The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (4 page)

    
Bell Sound

    
Five Years

    
SHU TING
(
1952-
)

    
Two or Three Incidents Recollected

    
Perhaps

    
Missing You

    
Dream of an Island

    
Mirror

    
A Night at the Hotel

    
YANG LIAN
(
1955-
)

    
An Ancient Children's Tale

    
An Elegy for Poetry

    
To a Nine-Year-Old Girl Killed in the Massacre

    
HA JIN
(
1956-
)

    
Our Words

    
They Come

Permissions Acknowledgments

IN THIS ANTHOLOGY WE HAVE ATTEMPTED TO BRING TOGETHER
into one volume the essence of Chinese poetry. The selection begins with the
Book of Songs
(the ancient anthology of folk songs supposedly collected by Confucius himself) and culminates in the political and experimental poetry of contemporary Chinese poets, many of whom are in political exile in the diaspora that followed the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. We have sought to represent in fine translation the well-established canon of great Chinese poems, and to deviate from that canon in ways we found interesting. Here you will find many of the familiar classical gems, popular favorites, and anthology pieces, and yet we have chosen to cut out old touchstones that don't fare well in translation in favor of including poems that read in English as poems in and of themselves. We have also attempted to adjust the canon, here and there, to shine a spotlight on fine poets whose work is often overlooked, and especially to make room for the poems of Chinese women. In the classical Chinese anthologies, the voices of women were largely ignored. Relegated to a few pages at the end of the volumes, they have survived the ravages of the centuries at significantly lower rates than those of men. The work of many of the finest Chinese women poets has been lost entirely. Those we know are represented by only a few poems or a few dozen poems, if we are lucky (while for many male poets, hundreds or even thousands of poems survive). Perhaps one could argue that we are skewing the canon by including a fifth of the fifty extant poems of the great woman poet

Li Qingzhao, while including only one thousandth of the poems of Lu You, who wrote more than ten thousand poems. However, our goal is not to be merely representative in this anthology. We have chosen to swell the selections of poets whose work we particularly admire (Tao Qian, Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, Han Shan, Su Shi, Mao Zedong, Bei Dao, and others) so that the reader can truly come to know their work. We consider such larger selections to be “pillars” that support the book, little books or chapbooks within the larger book that show the range and development and depth of the finest poets of this extraordinary tradition.

To aid the general reader (as well as students and scholars of Chinese) in navigating such a large selection of work by so many poets, we have provided an author index with both Pinyin and Wade-Giles transliterations of the authors' Chinese names. To help give readers the context necessary to ground their reading of this selection from three millennia of Chinese poetry, we have outfitted the book with an essay on the key issues that confront the English-language translator of classical and contemporary Chinese poetry, a short history of the development of Chinese literary forms, and introductions to each major historical period.

I would like to thank the poet and novelist Ha Jin for generously putting us in touch with Anchor Books and helping this project find a home. I would also like to thank our editor, LuAnn Walther, and John Siciliano at Anchor Books, for their patience with the book's slow development and for making the project possible. Although the majority of the selections in the volume have been team-translated by Chou Ping and myself, I supplemented our translations with exceptional examples by my father, Willis Barnstone, and by other poet-scholar-translators of Chinese, among them Arthur Waley, Sam Hamill, Kenneth Rexroth, David Hinton, Xu Haixin, Eliot Weinberger, Newton Liu, Ko Ching-p'o, Burton Watson, Michelle Yeh, Arthur Sze, Gregory B. Lee, John Cayley, A. C. Graham, J. P. Seaton, John Rosenwald, Mabel Lee, Sun Chu-chin, Bonnie S. McDougall, Chen Maiping, James A. Wilson, and Ho Yung. They have played an extraordinary role in carrying Chinese poetic genius across oceans and centuries and transplanting it in American soil, and I would like to thank them for allowing me to
reprint their translations here. Finally, I would like to thank my coeditor and primary cotranslator for his good humor and insight, which have made it a pleasure to work with him on this and other projects since we first met in my small apartment in Beijing in the winter of 1984.

—
TONY BARNSTONE

I ORIGINALLY CAME TO CHINESE POETRY AS AN AMERICAN
poet learning how to make the image. Like many other American poets, I was led to China by my interest in Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and other modernist poets who developed and modified their craft in conversation with the Chinese tradition. I came to China, in other words, to learn how to write poetry in English. This is also how I came to translation: as a way of extending the possibilities of poetry written in English. I wanted to learn from the Chinese how to write better poems in English, and to learn from the English-language tradition how to translate better from the Chinese. A translation, after all, is the child of parent authors from different cultures, and however assiduously the translator attempts to remove his or her name from the family tree, the genetic traces will be found in the offspring. What the translator brings to the equation can never be reduced to zero. Translators bring their linguistic patterns, cultural predispositions, and aesthetic biases to the creative act. They don't merely hold up a mirror to something old but give the original text new life in a strange environment. Even a perfectly translated poem—one in which every word is turned magically into its doppelgänger and in which form, sound, and rhetoric are retained—is still a product of misprision, and the translator does not so much create a text in the new language
equal
to the old one as a text that strives to be
equivalent
to the original.

