1: An Lushan

I know I was going to write about Taoism today, but after mentioning Zhang Jiuling's biography two days ago and chatting about it with Matt, I realized that there's some more historical context to this poem (and to the Tang dynasty in general) that will help set the stage for the rest of the Tang poetry we'll encounter on this project.

The Tang, which lasted from 618 to 907 CE, was a Chinese cultural high point, a cosmopolitan and outward-facing dynasty which traded liberally with Central Asian and Turkic peoples. Innovations in art, design, architecture, technology, and cuisine rose out of these three hundred years of prosperity. The Tang reached its peak under Emperor Xuanzong in the 8th century CE, and then, toward the end of his life, started to fall apart.

Everything begins going south with the rise to power of a general named An Lushan, the half-Tujue, half-Turkic son of a sorceress (I swear) who rose to become a general of the Tang armies and rebelled against the dynasty, capturing the capital of Chang'an and setting off a chain of rebellion and riot that destabilized the dynasty and led to its fall in the next century. Many poets in the 300 Tang Poems were exiled or killed or scattered in An Lushan's wake.

Thing is, before An Lushan became a revolutionary, he was a military official, who failed to follow the orders of his superior in battle. Zhang Jiuling, who was the Emperor's counselor at the time, advised the Emperor to execute An Lushan.

Of course, the Emperor pardoned An instead, and listened to a number of pro-war advisors (including a guy named Li Linfu) who claimed An would be more useful alive and terrorizing the central steppe than dead. The rise of this military faction was Zhang Jiuling's undoing, and led to his exile into Hubei, where he ultimately died.

When An Lushan rebelled, captured the capital city, and nearly toppled the dynasty sixteen years later, I'm sure Li Linfu and all the rest involved in Zhang's exile were very pleased with themselves.

1: Rigid Lines, Tight Rhymes

Romance language translations of Chinese poems often take the form of unrhymed free verse, which gives unfamiliar readers the sense that Chinese poets just write whatever comes into their mind, man!

Let's look at this week's poem again:

孤鸿海上来,池潢不敢顾。

侧见双翠鸟,巢在三珠树。

矫矫珍木巅,得无金丸惧。

美服患人指,高明逼神恶。

今我游冥冥,弋者何所慕。

Notice that each line is ten characters long, or five characters long if you divide the lines into couplets at the commas. Chinese poetic language is very condensed; almost every individual character in this poem is its own word, with a few exceptions, and Chinese doesn't have long-short syllabic meter in the way we think of it in English, Greek, Latin and so forth. However, rules about line length are rigidly observed, and divide poems into different genres.

Also, Chinese poems rhyme. Each of the five lines above ends not only with the same vowel sound, but the same tone: 顾 gù, 树 shù, 惧 jù, 恶 wù, 慕 mù.

By "tone," for those who haven't studied Chinese before, I mean one of the four (or so) standard tones in the Chinese language. Each syllable in Chinese can have either a flat tone (mā, first tone), a rising tone (má , second tone), a dipping tone (mǎ, third tone), or a falling tone (mà, fourth tone). Different tones on the same syllable produce different words. Mā means mother, má means hemp, mǎ means horse, and mà is a verb meaning "to curse." To make matters worse (or better), the same tone on the same syllable can have many meanings. Premodern Chinese poetry had rigid rules not only about which vowel sounds rhymed with one another, but which tones corresponded with one another as well.

This leaves translators in an uneasy position. Chinese poetic meter is quite different from English poetic meter: is a given Chinese poem in rigid five-character verse supposed to traipse along in iambs, or pontificate in dactyls, or what? Furthermore, since Chinese has fewer sounds than English, more words in the language rhyme with one another, so it's hard to express the poet's meaning in English rhyme without inventing words or using archaisms.

Maybe we can be fairest to the original poem by paying attention to syllabic rhythm in translations, and to the echo of sounds in line endings. I tried to do the first in my translation, and completely failed to do the second. However, this approach leaves us where we started: the reader of the English translation sees a rambling verse without rhyme, which isn't at all what the poet intended.

1: Exiled Poets

I start with the first poem of the 300 because, as the song says, the very beginning is a very good place to start. Happily, it turns out that the First Poem of Encountering is a great introduction to a common theme in Chinese poetry: the exiled poet.

Westerners are used to thinking of poets as outsiders, bohemian border-dwellers glancing with skeptical eye at society. Chinese poets were also often outsiders, but many came to this position later in life. In Tang dynasty China, government position and social status were determined by a rigorous exam system, which tested knowledge of traditional religious, philosophical, and poetic texts. Exams were graded for literary merit, so any government official in Tang China was likely to be at least a competent poet, with a memory keyed for literary allusion. This, in turn, meant that whenever political upheavals resulted in officials being deposed or dispatched to distant, pestilent regions of the empire, those officials turned to poetry as a comfort in exile -- hence the number of Chinese poems that deal with distance, loss, and life on the road.

Zhang Jiuling (Wikipedia bio here) was a more than competent official: a standout at the exams, from a family with a long history of official service, he became chancellor (like a cabinet member) to Emperor Xuanzang in the eighth century CE. He was honest and upstanding, an advisor on all matters of government, but rivals conspired against him and he was exiled to Hubei province, far from the imperial capital at Chang'an. He wrote the Poems of Encountering during his exile. In the contrast between the kingfishers, ensconced in high office and thus perfect targets for wandering hunters, and the far-flying crane, I see Zhang embracing his life as an exile, far from the machinations of government power that plague the "great and glorious."

This basic allegorical level opens the doors for discussing deeper Taoist themes, which I'll raise tommorrow. In the meantime, let's think what our political discourse would be like if all our leaders were poets. At the very least, it'd be more interesting to hear!

1: Zhang Jiuling - Four Poems of Encountering, No. 1

Let's start with the raw language at first: the poem in its original Chinese, followed by the pronunciation with a word-for-word dictionary translation. Then, I'll try my hand at a full English translation.

001张九龄:感遇四首之一

孤鸿海上来,池潢不敢顾。

侧见双翠鸟,巢在三珠树。

矫矫珍木巅,得无金丸惧。

美服患人指,高明逼神恶。

今我游冥冥,弋者何所慕。

Gū hóng hǎi shàng lái, chíhuáng bù gǎn gù.

Lone swan ocean on come, pool puddle not dare visit

Cē jiàn shuāng cuìniǎo, cháo zài sānzhūshù

side see pair kingfishers, nest at three pearl tree

Jiǎojiǎo zhēn mù diān, dé wú jīnwán jù.

arrogant / military(x2) treasure wood peak, how not gold pellet terror

měifù huàn rén zhǐ, gāo míng yù shén wù.

beautiful clothes worry men point, high shine meet god hate

jīn wǒ yóu míngmíng, yìzhě hé suǒ mù

now I swim / wander high and far, arrow -ingperson how where admire

Zhang Jiuling, Four Poems of Encountering - 1

Lone swan comes over ocean; pools and ponds it dare not visit.

Beside, see a pair of kingfishers, nesting in a triple pearl tree.

Mighty on their treasure-wood peak, how can they not fear a sling's gold stones?

Beautifully clothed, beware pointing fingers; greatness and glory bring spirits' wrath.

Now I ramble high and far; archers, what hope have they?

Mid-Autumn Festival / Li Bai Laughing Day

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival, and welcome to our translation of the Three Hundred Tang Poems!

The Mid-Autumn Festival (Zhongqiu Jie, or 中秋节) is a traditional Chinese holiday where families have dinner, eat moon cakes, drink wine, and watch the moon. There's a story behind this (there's a story behind everything), about Houyi and Chang'e, who lived back at the dawn of history. When I taught English in Anhui province, this is how my students told it to me:

Once, there were ten suns in the sky. They were too hot and burned up the land, so the Emperor found a very great archer named Houyi, who shot nine of the suns out of the sky. As a reward for saving the world, the Emperor gave Houyi a special medicine that would make Houyi and his wife, the beautiful Chang'e, immortal. There was only one pill of this medicine. The Emperor told Houyi to eat half of it and give half to his wife. Houyi, for reasons of his own, hid the pill. Maybe he wanted to reconsider the virtues of eternal life. My students didn't say.

Houyi's wife, Chang'e, found the pill while he was out one day, and, not knowing what it was, she ate the entire thing. She became immortal, yes, but the pill so altered her that she floated into the sky, all the way up to the moon, where she lives to this day.

This was my students' version of the story, a condensation of different tellings they'd heard from parents, grandparents, older cousins. They were great storytellers, but they were not masters of a tradition or a craft. In retelling this story for you now, I've adapted it further, added my own interpretations and the rhythms of my own language.

This is how we hope to approach the Three Hundred Tang Poems. As Matt said, neither of us are professional translators. We both speak Chinese, and we've traveled extensively on the Chinese mainland; I lived in Anhui for two years, and spent many summers in Beijing. At the moment, both of us are in America; this is one way of keeping our connection to China alive, even if we make mistakes along the way.

When I was in Anhui, my co-teacher and I asked our students to dream up their own holiday. One of my co-teacher's students came up with the concept of "Li Bai Laughing Day" - a day on which everyone dresses up as drunken Tang poet Li Bai, drinks wine, and wanders around laughing at the universe. While not all Chinese poetry shares Li Bai's lighthearted spirit, I hope the original poets would laugh in good humor at our attempts to present their work in a language which does not precisely suit it.

Check back Monday, and see what kind of a start we make.

Introductions

Welcome, all!

We are going to translate, one at a time, the three hundred poems of the 唐诗三百首. We will likely digress into attendant history, folklore, linguistic and literary issues. We will probably have something to say about what certain poems mean to us. Eventually, we may even finish.

This will be a learning experience. We are not accomplished translators, just lovers of China, of Chinese, and of ancient Chinese poetry. We will write as fans, and as the young man who stares off during the chorus of his favorite song eventually buys a secondhand guitar and picks out each chord, we will learn as we go. Eventually, we may even play uptempo, and someone else will sing along.

-Matt