China and the West

Bynner, Witter. Translating Wang Wei [ID D32337].
Just as Tu Fu and Li Po are often spoken of in conjunction by the Chinese, so are two other great poets of the T'ang Dynasty, Meng Hao-jan and Wang Wei. The latter, who lived 699-759 A. D., is distinguished among the poets of China by a deep and beautiful optimism. The melancholy that wounded Tu Fu and Meng Hao-jan seems not to have touched Wang Wei beneath the surface.
And, whereas Li Po sought in wine solace from the ills and sorrows of life, Wang Wei found an abiding content in the "green and healing hills" and in the highly humbled and attuned mysticism of Lao-tzu's teaching.
As a young man, Wang Wei became Assistant Secretary of State; but at the age of thirty-one, when his wife died, he left his post and retired to live near Mount Chung-nan. Two of his poems about Mount Chung-nan are published in this number, both breathing the sober sweetness and simplicity of his retired life. One of them begins with the line, "My heart in middle age found the Way"; the Chinese word for the Way being Tao, the first character of the title of Lao-tzu's book, Tao-Te-Ching, which may be translated in whole as The Way and the Exemplification. Taoism appears, then, to have been the consolation of Wang Wei, although Professor Herbert M. Giles, in his volume Chinese Literature, declares it to have been Buddhism. We realize, not only from the direct statement in this one poem, but from the spirit of all his poems, that he had serenely accepted the Way, the natural way of the universe.
There was for a while a strong division between the followers of Lao-tzu and the followers of Confucius. Po Chu-yi ridiculed Taoist doctrines in the following four lines, crisply translated by Professor Giles:
"Who know speak not, who speak know naught,"
Are words from Lao-tzu's lore.
What then becomes of Lao-tzu's own
Five thousand words or more?
The answer is that Lao-tzu's words, fused now with both Buddhism and Confucianism, have become an integral part of the religion of China. Here are two characteristic quotations from his gospel:
Follow diligently the Way in your own heart, but make no display of it to the world.
Do nothing, and all things will be done.
Among the selections printed in this issue, note the last two lines of the poem, Answering Vice-Prefect Chang: a question asked in terms of complicated morality and answered in terms of simple happiness:
You ask me about good and evil?
Hark, on the lake there's a fisherman singing.
This does not mean that the ideal Taoist literally "did nothing." As a matter of fact Wang Wei was a physician, a high government official, a great poet, and also one of China's most illustrious painters. (A scroll attributed to him is on view at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.) His activities, however, were all in flow with universal forces: they sang like the fisherman — there was no fret, no jealousy, no self-exaltation, no irritated struggle; only harmony, humility, exalted identity with nature — a true and wide knowledge of values, making him a master of words, a master of the brush, and a master of life. Yes, there was a sure gaiety in Wang Wei, instanced in his Message to P'ai Ti, the fellow-poet with whom he longed to drink again and to "sing a wild poem"; or in the verses already mentioned, My Retreat at Chung-nan, in which he happily anticipated the day when he should "meet an old wood-cutter, and talk and laugh and never return." In the last two lines of the poem to P'ai Ti, he addressed his friend, according to a too frequent Chinese manner, by the name of Chieh-yu, who was a recluse of the Ch'u kingdom, famous somewhat for drinking, but more for stopping Confucius' chariot and warning him against politics with the song:
O phoenix, O phoenix,
Virtue is corrupted!
What is past is past all counsel,
What is future may be moulded.
Come away! Come away!
Politics are dangerous!
And Wang Wei's reference in the final line of this same poem is to the place where he will be drinking with his friend; yet Five Willows is the place named, where long ago T'ao Ch'ien had lived, another famous recluse who was both a great writer and a great drinker.
The last two lines of the poem In my Lodge at Wang-Ch'uan after a Long Rain, clear and significant as they are in themselves, yet contain, for the Chinese reader, enriching allusion and connotation. There was once a scholar, Yang-tzu, who, before he became a student of Lao-tzu, was highly respected and honored by his fellow-men. Later, through the many years of his discipleship, he lost his prestige, and even a boor would take precedence over him; but he was glad because he had formerly been proud and pretentious. The last line refers to a hermit who was fond of sea-gulls; they followed him wherever he went. His father asked why they were not afraid and bade the son bring him some; but next day, when the hermit went out intending to take them to his father, they all flew away.
The poem in the group most in need of explanation, because of its allusion to historic events and personages, is The Beautiful Hsi-shih; and the last two lines of A Song of Young Girls from Lo-Yang also require the following summary:
During the Chou Dynasty, when the Yueh kingdom was conquered by the Wu kingdom, the Yueh king still held his throne and plotted to throw off the tributary yoke. Aided by his able minister, Fan Li, he planned to distract the king of Wu with women. Fan Li searched through the Yueh kingdom for girls to beguile him and came upon Hsi-shih washing clothes by a lake. Conquering his own love for her, he fiercely persuaded her to his scheme. She remained at court for some time; and the Wu king, in his infatuation, forgot affairs of state. Weakened by this means, the Wu kingdom was overcome by the Yueh kingdom; and Fan Li eventually accepted Hsi-shih as his reward. The whimsical phrasing of the line "If by wrinkling their brows they can copy her beauty" alludes to the fact that she had heart trouble,
and it was said that her drawn brows, her look of gentleness in suffering, which the girls of her time tried unsuccessfully to imitate, made her more beautiful.
One might enlarge upon references in others of the poems. For instance, the quatrain called Lines contains the phrase "my silken window." This is not a decorative adjective. It merely means that, before the use of paper or glass, windows in China were of silk. The last line of the same poem is made lovelier by knowledge that the mei, or plum blossom, is in China the earliest flower of spring. It is interesting to know that A Song at Wei-Cheng, which was written for music, is still popular through China as a song of farewell, and that to this day "since we picked willow-branches at Wei-Cheng" means "since we parted." The beauty of the four lines called
A Parting, with its simple, profound expression of the abiding presence of friendly nature and the transient presence of friendly man, is heightened by the reader's response to the grace of the name Wang Sun, which from a dim and ancient origin still means in China a noblehearted young scholar, or sometimes lover. But on the whole, these T'ang poems are so valid and universal in uttering beauty that they may vitally enter the poetic consciousness of a westerner still ignorant of the various allusions.
Translating the work of Wang Wei and others in the Three Hundred Poems of the Tang Dynasty, Dr. Kiang and I have tried constantly to transfer the Chinese idiom into an equivalent idiom in English, rather than to stress the local novelty and pungency of Chinese phrasing. It would be as erroneous to overemphasize the component radicals of a Chinese character as to overemphasize the component meanings of such words in English as day-break, breakfast, nightfall or landscape. The delicate importance of the translator's office lies in bringing from one language to another the rounded and proportioned effect of a whole poem. And we, conscientiously, have tried to make felt, in our translations, the high honesty and wise humanness of poets who have in many ways, and in one Wei especially, lived closer to the heart of life than importunate passion brings the poets of the West.