This is particularly true of translators of Chinese poetry. From a set of monosyllabic, largely pictographic characters calligraphed perhaps on a Chinese painting, fan, or scroll, the poem proceeds through a hall of mirrors, reappearing on the other side of time, culture,
and speech as a few bytes of memory laser-etched on a white page in the polysyllabic, phonetic language of the English-language translator. The effect is that of moving from the iconic, graphics-based Macintosh operating system to the text-based DOS system. It is very difficult to make the systems compatible because the conceptual paradigms that underlie them are so radically different. We can create a neutral language that will transfer information between the two systems, but small things will change: the formatting will go awry, certain special characters will disappear if their correspondents are not found, and attached files—such as graphics and footnotes, which modify our sense of the text—may become separated or lost. Raw information will be preserved, but the aesthetic unity, the gestalt of the poem, will be lost in the translation. Literary translation is more than anything an attempt to translate that gestalt, which a machine is not sensitive enough to detect, much less reconstruct.

Those who discount the creative element in translation believe that translations should consist of word-for-word cribs in which syntax, grammar, and form are all maintained, and in which the translator is merely a facilitator who allows the original poem to speak for itself in a new language. Poetry, however, can't be made to sing through a mathematics that doesn't factor in the creativity of the translator. The literary translator is like the musician who catalyzes the otherwise inert score that embodies Mozart's genius. In that act, musician and composer become a creative team. However, it won't necessarily be good music just because the musician can keep time and scratch out the correct notes in the correct order. Musical skill inevitably enters into the equation. Fidelity comes from a musician's deeper understanding of the music. As John Frederick Nims says, “The worst infidelity is to pass off a bad poem in one language as a good poem in another.”

From the early metrical and end-rhymed translations of Herbert Giles to the so-called free-verse translations of Ezra Pound, Arthur Waley, and Kenneth Rexroth, Chinese poems have been reinvented in English. The Chinese poem in English is like a stolen car sent to a chop shop to be stripped, disassembled, fitted with other parts, and presented to the consumer public with a new coat of paint. But
despite its glossy exterior, it's a Chinese engine that makes it run, and fragments of the poem's old identity can be glimpsed in its lines, the purr of its engine, the serial number, which we may still be able to read. In these thoughts on translation, I wish to discuss ways I've found of negotiating between Chinese and English-language poetic paradigms, and to touch on the aspects of English that have proved compatible with the Chinese poem, which has been a part of Western poetic traffic since the early years of modernism.

Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi says, “The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap…. Words exist because of meaning; once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?” Words are the net we cast upon the waters in search of knowledge, meaning, enlightenment. Ultimately, though, the fish has to come to us of its own volition (Native American hunters believe that when the hunter is in harmony with nature, the animal comes to him and sacrifices itself). In his poem “The Placid Style,” Sikong Tu, a famous ninth-century poet whose “The Twenty-four Styles of Poetry” is a Daoist treatise on how to write poems, speaks of the need to find poetic inspiration through
lack of effort:
“You meet this style by not trying deeply;/it thins to nothing if you approach.” There is always something ephemeral about the knowledge behind a poem, about the inspiration that creates it—or that creates a translation. To find a poem in translation we need to discover what I call “the poem behind the poem.” Sometimes we can't find it just by looking; we also have to see. Sometimes we can't find it by trying; it comes to us while we're doing something else.

Let's take as an example the following poem, “River Snow” by Liu Zongyuan—translated by Chou Ping and me. But before discussing it, let's take a moment to read it out loud, slowly. Empty our minds. Visualize each word.

“River Snow” is considered a prime example of minimum words/maximum message and has been the subject of numerous landscape paintings. It is terrifically imagistic: the twenty Chinese characters of the poem create a whole landscape, sketch an intimate scene, and suggest a chill, ineffable solitude. To get this poem across in translation, we strove to reproduce the sequential way the characters unfold in the reader's mind. The syntax is particularly important because it is perfectly constructed. We walk into this poem as if walking into a building, and the spaces that open up around us and the forms that revise themselves at each step unfold according to the architect's master plan.

The first two lines create a fine parallelism: birds passing through the sky leave no trace, just as human traces are effaced in the mountain paths. It makes me think of the Old English kenning for the sea: “whale path.” Here the sky is a bird path. In the second line, it's clear that the snow is the active agent in erasing humanity from the natural scene, yet snow is never mentioned. After the last trace of humanity disappears with the word “erased,” a human presence is rebuilt in this landscape, character by character, trace by trace: “One boat, bamboo hat, bark cape” and—the sum of these clues— “an old man.” These first two lines sketch a painterly scene: the vast emptiness of the sky above and the snowy solitude of the landscape below have the same effect on the reader as a glance at a Chinese landscape painting. And then the tiny strokes that create a man in the third line direct our imagination deeper into the poem, as if we had discovered a tiny fisherman's figure on the scroll. The next line tells us what the old man is doing. He is alone and fishing in the cold river. The Chinese word for fishing is “hooking,” so we used “angling” for its specific meaning of “fishing with a hook.” We see the man fishing the river, almost fishing
for
the river. Silence. We take in the last character, which sums up the entire poem: “Snow.”

