8: Mountains and Aspects

Footnotes to the previous Du Fu poem:

1. Daizong refers to Mt. Tai, the quintessential Chinese 'sacred mountain', so the poem is about Du Fu contemplating Mt. Tai as he looks on it, or from its heights down onto the world. In China a 'mountain' refers not to a single peaked formation, but to a collection of what Westerners might call individual mountains or hills; a system of heights, like /\/\/\ instead of /\.
2. During the Spring and Autumn period, the border between Qi and Lu ran through Mt. Tai, so this use of the place names parallels the later use of Yin and Yang in the way it divides and dualizes the mountain.
3. Great Transformations is a philosophical term that makes reference to the basic operations of nature itself. Literally, the two characters mean "Creation / Change" but I have chosen "Great Transformations" for reasons I explain below.
4. Yin and Yang are familiar to many in the West as the Twin Forces that underlie certain strands of Chinese metaphysics. In many ancient texts, such as the Book of Songs, they also refer to the northern and southern faces of mountains.

8: Look on Sacred Peaks, Du Fu

Now how about Old Daizong

Qi and Lu are yet green here

Great Transformations cherish his aspect

His Yin and Yang cut morning from evening

The hot springs in his breast birth strata of cloud

His hard glare receives returning birds

Gathering facing his final peak

Many mountains are made small below

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.

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.

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."