China and the West

Bynner, Witter. New China in old verse : review. [ID D32341].
New China in Verse, by Cheng Chi-yu. The Gillick Press, Berkeley, California, 1944
The Tang emperor, Hsüan-tsung (685-761), about whom Po Chü-yi (772-846) wrote his great narrative, The Song of Unending Sorrow, was himself on occasion a poet. One of his poems, / Pass through the Lu Dukedom with a Sigh and a Sacrifice for Confucius, begins, as Dr. Kiang Kang-hu and I have translated it in The Jade Mountain,
O Master, how did the world repay Your life of long solicitude?
Cheng Chi-yu in 1944 begins a poem to Confucius,
O Master! Why did you fail to complete The social reforms which you instituted?
Hsiian-tsung, depressed by the pathos of mortality, concludes,
Can this sacrifice I watch here between two temple-pillars Be the self-same omen of death you dreamed of long ago?
Cheng Chi-yu, impressed by the mechanistic importance of West- ern civilization, concludes,
You loved antiquity but lacked the creative mind, so that na scientific achievements have been made in the territory under your influence.
This statement and a few touches such as
...funnels send their smoke To the mountains afar;
While the sparks from the machines of the welders Light many a distant star may be a voice expressive of "new China"; but on the whole
Mr. Cheng's themes and phrasing (though I am convinced that no one should try rhymes in a foreign language) are markedly akin to poems as written in his homeland a thousand years ago.
Po Chü-yi has the murdered Lady Yang send a message from heaven to Emperor Hsiüan-tsung (these lines also from The Jade Mountain, ...we wished to fly in heaven, two birds with the wings of one, And to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree.
In Wedding Picture by the modern poet
The echo answers,
We two who are one, like branches of the same stock, wish to be Darby and Joan.
Such acknowledged classical allusion is fair enough; but in another poem, On Climbing the Yellow Crane Terrace, a favorite theme of the ancients, the modern lines weave together lines from two more T'ang poets. Mr. Cheng's
...mingling with Beauty among the flowers,
I, through the dream of an afternoon nap, have forgotten myself
closely resembles Liu Chang-ch'ing's
...mingling with Truth among the flowers,
I have forgotten what to say
and Mr. Cheng's
...twilight grows dark with the mist of grief is almost identical with Tsuei Hao's
...twilight grows dark with a mist of grief.
And then Mr. Cheng's
POETRY : A Magazine of Verse
Walking on the rocky path is harder than climbing to the blue sky
is like Li Po's
Such travelling is harder than scaling the blue sky,
Mr. Cheng's
...my heritage is lost through disorder and famine
like Po Chü-yi's
My heritage lost through disorder and famine
and Mr. Cheng's
Cease for a while, Oh, tumult of the world
like Tu Fu's
Hush for a moment, O tumult of the world.
Very little in New China in Verse seems to me to be new or to depart from traditional theme and phrasing, certainly Mr. Cheng presents no such showing as modernists in Western verse who have devised innovation or cast the old aside. Perhaps no one has thought before to say, as Mr. Cheng says in A Song on Burying a Flower,
No music to be played, nor any sort of service As your petals are placed in the shallow grave...
No eulogy or monument shall stain Your having-been, nor vulgarize your glory.
Perhaps no one has felt as tenderly toward the rooster as he does
in his poem, Written on the Way to An-king,
I am certainly wandering one of straightened circumstances.
The cocks seem to comprehend me,
Consoling me with beautiful voices in the early morning.
But Mr. Cheng's contemporary lines:
Unbearable to think that a world disaster Is followed by a year of famine,
And still the army calls for recruits . . .
It is bitter to think of the good earth become waste land.
are no newer than Laotzu's observation five hundred years before Christ:
An army's harvest is a waste of thorns,
Conscription of a multitude of men Drains the next year dry Mr. Cheng, however, speaks amply for himself in the following passage from his introduction to the book, an introduction which contains for the most part helpful information and considerable sense:
You will find in these poems my close contact with cosmic and ultimate reality, my new forms and specific techniques in producing the variety, power and charm by means of direct vision and simple diction, and my deliberation in the interesting subject, the proper metonymy, the concrete method, the attractive manner, and the sublime style..., . Some of my poems are only for the display of my intellectual attainments as well as classical allusions; some of them are written with my own specific forms of long and short lines... but all of them show originality.
Witter Bynner