Snow is the white page on which the old man is marked, through which an ink river flows. Snow is the mind of the reader, on which these pristine signs are registered, only to be covered with more snow and erased. The old man fishing is the reader meditating on this quiet scene like a saint searching himself for some sign of a
soul. The birds that are absent, the human world that is erased, suggest the incredible solitude of a meditating mind, and the clean, cold, quiet landscape in which the man plies his hook is a mind-scape as well. Thus, there is a Buddhist aspect to the poem, and Liu Zongyuan's old man is like Wallace Stevens's “Snow Man,” whose mind of winter is washed clean by the snowy expanse. He is “the listener, who listens in the snow,/And, nothing himself, beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

“River Snow” is a perfectly balanced poem, a tour de force that quietly, cleanly, easily creates its complexly simple scene. To merely paraphrase it in translation is to ignore the poem behind the poem. The translator must discover the poem visually, conceptually, culturally, and emotionally, and create a poem in English with the same mood, simplicity, silence, and depth. Each word must be necessary. Each line should drop into a meditative silence, should be a new line of vision, a new revelation. The poem must be empty, pure perception; the words of the poem should be like flowers, opening one by one, then silently falling. As William Carlos Williams was fond of saying, a poem is made up of words and the spaces between them.

If this technique is taken to extremes, it can create a poem that sounds too choppy. The magical economy of “River Snow” lies in the unfolding of visual clues in a meditative sequence of discrete images, but with too many dashes, colons, or periods, the poem can seem fragmented. Alternatively, a translation that fills in the gaps between images can seem wordy and prolix, with prepositions and articles that make the lines fluid but dilute them in the process. The addition of a few parts of speech or an unfortunate choice of punctuation can significantly alter the translation and affect the reading experience.

While it is difficult to translate economically from a language that typically eliminates articles and pronouns, one can nevertheless attempt to create a translation that reads as cleanly and concisely as possible. We consider it a great success if we can translate a five-character line of Chinese poetry into a five- or six-word line in English, though this is not always possible. Too often translators will translate a seven-character line into two full lines of poetry in
English, which makes the poem read like Walt Whitman, when the Chinese is much closer to Emily Dickinson.

The poetry of Wang Wei—the poet I've translated most extensively from the Chinese—is often spare and clean, like “River Snow.” Each character resonates in emptiness like the brief birdcalls he records in one of his poems. The inventor of the monochrome technique, Wang Wei was the most famous painter of his day. In his work, both painting and poetry were combined through the art of calligraphy—poems written on paintings. As Su Shi said of him, “His pictures are poems and his poems pictures,” and as Francois Cheng has pointed out, painting and calligraphy are both arts of the
stroke
, and both are created with the same brush. I like to imagine each character in “River Snow” sketched on the page: a brushstroke against the emptiness of a Chinese painting—like the figure of the old man himself surrounded by all that snow.

The most famous piece by Zen-influenced composer John Cage was titled “4′33″” (1952). The audience came in and sat down, and for four minutes and thirty-three seconds nothing happened. The audience was the music. Their rustlings, coughs, chatter, the creaking of seats, perhaps the rain on the roof of the auditorium—all this was the music. In classical Chinese painting the white space defines what forms emerge, and in Buddhism emptiness is wholeness. The perfect man's mind, according to Zhuangzi, is empty as a mirror, and according to the Daoist aesthetics of Chinese painting, each stroke of the brush is
yin
(blackness, woman) upon
yang
(light, whiteness, man). All the empty space reacts to one brushstroke upon the page. Each additional stroke makes the space adjust itself into a new composition, in much the way each great poem makes all of literary history readjust itself, as T S. Eliot wrote. To make a Chinese poem in English we must allow silence to seep in around the edges, to define the words the way the sky's negative space in a painting defines the mountains.

As I stated earlier, I think the poem in translation must carry on a conversation with other poems in order to discover itself. For me, “River Snow” calls to mind Japanese Zen poems and poems of the English Romantics in addition to poems from the Chinese tradition, and it is this conversation that allows me to hear its silence.

Consider these lines from the poem “People's Abuse” by Japanese
Zen poet Muso Soseki (1275–1351), translated by W. S. Mer-win and Soiku Shigematsu:

In Soseki's image, the flying birds pass through the sky without leaving a trace, as in “River Snow,” which also shares with Soseki's lines a distinction between the human world and the natural world. Now consider these lines from Zhu Xizhen's poem “Fisherman, to the Tune of ‘A Happy Event Draws Near,'” in which the fisherman

The fisherman on the water is like the birds in the sky, whose trackless flight is a symbol of the enlightened mind's passage through the world without grasping or holding or desiring. Compare “On Nondependence of the Mind,” a poem by Dogen (1200–1253)— founder of the Soto school of Japanese Zen Buddhism—translated by Brian Unger and Kazuaki Tanahashi: