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.

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?