one of the stars of his belt) and the second corresponding to Antares. As such, each rises only when the other sets, and they do not seem to move relative to each other -- natural symbols for two people who share an intimate connection and yet must be apart, as in Du Fu's poem. As far as I know, however, these two stars have no metaphorical connection of this kind at all in the Greco-Roman-based Western astronomy Americans learn in school. By contrast, as early as the Zuo Comentary (compiled c. 400 BCE but contained information from much earlier sources) there have been Chinese written references to the association between the stars Shen and Shang and stories of separation. The Zuo Commentary itself cites the story of two brothers, sons of the Legendary Emperor Ku (the great-grandson of the Yellow Emperor), who were so at odds that their father enfoeffed each with different lands. E'bo (阏伯), the eldest, was given land that became known as Shangqiu (商丘), and was called "the Shang star" after he died. His younger brother Shishen (实沈) was then naturally called "the Shen star" after his death -- and the legend, so they say, was born.

The Greco-Roman and Chinese astronomical traditions independently developed many of the same predictive techniques and even fit some of their stellar groupings into vaguely similar conceptual frameworks, but of course despite their similarities remain extremely different. In the classical Chinese astronomy of the Tang Dynasty, for example, the sky was divided into a total of "Twenty-eight Mansions" (二十八宿), plus "Three Enclosures" (三垣). So one would say that the star Shen from the poem is located in the Shen Mansion of the White Tiger of the West (东方白虎参宿), and the Shang star is located in the Xin Mansion of the Azure Dragon of the East (西方青龙心宿, which in earlier times -- as early as the Shang Dynasty, supposedly -- was 苍龙; just as in earlier times 方 was 宫).

All of this background probably only scratches the surface of what Du Fu, a well educated man of the Tang, would have known. He would have been aware of other famous references to the stars, such as to the story of the Cowherd and the Weaving Girl, and perhaps had in mind some resonance with another text I've never even heard of. Indeed, his use of the Shen-Shang reference is illustrative of the sophistication of his interaction with the Chinese canon. Just as when he plays with the well-known "To-night, oh, what a night", this choice of metaphor provides an unexpected new lens through which to view the rest of the action of the poem. The stars are cosmically determined to never meet -- their separation is a definite, natural feature of the world. Human lives, says Du Fu, do not see one another in precisely this fashion. That is, they simply couldn't.

9: Tuesday Literary Allusion Blogging

This week, I translated another extremely well-known poem by Du Fu, one of China's preeminent poets. Highlighting his exceptional range, this poem is of a different genre, and in some ways a very different style: where "The Beautiful Woman" was an imaginative, allusive, richly described allegorical tale, "For the Recluse Wei Ba" is a more straightforward gift of sincere friendship, filled with subtle moments of quiet emotion. Different sorts of textual ephemera lifted from a long life of same.

Especially since I ended up skipping over Du Fu's many references in my last translation (though I made a couple of comments about them last week), I'm determined to get right to the allusions in this week's poem, even if it means putting off some talk about the more obvious ways my translation deviated from the original. And so I'll start with this line:

今夕复何夕

At first I was frankly stumped as to its precise meaning, so I looked up the line. The lovely Baike described it as an exclamation of happy wonderment, which I can understand though I remained somewhat confused. Then by chance I heard a re-written version of the original sung while I was watching the movie The Banquet《夜宴》by Feng Xiaogang -- it turns out that it comes from

今夕何夕

which appears in the Book of Songs (《诗经 唐风 绸缪》to be precise). The original means something like "To-night, oh, what a night"; which then given the context of the song, is clearly a happy exclamation, looking forward to a marriage ceremony the next day. So Baidu Baike is correct, if incomplete. It is certainly meant to be a happy, wistful sort of exclamation at the night, but it is a twist on an old, sighing lyric of that feeling, not a direct copy. In Du Fu's version, for one, the poet's days of marriage have long since passed.

Du Fu's line, then, is a play on a lyric from one of the oldest extant folk songs in the world, a song that even now sees some of its lyrics sung in big-budget period movies and faux-Qing teahouses throughout China. The original lyrics are old enough that their grammar is noticeably different from the Classical Chinese of the Tang (Du Fu's time), which explains why it stuck out to me. Given its provenance it seems nothing but beautiful, but as for how to translate such beauty I am still stumped. My choice was a banal one, to try to simply convey in a modern free verse English what the direct connotation should be. I am unsatisfied with that, but I'm unconvinced there is much to be done. Anyone have any ideas?