The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (6 page)

I have argued elsewhere that Chinese poetry in English has deviated deeply from the form, aesthetics, and concerns of the Chinese originals and that this is the result of willful mistranslation by modernist and postmodern poet-translators. In the first decades of the
last century, Chinese poetry was a powerful weapon in the battle against Victorian form. It was brought over into English in forms resembling the free verse that it helped to invent. Rhyme and accentual meter were quietly dropped from the equation because—unlike Chinese use of parallelism, caesura, minimalism, implication, and clarity of image—they weren't useful in the battle for new poetic form. However, we are now in a new century and need no longer be constrained by past literary conflicts. While the elimination of rhyme and meter from translations of Chinese poetry has created a distinguished English-language tradition of “Chinese” free verse— one that has influenced successive generations of American poets— it has also denied the poem its right to sing.

I am just as much to blame for this as other translators of Chinese poetry. The simple truth is that most of the time I am trying to bring across into English poetic effects as well as a literal accuracy that I judge will be damaged by too much attention to sound. However, in recent years I have increasingly attempted to sneak in the pleasures of sound, as in this translation of Du Fu's “Thoughts While Night Traveling,” cotranslated with Chou Ping:

To emphasize sound in this poem, we cast around for lucky synonyms, choosing for example “splays” in line 3 over our original translation, “broadens,” and changing line 6 from “my career over” to “my career done” to get the off rhyme with “known.” So we created a loose form in English—four or five beats per line to correspond to the five-character lines of the original, and a use of off and true rhyme to emphasize the parallelism of the couplet structure. Of course, the Chinese
lu shi
(regulated verse) poem
doesn't rhyme in couplets. It has a single rhyme in the first couplet that is repeated every other line throughout the poem. Perhaps the next example, “Facing Snow,” also by Du Fu, comes a bit closer:

In our first attempt, below, sound was not a primary concern:

The revision uses the long “o” of “ghosts,” “poems,” “snow,” “stove,” and “sorrow” to suggest a regulated verse rhyme scheme. To achieve this we needed to invert the syntax and rearrange elements so the lines in English would end on a rhyme sound. Even so, I am not entirely convinced that the revision for sound is an improvement. As one sinologist pointed out to me, “With one finger I write in the air,
sorrow”
specifies a word that the poet is writing in the air, whereas the original is more ambiguous, closer to “With one finger I write my sorrows in the air,” in which the nature of the sorrow is left open and resonant.

What a pleasure it was for me as an American translator to encounter a sonnet sequence by twentieth-century Chinese poet Feng Zhi, written after he fled to the countryside to escape the Japanese
bombing of Kunming. In the past Feng Zhi's sonnets have always been translated into free verse in English, but we decided to re-create them as sonnets, preferring to use consonance, assonance, and slant rhyme where possible, instead of true rhyme. Here is one, “Sonnet 16”:

Translating the poem this way was difficult, certainly more difficult than it would have been to translate it as free verse, and yet in some way it was a relief. How wonderful to know that all the poetic skills I had developed writing sonnets in English could be applied so directly to Chinese poetry. Once I discovered that I could translate Feng Zhi's sonnets as English sonnets with both accuracy and formal integrity, I had found the answer to the question that has vexed me for nearly two decades. Is it worse to pass off free verse translations in English as Chinese poems or to try to maintain meter and rhyme, running the risk of creating sing-songy, jingly, archaic-sounding poems that lose the plain and revelatory power that free verse translations embody so well?

I don't recommend a return to the practice of translating Chinese poems into rhyming iambics (generally, this overwhelms the Chinese poem). But I do think that as much attention should be given to the way the Chinese poem triggers sound as to how it triggers sight, and that translators should use the whole poetic arsenal— syllabics, sprung rhythm, off rhyme, half rhyme, internal rhyme, assonance,
consonance, and so forth—to try to give the English version of the poem a deeply resonant life. Too often translators have given Chinese poets the resolution powers of an electron microscope, but have cut off their ears. By being cognizant of the poem's song, we are less likely to be deaf to the poem behind the poem, and less likely to be satisfied with clumsy rhythms and a lack of aural pleasure.

If my examples are notable less for their similarity than for the apparent divergence of the translation principles by which they were created, this is the essence of my argument. There are many roads to China. For the Chinese poem's voice to be heard, the poem behind the poem may require word-by-word fidelity—that is, translators may need to restrain their inventiveness. Or the poem may require a radical departure from convention to arrive where it began. In either case, the translator must keep faith with the deeper need that poetry fulfills in our lives. Like a cricket's song, a poem is an arrangement of sound that is also an action affecting the reader. If we are very quiet, we can feel its tiny pulse fluttering in our wrists. If we listen like Stevens's snow man, if we become nothing long enough, we may discover not what the poem
says
but what it
does.
A poem is a machine made out of words, as William Carlos Williams once wrote, and like a wheelbarrow or a can opener or a telephone, it is a machine reduced to an economic efficiency of parts and designed for a specific function. It doesn't matter whether we take the original poem apart with an Allen wrench or a Phillips screwdriver, or whether we build the translation out of wood or plastic or burnished copper. What matters is that the gears engage and the wheels turn and that the poem's
work
is done in the translation as well. All translation is mistranslation, but a translator's work and joy are to rig something out of the materials at hand that opens cans, or carries hay, or sends voices through the lines. We will never create a truly Chinese poem in English, but in this way we can extend the possibilities of the translation, which may in turn reveal to the imaginations of English-language poets unforeseen continents.

