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?

9: Du Fu - For the Recluse Wei Ba

I can't get off that Du Fu. Here's another of his poems, with a somewhat different theme:

009杜甫:赠卫八处士

人生不相见,动如参与商。

今夕复何夕,共此灯烛光。

少壮能几时,鬓发各已苍。

访旧半为鬼,惊呼热中肠。

焉知二十载,重上君子堂。

昔别君未婚,儿女忽成行。

怡然敬父执,问我来何方。

问答乃未已,驱儿罗酒浆。

夜雨剪春韭,新炊间黄粱。

主称会面难,一举累十觞。

十觞亦不醉,感子故意长。

明日隔山岳,世事两茫茫。

rén shēng bù xiāng jiàn, dòng rú shēn yǔ shāng

jīn xī fù hé xī, gòng cǐ dēng zhú guāng

shào zhuàng néng jǐ shí, bìn fà gè yǐ cāng

fǎng jiù bàn wéi guǐ, jīng hū rè zhōng cháng

yān zhī èr'shí zǎi, chóng shàng jūnzǐ táng

xī bié jūn wèi hūn, ér nǚ hū chéng xíng

yí rán jìng fù zhí, wèn wǒ lái hé fāng

wèn dá nǎi wèi yǐ, qū ér luó jiǔ jiāng

yè yǔ jiǎn chūn jiǔ, xīn chuī jiān huáng liáng

zhǔ chēng huì miàn nán, yī jǔ lèi shí shāng

shí shāng yì bù zuì, gǎn zǐ gù yì cháng

míng rì gé shān yuè, shì shì liǎng máng máng

human life not to-see-each-other, moving like Shen(star) and Shang(star)

today night turns/duplicates what night, share this lantern candle light

young vigorous can what time, temple-hair hair each already pale-white

pay-visit old half become ghost, surprise cry-out hot middle intestine

how know twenty year, again go-up gentleman hall

past leave you not-yet married, son daughter suddenly become go

content in-the-manner-of- respect father friends, ask me come what place

question answer still not-yet stop, gallop-off son gather/plan wine wine

night rain cut spring chives, new cooking during yellow millet (a kind of millet)

host calls meeting face difficult, one stroke consecutively ten wine-cups

ten wine-cups also not drunk, feel you old intention good

tomorrow day separate mountain peak world affair two boundless-and-indistinct

________

For the Recluse Wei Ba

These human lives do not see each other, moving

like the stars Shen and Shang.

What night could be like tonight, when

they two share this lantern glow?

When was it they were young and strong, who's temples

have since both grayed?

Glimpsing old friends, faded half to death, their surprised

cries echo down to their bones.

How could I know it would be twenty years

before I climbed again into your family's halls?

Long ago I left you not yet engaged, suddenly

sons and daughters walk beside you.

Happily they bow to their father's friend, and ask

me from where I come.

Questions not yet finished, they race

off to prepare the wines for our feast.

Tonight as it rains the spring chives are

chopped, and the yellow millet cooked.

The host calls out that how difficult it is

that we should meet, and at a stroke we have taken ten cups.

Ten cups and not yet drunk, and for you

I feel my old gratitude deepen.

Tomorrow the mountain will be cut off from its peak,

we two, hazy amid the affairs of the world.

2: Everyday Study, Everyday Up!

In the comments to the Monday translation, Matt pointed out a couple points where my work conflicts with the interpretation of Baidu Baike, a gigantic Chinese online encyclopedia. Reading through the notes on Baidu, I see a couple clear failures of my translation, but I'm not certain how to fix them.

Starting in the first half of the third couplet, "谁知林栖者", the phrase "lín xì zhě" (forest lonely person) properly translates to "hermit" in the religious recluse sense: someone living away from the world in order to seek enlightenment. Baidu identifies the hermit with the 美人 in the final couplet -- grouping the two characters 美 and 人 together as "beautiful person", rather than separating them as I've done in my translation. In that case, Mike's proposed translation of 美 as "virtuous" yesterday gets closer to the truth than my "honor," as it focuses on the hermit's virtue. Moreover, Baidu interprets 坐 in that third couplet as "deep," which I'm not certain how to handle.

相悦, xiāng yuè, I translated originally (on the basis of another annotation) as "like one another" in the sense of resembling, but on retrospect, and realizing the subject is a hermit, I feel that the phrase refers to mutual happiness, along the lines of the dictionary definition. Who would have suspected that the dictionary was right all along? In that case, the mutual rejoicing is probably between the hermit and the flowers, as there are no other people in the poem.

