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.

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?