China and the West

Bynner, Witter. The jade mountain [ID D9794]. (3)
Sekundärliteratur
1930
David Morton : It is no longer possible to regard Chinese poetry as an entirely alien and exotic product that can have no very real significance for us and our tradition. American poetry of recent years has given increasing evidence of contact with the nature poetry of China. It is not merely that such poets at Amy Lowell and others have poured characteristically Chines images and colors into their verse. The method and even the temper of American poetry has been affected to a degree which, in the near future, will suggest the necessity of our knowing something of this alien tradition that has touched our poetry and left it changed. It is not without significance that such western figures as Cranmer-Byng and Judith Gautier and our own Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound and Witter Bynner havr found something in this Chinese poetry to satisfy a need unsatisfied by the poetry of our own tradition, and that our own poetry has been so hospitable in assimilating something of this alien art.
This gives peculiar point to the appearance of Mr. Bynner'd book, it would be welcomed, I fancy, merely on the score that it is a beautiful thing, nnd that it ii his. And no better reasons arc needed for reading it. But it will be especially welcomed by those who see in it another entrance into that world that is so richly entrancing in itself and that is becoming increasingly significant for the English tradition because of certain congenial elements which are assimilated by American poetry, to the latter's great enrichment.
The introductory essays of Mr. Bynner and Mr. Kiang-Hu will serve to quicken the memories of some and to inform others. Thus Mr. Bynner does much to prepare the reader for the proper approach to the poems, when he says: "They are the heart of an intimate letter. They bring the true, the beautiful, the everlasting, into simple, easy touch with the human, the homely and the immediate." He might have said, also, that the poetry as a whole has a marked diarist character, that to read any considerable quantity of a single poet's work, is to acquire the feeling that one is reading that poet’s diary, his day-by-day journal, where the casual and apparently trivial is set down side by side with the crucial and affecting. Thu characteristic is emphasized in the title and arrangement of Mrs. Ayscough's new translations, The Autobiography of Tu Fu. The effect is—on the English reader, at first—of a kind of pointless horizontalism. There are so few peaks. And it is only after initiation, that the English reader acquires the feeling of the profound richness of this poetry into which a whole life has passed—a poetry which did not confine itself to selected moments of thrilling intensity and significance, but recorded also the sweet and common uses of everyday experience, which after all, make our lives what they are. One acquires the feeling that these poets observe, for the sheer love of observing, and contemplate, for the sheer love of contemplating, and the observations and contemplations are re¬corded for that delight, whether they be peculiarly acute and significant or not.
The intricacy of Chinese verse forms is an appalling thing and has little interest save for the curious—beyond furnishing furtive hint of what is necessarily lost in translation, which cannot hope to reproduce the tone effects which those prescriptions were designed to create. The music we must count as lost. But we turn for consolation to the good fortune which directed so gifted and musical a poet as Witter Bynner to the Chinese field. It is no disparagement of Arthur Waley, pioneer and excellent scholar in the field, to rejoice in the fact that one who is first and essentially a poet, has turned his attention to Chinese poetry. Mr. Bynner has resisted what must have been a temptation to make English verse out of his originals—verse characterized by the cryptic turn of thought and phrase, or resolving into the catch-throat denouement. In the absence of these, the poems have, in his version, the dignity and quiet integrity which we think of Chinese poetry as possessing.
The poems are all taken from T'ang Dynasty (618-906) the golden age of Chinese poetry. In addition to the prefaces by Mr. Bynner and his translator, Mr. Kiang Kang-Hu, the book is supplied with a historical chronology, a chronology of the poets, a topography and explanatory notes on the poems.

1930
Isidor Schneider : The Jade Mountain is a translation of a Chinese anthology of classical poetry published late in the eighteenth century—a sort of Chinese Golden Treasury, but limited to the poetry of the Tang-Dynasty (seventh to tenth century). This was the classical age of poetry in China, and since the classics are living literature in China and have fixed literary forms to this day, this relume may be regarded as fairly representative of Chinese poetry as a whole.
Although Dr. Kiang's excellent introduction gives a lucid description of the complex Chinese prosody, the reader cannot, even with its help, reproduce for himself in thfcse (or in any) translations the immediate sensory effects of the original. These are based on elements absent in other languages, one of which is the Chinese written character, which, being essentially a pictograph, gives a more physical and immediate sense of movement than our letters can. Another is the monosyllabic structure of the language, which affords different rhythmic effects. A third is the system of tones, classical Chinese having five tones or pitches of the voice, in each of which an identical sound lias a different meaning. Harmonies of these tones are as important in Chinese poetry as rhythm or rhyme.
It is also true that Chinese poetry, which makes use of allusion as freely as we make use of metaphor, and, in a way, uses allusion instead of metaphor, presents the ob¬stacle of an entire alien civilization to translation. Its allusions are to an ancient history, to religions, mythologies, philosophies and a geography unknown or unfamiliar to us. Even to one who has read much about China these allusions are difficult; for the value of an allusion is the spontaneous response to it that comes with long and intimate association. And there is, also, the difference of subject matter. Women not being regarded as personalities /in Chinese life (I am speaking generally), there is almost no love poetry in Chinese literature. Friendship poetry takes its place. Again, the family and local affiliation being extremely strong in China, departure is always represented tragically, whereas in the West it would be represented with the glow of adventure. In some of these parting poems, as in the verses of the inveterate wanderer Tu Fu, I felt that a convention was being obeyed, that the poet pretended to sigh when he was impatient to be off, just as in the West we rarely dare to confess a disinclination to 'adventure'. Also, Chinese poetry presents the horrors, but almost never the glory, of war. These instances, which can be liberally added to, are enough to show how much more than words must be translated here.
There is, however, still another special difference which should be noted—the attitude of the Chinese poet to nature. To him, nature is not symbolized. Nature is very near, is understood with a directness and simplicity that must make a Westerner despair. The ifiore we worship nature, the further it gets away from us. We have reason to envy the Chinese poets.
It will be seen, then, that considerable patience is necessary for the enjoyment of Chinese poetry. The reader will be mystified at the beginning, but further acquaintance will give him a pleasure equal in intensity to the pleasure to be found in any major poetry. I am not able to agree with Mr. Bynaer, who says that in Chinese poetry "I have begun to feel a new, finer and deeper education than ever came to me from the Hebrew or Greek". But I feel that a stream of culture as valuable as any similar element in our civilization is being introduced by the translation of Chinese poetry.
Mr. Bynner's and Dr. Kiang's versions are excellent. The unfortunately few translations ('Cathay', by Ezra Pound), done from the notes of Fenollosa, are more vigorous; and Waley's translations are more terse; but on the whole 'The Jade Mountain' stands as the best single volume of Chinese poetry now available.

1995
Richard Wilbur : A farewell to a friend by Du Fu : The exemplary translation illustrates everything which Bynner found attractive and corrective in Chinese poetry. Everything is distributed, in these quiet lines, with an evenness of attention. Everything in the scene and situation is actual, and presented in a natural sequence…