Given this parsing, that line:

谁知林栖者,闻风坐相悦。
shéi zhī lín xì zhě, wēn fēng zuò xiāng yuè
who know forest lonley (type of person), hear\smell wind deep mutual joy

becomes:

"Who knows the solitary forest man, who smells the breeze, deep, rejoicing in their joy?"

Or, if we take "谁知", "who knows," as declarative (Where's John? Who knows!), the sentence might scan:

No one knows the solitary forest man, who smells the breeze, deeply rejoicing in the flowers' joy.

I keep "林栖者" expanded as "solitary forest man" because each of the three characters which comprise the word carries a meaning in Chinese which is lost by the direct translation to "hermit" in English. Maybe I should render it as "solitary forest hermit" to avoid confusion, though.

So much to learn! This is going to be one heck of a project. Oh well; Everyday Study, Everyday Up, as the walls of my classroom in Anhui province said.

2: Beauty and Big Sheep

Veering from understanding to complete ignorance, I'm going to talk about the character 美 měi, which appears in the poem's last line：

何求美人折?
hé qiǔ měi rén zhé?
why beg beauty person return

I've translated měi as "beauty" above, which is its dictionary definition; some other suggestions from Wenlin include "pretty" and "self-satisfied," which I think is Wenlin being too pejorative about the state of being pleased with oneself.

Chinese characters come in many different varieties. The most common by far are semantic-phonetic combinations like 饿 è, which means "hungry." These types of characters are composed of smaller characters that suggest both the character's meaning and its pronunciation. The leftmost part of the 饿 character, 饣, is a simplified version of 食 shí, which means "eat," so we know this character has something to do with food; that's as much meaning as the character contains within itself. Meanwhile, the rightmost part of the character, 我, is pronounced "wǒ," and is supposed to suggest to us (or was once pronounced as - I'm going to beg Matt to post on this because his sense of tonal development is better than mine) the sound "è."

Some Chinese characters, though, are meaning-pictures. 好 (hǎo), the classical example, is composed of a picture of a woman (女) next to a picture of a child (子), and means "good." Woman + Child is good - a pleasant domestic and dynastic image that has a whole bunch of social connotations which I don't want to get into now. 美, at least according to one common etymological dictionary (which is not always correct but is often interesting), is the character for sheep (羊) on top of the character for "big" (大). Big sheep are beautiful! Or, Beauty is Big Sheep! The next time I look at images of Jolin Tsai or Sun Yanzi, I'll have to compare them to a big sheep and see what they have in common.

That aside, my question is, how to translate "měi" at the end of this poem. The dictionary translation above makes it look like the proper English would be "Why beg the beautiful people to return?" but that doesn't feel right: the poet's the wandering one, not the beautiful people. 求 qiú might be better read as "seek", in which case the line might read something like "Why, seeking the beautiful people, return?" This reading has its merits, but it sounds like the poet is plagued by concupiscence, while I think he's more worried about political position and influence. In that case, rather than reading 美人 "beauty people" as "beautiful people," maybe I should read it as "Why, seeking beauty from people, return?"

This is where I make a big jump, and this is where my translation probably fails. In love with the idea that the poet's talking about politics, I think, beauty and self satisfaction might be referring to a kind of official position or respect, much as did "高明“ (high and shining) and 美服 (beautiful clothes) in the first poem. Hence my translation as "honor," and the final reading of "Why return to seek honor among men?"

2: Parallelism

I'll start with something I vaguely understand about this poem, and leave the points of my confusion for later in the week.

(Apropos of nothing, "The Points of My Confusion", or possibly "The Points of His Confusion" sounds like the title for some kind of rich caramel society novel, best read on stormy day with tea and honey.)

The first couplet of this poem is an accessible example of how Chinese poetry uses parallelism:

兰叶春葳蕤,桂华秋皎洁。

Each character or phrase in the first line of this couplet corresponds with a character or phrase in the second line. This may be easier to visualize if the lines are presented vertically:

兰叶春葳蕤
桂华秋皎洁

The dictionary reads these lines as:

orchid leaf spring (abundant, luxurious)
cassia flower autumn (clear, pure)

I enclose the translations of 葳蕤 and 皎洁 in parentheses because each of these two pairs of characters forms a set phrase with the meanings I've bracketed above. These two lines have a strict form: (plant name) (part of plant) (season) (adjectival double-phrase). We could continue to riff on this phrase for subsequent lines if we wanted:

Holly berries in winter: red, round.
Dandelion seeds in summer: floating free.

Such parallelism is more than just a neat trick; in many poems it's key to comprehending a subtle line. When translating poem #1, I was stymied by the couplet 美服患人指,高明逼神恶 (měifù huàn rén zhǐ, gāo míng bī shén wù) which reads in the dictionary: beautiful clothes worry men point, high shine meet god hate. I was stymied at this point, but Matt pointed out that I should focus on the parallelism in this couplet, where 患 huàn and 逼 bī work as verbs, měifù (beautiful clothes) and gāo míng (high and shining, sort of like high and mighty) both refer to a kind of elevated or haughty condition, and rén zhǐ (people pointing) and shén wù (god hate) are situations to avoid.

I wasn't happy with the parallelism in my English translation of that line ("Beautifully clothed, beware pointing fingers; greatness and glory bring spirits' wrath"); in the end it felt like a poorer representation of the Chinese than was the raw dictionary translation. I tried to be more strict in communicating the parallel here:

Orchid leaves in spring: abundant, luxurious; cinnamon flowers in fall: bright, pure.

I think these two lines hold together, but I'm cautious about falling into the trap of writing lines so similar to the Chinese that they don't work in English. Thoughts?

2: Zhang Jiuling - Four Poems of Encountering, No. 2

Matt's madcap rebellion regardless, I intend to continue with the poems in Hengtang Hermit Edition order. I don't know enough Tang poetry to know which poems out of the 300 I really like; one of my minor goals with this project is to learn more about Tang dynasty poetics. I have to move in some order, so I might as well proceed in the traditional one, which will provide me with classics and hidden gems in equal measure.

002张九龄:感遇四首之二

兰叶春葳蕤,桂华秋皎洁。
欣欣此生意,自尔为佳节。
谁知林栖者,闻风坐相悦。
草木有本心,何求美人折?

lán yè chūn wēiruí, guì huā qiū jiǎojié
orchid leave spring abundant luxurious, cassia flower autumn clear pure

xīnxīn cǐ shēng yì, zǐ ér wèi jiā jié
happy happy this life meaning, I you become good festival

shéi zhī lín xì zhě, wēn fēng zuò xiāng yuè
who know forest lonley (type of person), hear\smell wind & so mutual joy

cǎo mù yǒu běn xīn, hé qiǔ měi rén zhé?
grass wood have root heart, why beg beauty person return?

Zhang Jiuling, Four Poems of Encountering, No. 2

Orchid leaves in spring: abundant, luxurious; cinnamon flowers in fall: bright, pure.
Happy, happy this life; spring and fall are joyous revels.
Who knows the lonely forest, hears the wind and so becomes like breeze.
Grass and wood have a rooted heart; why return to seek honor among men?

Even without Kang Laoshi to excoriate me I can see a handful of issues with this translation, which I'll start to bring up tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy your evening!

10: Scraps of Du Fu

It occurred to me that before I launch into some musings on the specific allusions in Du Fu's "The Beautiful Woman", it would be worth it to talk a bit about Du Fu the man. As one of a very few people occasionally referred to as China's 'Greatest Poet' (the 诗圣 or 诗史 to Li Bai's 诗仙), there is an enormous amount that has been written and surmised about Du Fu. I'm certain that Max and I will both return to him often in the future. For a brief outline of his life, there is of course his wikipedia page, but here's a quick thought on his work:

What we know of Du Fu comes mostly from the 1500 or so of his poems to have survived, themselves scattered pools of the sea of verse he probably wrote. In Du Fu's day, educated men wrote poetry the way we text or blog: for whatever purpose lay before them, in whatever format seemed convenient. Naturally, instead of the choice between Twitter and Wordpress, they chose among a series of strict poetic forms. Certainly also, poetry was not a mass media, and was treated by its writers and readers very differently from the way we treat internet ephemera. The analogy is nonetheless useful when one considers the volume of poetry produced by individuals, most of which was never published, and much of which consisted of reactions by the poet to things he saw, or did, or felt. From Du Fu, then, we have a collection of the best, choice scraps from a lifetime of daily collecting, all carefully arranged in precise lines, selected for purity of thought and precision of placement, both by the author (in terms of what he saved, published, or merely did not destroy), and by the many collectors, preservers, and students of his work since his death. The same can be said of the work of any of the poets represented in the 300 Poems of the Tang, but for Du Fu, a man of particular concern with history, the passing of time, and of the changing society around him, a master of every poetic technology of his age, a man called sometimes the "Poet Historian", it is all the more lovely an image.

I recommend, for a truly good collection of Du Fu translations, David Young's Du Fu: A Life in Poetry.

10: In Which I am Destroyed

I had a fantastic discussion with Kang Zhengguo today that eventually developed into his offering a full-blown evisceration of my translation below. If I were always lucky enough to be so eviscerated, I would be a much wiser person:

[If you want to study literature, you must understand] intertextuality. [Do you know that word?]

[Yes Teacher Kang, yes. I was think--]

[This word is a set phrase. It doesn't mean that. It comes from a poem by Li Yuannian from the Han Dynasty. "In the north there was a beautiful woman." Do you know Qu Yuan?]

[Oh. Yes, but I've only--]

[This one is a reference to Qu Yuan's Nine Songs. "Mountain Ghosts." "Oh if through mountain depths / once wandered a traveler." And this one's not really right at all.]

Kang Laoshi (for those who might not know, laoshi is a common Chinese honorific applied to teachers) is a tall, broad-shouldered, shuffling Chinese intellectual from Xi'an. He has a a crackly Shaanxi accent, and he speaks directly, through your words if they're in his way, but not interrupting, like sand being poured steadily down over trails of smoke in the air. I won't try to encapsulate his fascinating life into a few lame bon mots, but I recommend his memoir, which has been well translated into English, entitled Confessions.

Stay tuned for explorations of the above allusions, my thoughts on enjambment, and more! Same web-site, same web-time. So, tomorrow maybe.

10: Du Fu - The Beautiful Woman

Max has evinced a desire to translate in the order of the Hengtang Hermit Edition (sometimes called the "Retired Master of Hengtang", and certainly deserving a post of its own), but, wild free spirit that I am, I have chosen instead to jump around. And so I present the tenth poem of the collection, by Du Fu:

010 杜甫: 佳人

绝代有佳人,幽居在空谷。

自云良家子,零落依草木。

关中昔丧乱,兄弟遭杀戮。

官高何足论,不得收骨肉。

世情恶衰歇,万事随转烛。

夫婿轻薄儿,新人美如玉。

合昏尚知时,鸳鸯不独宿。

但见新人笑,那闻旧人哭!

在山泉水清,出山泉水浊。

侍婢卖珠回,牵萝补茅屋。

摘花不插发,采柏动盈掬。

天寒翠袖薄,日暮倚修竹。

jiā rén

jué dài yǒu jiā rén, yōu jū zài kōng gǔ

zì yún liáng jiā zǐ, líng luò yī cǎo mù

guān zhōng xī sāng luàn, xiōng dì zāo shā lù

guān gāo hé zú lùn, bù dé shōu gǔ ròu

shì qíng è shuāi xiē, wàn shì suí zhuǎn zhú

fū xù qīng bó ér, xīn rén měi rú yù

hé hūn shàng zhī shí, yuān yāng bù dú sù

dàn jiàn xīn rén xiào, nǎ wén jiù rén kū

zài shān quán shuǐ qīng, chū shān quán shuǐ zhuó

shì bì mài zhū huí, qiān luó bǔ máo wū

zhāi huā bù chā fā, cǎi bǎi dòng yíng jū

tiān hán cuì xiù báo, rì mù yǐ xiū zhú

the beautiful woman

cut generation has beautiful people, secluded inhabit in empty valley

self say good family son/child, alone fallen rely grass wood

central plain former-times death chaos, brothers met-disaster killed massacred

official high how enough discuss, not worth gather bones flesh

world condition evil fall cease, ten-thousand things follow turn candle

man son-in-law light thin, new people beautiful like jade

unite dim(meet at night) still know time (the Time of Knowing), male(duck) female(duck) not alone sleep

only/but see new people laugh, that hear old people cry

in mountain pool water clear, leave mountain pool water muddy

servant maid sell pearl return, lead-on/pull vine mend thatch house

pluck flower not insert hair, gather cypress move full/surplus hold-with-both-hands

sky cold emerald sleeve thin, sun dusk lean-on slender bamboo

__

The Beautiful Woman

In generations long past, there was a beautiful woman who lived alone in an empty valley.

Quoth she:

"I, the child of a good family, am fallen

empty, to lean on grass and wood.

Of late the lands Between the Passes are beset by death and chaos,

brothers cursed to kill and to massacre.

Of those high officials what can be said? They could not

order even their own bones and flesh.

The mood of the world is evil, fallen, exhausted, and all

the Ten Thousand Things flicker and turn like candle flame.

My husband was weak and thin,

his new woman beautiful as jade.

They met at dusk in the Time of Knowing, before the flowers closed,

mated ducks who would not pass the night alone.

He only sees that new one, how can he

hear this old one cry?

In the mountains, spring-water is clear.

Leave the mountains, and such pools thicken with mud.

My maid has gone to sell my pearls, and she returns

trailing vines to mend my thatched hut.

I pluck flowers but do not bind them into my hair, I seek

for cypress to fill my hands and carry home.

The sky is cold and my emerald sleeves thin, and

as the sun dims I lean on a slender bamboo."