China and the West

Williams, William Carlos. Two new books by Kenneth Rexroth [ID D29177].
One hundred poems from the Chinese
Kenneth Rexroth has recently translated One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, one of the most brilliantly sensitive books of poems in the American idiom it has ever been my good fortune to read.
It must be amazing to the occidental reader, acquainted we'll say with Palgrave's Golden Treasury, to realize that the Chinese have a practice and art of the poem, which in subtlety of lyrical candor, far exceeds his own. I am grateful to him. Nothing comparable and as relaxed is to be found I think in the whole of English or American verse, and in French or Spanish verse, so far as I know. So that it constitutes a unique experience to read what has been set down here.
Womanhood has been engraved on our minds in unforgettable terms. Oh, I know that women can be bitches, you don't have to be a homo'sexual to learn that, but the exact and telling and penetrant realization of a woman's reality, of her lot, has never been better set down. It is tremendously moving, as none of our well known attempts, say, throughout the Renaissance have ever succeeded in being.
This is a feat of overwhelming importance. It is not a question of a man or woman's excess in experience or suffering, for whatever this amounted to, they have had to do; but that in their mutual love they have been made to bear their fates. What does it matter what a woman and a man in love will do for themselves? Someone will succeed and someone will die. In the poem suddenly we realize that we know that and perceive in a single burst of vision, in a flash that dazzles the reader.
The poet Tu Fu (713-770) was the first, with him it begins. Homer and Sappho with their influence on our poetry had been dead for over a thousand years. The use of the metaphor, pivotal in our own day, had not been discovered by the Chinese in these ancient masterpieces. The metaphor comes as a flash, nascent in the line, which flares when the image is suddenly shifted and we are jolted awake just as when the flint strikes the steel. The same that the Chinese poet seeks more simply when the beauty of his images bursts at one stroke directly upon us.
Dawn over the Mountains
The city is silent,
Sounds drains away
Buildings vanish in the light of dawn,
Cold sunlight comes on the highest peak,
The dust of night
Clings to the hills,
The earth opens,
The river boats are vague,
The still sky—
The sound of falling leaves.
A huge doe comes to the garden gate,
Lost from the herd,
Seeking its fellows.
(Tu Fu)
Where is the poem? without metaphor among these pages so effortlessly put down. Occidental art seems more than a little strained compared to this simplicity. You cannot say there is no art since we are overwhelmed by it. The person of the poet, the poetess, no, the woman herself (when it is a woman), speaks to us... in an unknown language, to our very ears, so that we actually weep with her and what she says (while we are not aware of her secret) is that she breathes. . . that she is alive as we are.
Where is it hidden in the words? Our own clumsy poems, the best of them, following the rules of grammar . . . trip themselves up. What is a sonnet of Shakespeare beside this limpidity but a gauche, a devised pretext? and it takes fourteen lines rigidly to come to its conclusion. But with bewildering simplicity we see the night end, the dawn come in and a wild thing approach a garden. . . . But the compression without being crowded, the opposite of being squeezed into a narrow space, a few lines, a universe, from the milky way . . . vividly appears before us.
But where has it been hidden? because it is somewhere among the words to our despair, if we are poets, or pretend to be, it is really a simple miracle, like that of the loaves and the fishes. . . .
Where does the miracle lodge, to have survived so unaffectedly the years translation to a foreign language and not only a foreign language but a language of fundamentally different aspect from that in which the words were first written? The metaphor is total, it is overall, a total metaphor.
But there are two parts to every metaphor that we have known heretofore: the object and its reference—one of them is missing in these Chinese poems that have survived to us and survived through the years, to themselves also. They have been jealously, lovingly guarded.. .Where does it exist in the fabric of the poem? so tough that it can outlast copper and steel ... a poem?
—and really laughs and cries! it is alive.
—It is as frightening as it is good.
And the Chinese as a race have built upon it to survive, the words of Tu Fu, a drunken poet, what I mean is DRUNK! and a bum, who did not do perhaps one constructive thing with himself in his life—or a Bodenheim.
I go to a reception and find a room crowded with people whom 1 cannot talk with except one, a man (or a woman perhaps) or one who wearies me with his insistencies. . . . When a few miraculous lines that keep coming into my head transport me through space a thousand years into the past....
"A magic carpet" the ancients called it. It costs nothing, it's not the least EXPENSIVE!
Look at the object: an unhappy woman, no longer young, waking in her lonely bed and looking over a moonlit valley, that is all. Or a man drunk or playing with his grandchildren who detain him so that he can¬not keep an appointment to visit a friend. . . . And what? A few fragile lines which have proved indestructible!
Have you ever thought that a cannon blast or that of an atomic bomb is absolutely powerless beside this?—unless you extinguish man (and woman), the whole human race. A smile would supersede it, totally.
I raise the curtains and go out
To watch the moon. Leaning on the
Balcony, I breathe the evening
Wind from the west, heavy with the
Odors of decaying Autumn.
The rose-jade of the river
Blends with the green-jade of the void.
Hidden in the grass a cricket chirps.
Hidden in the sky storks cry out.
I turn over and over in
My heart the memories of Other days. Tonight as always
There is no one to share my thoughts.
(Shu Chu Senn)
or this:
The Visitors
I have had asthma for a
Long time. It seems to improve
Here in this house by the river.
It is quiet too. No crowds
Bother me. I am brighter here
And more rested. I am happy here.
When someone calls at my thatched hut
My son brings me my straw hat
And I go out to gather
A handful of fresh vegetables.
It isn't much to offer.
But it is given in friendship.
(Tu Fu)
These men (a woman among the best of them) were looking at direct objects when they were writing, the transition from their pens or brushes is direct to the page. It was a beautiful object (not always a beautiful object, sometimes a horrible one) that they produced. It is incredible that it survived. It must have been treasured as a rare phenomenon by the people to be cared for and reproduced at great pains.
But the original inscriptions, so vividly recording the colors and moods of the scene . . . were invariably put down graphically in the characters (not words), the visual symbols that night and day appeared to the poet. The Chinese calligraphy must have contributed vastly to this.
Our own 'Imagists' were right to brush aside purely grammatical conformations. What has grammar to do with poetry save to trip up its feet in that mud? It is important to a translator but that is all. But it is important to a translator, as Kenneth Rexroth well knows. But mostly he has to know the construction of his own idiom into which he is rendering his text, when to ignore its more formal configurations.
This is where the translations that Kenneth Rexroth has made are brilliant. His knowledge of the American idiom has given him complete freedom to make a euphonious rendering of a text which has defied more cultured ears to this date. It may seem to be undisciplined but it is never out of the translator's measured control. Mr. Rexroth is a genius in his own right, inventing a modern language, or following a vocal tradition which he raises here to great distinction. Without a new language into which the poems could be rendered their meaning would have been lost.
Finally, when he comes to the end of introduction, he says, "So here are two selections of poetry, one the work of a couple of years, the other the personal distillate of a lifetime. I hope they meet the somewhat different ends I have in view. I make no claim for the book as a piece of Oriental scholarship. Just some poems."
At the very end there are data, notes, ten pages of them, annotated page for page, on the individual poems. And two and a half pages of Select Bibliography. The translations into English began in 1870 with The Chinese Classics, James Legge. Included is a mention of Ezra Pound's Cathay, 1915.
In the French there is, dating from 1862, the Poesies Chinoises de I'Epoque Thang, and, among others, that of Judith Gautier's, 1908, Livre de Jade. The German versions are still those of Klabund.