—
TONY BARNSTONE

CHINA IS A NATION CREATED BY ITS THOUSANDS OF POETS
, who have imagined and extended and redrawn its boundaries as well as the contours of its landscape from year to year, from dynasty to dynasty. For millennia, poetry has played an essential role in shaping its collective consciousness and maintaining the continuity of Chinese civilization. Neither time nor space nor linguistic change restrict free communication in the nation because of the nature of the Chinese written language: a system of pictographs and ideographs that convey their meaning, divorced from their sounds, which, after all, vary according to the time period, the region, and the city or provincial dialect. So when a contemporary Chinese recites a poem written in the Tang dynasty (618–907), the poem remains pure, its meaning virtually constant, even though more than a thousand years have elapsed and the poet's modern speech would be unintelligible to the original author. But the original meaning does not remain intact, of course, since reception, audience, and aesthetics vary according to reader and period, and allusions and expressions that were common in one era might become strange in another. Regional and temporal change in pronunciation also affect the reception of the poem, because Chinese poetry typically uses rhyme and, particularly after the fifth century, has often used tonal prosody (similarly, in the English tradition Chaucer was until recently considered an irregular prosodist, because later generations did not understand how to sound out Middle English). To understand how the Chinese have imagined their poetry, it may help to go back to the earliest Chinese verse and trace its development to its maturity in the Tang dynasty, and then to pursue it further as verse is transformed in later dynasties.

The general Chinese term for poetry is
shi
Shi
also refers more specifically to a sort of tonally regulated verse that became popular in the Tang dynasty, as well as to older forms of poetry that were not tonally regulated, such as rhymed prose (
fu
), an elegant and elaborate blending of poetry with prose passages. While verses are normally independent from music, songs can be further classified into folk song poetry (
ge
), lyric songs (
ci
), and opera arias (
qu
). We will visit each of these forms in turn, but it is best to begin with the primary source of Chinese poetry, the
Book of Songs.

Dating back a thousand years before the Tang, the
Book of Songs
is the earliest surviving anthology of Chinese poems. It was collected in Northern China from the eleventh century to the sixth century bce. For a modern Chinese, the
Book of Songs
is not at all easy to read. Its diction is often archaic, and many of its references need footnotes. Since the pronunciation of some characters has changed over time, the modern ear cannot always detect the original rhyme scheme. Despite these difficulties, the poems have elegant structural characteristics that aid in their reading and enjoyment. Accompanied by music, the short stanzas often contain fully or partially repeated lines to create an effect of refrain. In this early phase of Chinese poetry, verse and music were not clearly separated.

Although line length varies, especially in folk songs, over ninety percent of the lines in the
Book of Songs
consist of four characters. The four-character line is the dominant form in early Chinese poetry. Its use reflects a desire for balance: the standard pattern of rhythm in these songs is two beats per line, with each beat consisting of two characters. There are exceptions, however, with some poems having stanzas consisting of lines with seven or more characters.

Different traditions of poetry coexist in the
Book of Songs:
hymns of religious solemnity, folk songs of emotional spontaneity,
and structurally symmetrical literati poetry. Structural symmetry is a crucial element in the evolution of the Chinese poem. It may be seen in the first stanza of the very first poem from the
Book of Songs:

Since Chinese characters are monosyllabic, they are ideal for creating visual and aural symmetries. We can imagine the paired lines as mirror images of each other in terms of syllables and rhythm. In this poem every two characters form a beat, every two beats a line, every two lines a pair, and every two pairs a stanza. Each pair forms a complete sentence, and each stanza presents a complete idea. All five stanzas in this poem are structurally identical. As the poems in the
Book of Songs
have a strong tendency to have lines constructed in pairs, their architectural balance offers a perfect example of how the gestalt of yin-yang symmetry in Chinese poetry came into being. It also allows us to trace the ancient psychological and aesthetic need for lines to be paired and balanced into the development of “regulated verse,” with its preoccupation with metrical and phonic balance.

Though many songs evince this perfect symmetry, the poems from the
Book of Songs
that we have translated in this volume are primarily folk songs whose forms are often less rigid. These folk songs have been popular, and often imitated, in the Chinese tradition; they also read well in translation because their themes speak to universal human emotions and raise fewer cultural obstacles for their English-language readers. Consider: