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.
Vikram Seth has a lovely book wherein he attempts metrical translations of Tang verse. I'd suggest taking a gander at that.
ReplyDeleteAlso I hasten to add that *not all* chinese poetry had to obey tonal meters. Indeed, many poems in the style of folk song (such as Li Bai's shorter quatrains or the allegorical verse of Liu Zongyuan) obeyed no tonal meter whatsoever. And the requirements for rhyme could be quite relaxed: Du Fu's "northward journey" for example contains 140 lines whose rhyme-requirement is that every other line end in "t" (this T sound has disappeared from modern Mandarin, mind you) and once even this rule is broken.
The stuff you're talking about is really only strictly applicable to the Lüshi or regulated verse styles of the High Tang (and after)
Good points! I'll check out the Vikram Seth book, it sounds like it would be right up my alley.
ReplyDeleteAnd, yes, I should be much more careful about painting all Chinese poetry with such a broad brush. I'll mention the differences in tonal meter sometime this week, by way of penance. In hastening to point out (largely Western) misconceptions about Chinese poetry, I haven't taken as much time to point out the gradations of rhyme and meter within Chinese verse -- which is almost as bad as letting those misconceptions go un-addressed.