China and the West

Bynner, Witter. On translating Chinese poetry [ID D32462].
Blithely, three years ago, I undertook with the eminent scholar, poet and publicist, Dr. Kiang Kang-hu, a translation of three hundred poems from the Chinese, thinking that twelve months would see my labors ended. Through twelve of the thirty-six months I have worked from eight to ten hours a day on nothing but these poems and through the other twenty-four have been continually devoted to them, even accompanying Dr. Kiang to China for a year of closer cooperation. And they are still unfinished. I might have read a lesson from the history of as short a piece of translation as Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam; but I was rash and, better than that, fascinated. Prior to the present undertaking, I had translated with the help of a Chinese student a few poems from the Confucian Book of Poetry. Those few had been enough to stir my wonder at the quiet beauty and deep simplicity that are as much qualities of Chinese poetry as they are of Chinese painting.
Stephen W. Bushell, in his book on Chinese Art, speaks of some early painter as typifying the aim of painting with the phrase, 'to note the flight of the wild swan'. It 'shows already', says Bushell, 'the preoccupation Chinese art with the motion and breathing life of animals and plants, which has given their painters so signal superiority over Europeans in such subjects'. When one remembers that in China the wild swan was traditionally the messenger of the heart, the phrase might used also to typify Chinese poetry: 'the motion a breathing life' of a world in which man is the animal a nature the plant. But the wild swan was not merely a messenger between young and passionate hearts. Chinese poetry begins, in a way, where ours ends. When I felt a certain monotony of subject matter in a section of the volume I was translating, the parting and separation of friends and the solace of the everlasting hills, I turned to the Oxford Book of English Verse and found there an equal if not greater monotony in the succession of poems dealing with the extravagant passions of youth. Wordsworth, in his lyrics, is the most nearly Chinese of our poets. The poetry of the Chinese is, like his, the poetry of the mature, or, better, of grown children. It signs not the rebelliousness of youth, but the wisdom of age; not the excitement of artificial life, except for the elevation brought by wine, but the quiet of nature; not the unsteady joys of passion, but the steadfast joy of friendship. It is attached to actual daily life and not reserved as an ethereal pastime. A Chinese poem sounds often like the heart of a letter—and so it was: a condensed and thoughtful message.
Tu Fu of the T'ang Dynasty is generally accounted by the Chinese as the greatest of their lyric poets, though it was said of him and Li Po, 'How shall we tell, when two eagles have flown beyond sight, which one has come nearer the sun?' From Tu Fu's grandfather, Tu Shên-yen, the editors of the anthology I am translating selected a single poem, in which his quiet voice echoes all the way from the sixth century to undo a persistent delusion, prevalent among certain poets of the western moment, that beauty is to be found only in the unfamiliar. Incidentally, the poem illustrates the difficult game of 'harmonizing a poem', which poets sometimes played with their verse: one poet would respond to a poem from another by adopting the other's rhyme-words in the same or altered arrangement. Tu Shên-yen's poem is called
A walk in early spring
(Harmonizing a poem by my friend Liu stationed at Chin-ning)
Only to wandeerers can come
Ever new the shock of beauty
Of white cloud and red cloud dawning from the sea,
Of spring in the wild plum and river-willow
I watch a yellow oriole dart in the sun
And a green water-plant reflected –
Suddenly an old song fills
My heart with home, my eyes with tears.
'To understand the circumstances of morality', says a writer in The Nation, 'to know what such a being as man can expect, and then to contemplate such knowledge – that is as near as art can get to any steadiness of joy'. And that is where T'ang poetry had arrived a thousand years ago. The T'ang poets do not fool themselves with illusion but, seeing things as they are, find beauty in them – and thereby bring the high, the deep, the everlasting, into simple, easy touch with the immediate. They are masters of momentous minutiae, the small things that make the big. They know and record the immense patience of beauty. There is sadness in that patience, but it is an honest, a hearty, an even relishable sadness. One feels that they had sent their souls out through all the intricacies that are now confusing this western generation, through all the ways of experience and imagination, and had then recalled them to the pure elemental truths, had received them again, peacefully cleansed of illusion and restlessness, and content in the final simple beauty of their own dooryards. To be sure, they knew where to place their dooryards. But so might we all, if we would.
I was fortunate enough to spend three months on a Chinese mountain-top, with a poet and his family, in the kind of retirement the old fellows loved and wrote about, overlooking a landscape the like of which I had never seen from any dwelling on earth. There were Sung mountain-paintings glimmering from our peak all the way to the Himalayas; there were tremendous rainbows, sometimes leaving a bright section in the heart of a towering white cloud after the rest of the bow had faded; there were countless bamboos glistening after brief showers; there were the cicadas, ten thousand Chinese actors on one note at top pitch; there were the waterfalls along our paths; there were slow changes of incredible mist, spellbinding the dawns and the twilights; there was always, below us, the vast plain—rippled with hills, varied with purple shadows of cloud, veined with jade-green rice-fields; and there were remote silver gleams of river and lake and even of sea—the whole level eastward horizon seeming often the actual ocean and our mountain the brow of the earth. It is no wonder that I became imbued with the spirit of the poets who had lived in just such places—with the 'huge and thoughtful' patience of China: the kind of patience that is wisdom; the kind of wisdom that is submersion of one's self and its little ways in the large and peaceful distances of nature. And just as that landscape moved and breathed, so do the Chinese poems from line to line. And just as man becomes natural and simple in a presence like that, so did the Chinese poets. And in all the chaos of contemporary China that spirit is alive. In Peking last winter, fine old Admiral Tsai Ting-kan said to a friend of mine, 'The older I grow, the more contempt I have for the processes of human reason and the more respect for the processes of the human heart'.
Dr. Kiang has said much the same thing to me. And against various odds, he has practised what he preaches. Appalled at times by the stupendous task confronting those who would ameliorate conditions in China, he has begun, as the sincere and simple altruist always begins, with his own conduct and his own circumstances. Some years ago he founded a girls' school and gave his own dwelling in Peking to house it: the first girls' school in the country founded by a Chinese. He inherited a fine library and a distinguished collection of paintings. Some of the latter are in museums in Japan, the Nipponese having been the most intelligent of all the looters after the Boxer uprising. What was left of the library he has given to the University of California. His share of other property inherited from his father he has renounced in favor of his brothers. When Yuan Shih-kai usurped the throne, Kiang risked his life by challenging the act and finally fled to America. Now that he can be of service again in China, he has relinquished academic opportunities in the New World, to return to his own people. In other words, he is a man of the same nature as the noblest of the T'ang poets and, as such, better fitted to interpret them than if his only qualification were the title he won under the Empire, when literary knowledge and even poetic ability were requisite for passing the old Government Examinations.
When Dr. Kiang and I were colleagues on the faculty of the University of California, he led me to an anthology, compiled several hundred years ago, of poems written during China's golden age of poetry, between 600 and 900 A. D.: Three Hundred Pearls of the T'ang Dynasty, an anthology better known among Chinese than The Golden Treasury, or any other collection of English poetry, is known among us. It is in the hands and heart of every Celestial school-boy. One afternoon in Peking, I was to address a large audience and read some of my translations at the Higher Normal School, a Chinese institution for the training of teachers. Dr. Kiang was my interpreter for those of the students not proficient in English; and he was to read the originals of the poems. At the last moment we found we had not brought the Chinese book; and it had to be hastily bought at a shop close by. Laughing at my surprise that so important a volume was not in the school library, President T.Y. Teng explained, 'We do not need it there: every one has it'.
The Chinese call this poetry, written thirteen hundred years ago, 'modern poetry'. In this 'modern poetry', in spite of the constraint of rules and regulations unparalleled in the prosody of the West, I found the same human pith, the same living simplicity and directness, the same fundamental beauty, as in the ancient 'unregulated' verse of the Confucian Book, and the added power of an austere and consummate art.
T'ang poetry, like all Chinese poetry—even of the contemporary poetic rebels, who correspond in spirit to our writers of free verse—used rhyme, or what we should call assonance. Rhyme in itself, however, is not enough. There are 'drum tales', containing thousands of lines all on a single rhyme, which calls each time for an accompanying drum-beat; and these achievements are not considered poetry. Besides rhyme, there are rules of tone and balance which I have space here only to intimate. A Chinese character may be inflected, in the dialect preferred by literati, according to five tones—one level, two rising, one sinking and one arrested. The first three are called 'even tones' and the latter two 'uneven tones'; and there is an intricate pattern by which corresponding characters in adjacent lines have to be of opposite tone-groups, while yet of parallel syntax. A translator might conceivably divide the English vowels into two groups—a, e, i, and y on the one side and o and u on the other and, opposing the vowels of the two groups in conformity with the pattern of opposed tones, arrive at an effect faintly akin to the music of the Chinese convention; but to translate three hundred poems in this manner would be a life-work. As to the parallel use of words of a similar nature, I am convinced that the result would monotonously offend the English ear, though I am not sure that a final translation may not be made a thousand years hence, faithfully following the Chinese order. In some of the four-line poems it is possible in 1921 to use the parallelism throughout and in some of the longer poems to use it now and then. For example here is a poem by Po Chü-yi, a slightly different version of which I have already published in ASIA:
A REMINDER TO MY FRIEND LIU
There's a gleam of green in an old bottle,
There's a stir of red in the quiet, stove,
There's a feeling of snow in the dusk outside –
Is it yes to a cup of wine inside?
I have in China, like two of the poets I quote, a friend named Liu—to whom I successfully sent this reminder. A poem by Liu Tsung-yüan shows the same method:
SNOW ON THE RIVER
A thousand mountains and no bird,
Ten thousand paths, without a footprint,
A little boat, a bamboo cloak,
An old man fishing in the cold river-snow.
Here you have the verbal parallelism, but nothing, of course, of the pattern of tone and rhyme.
I agree with Arthur Waley that a rhymed English version is treacherous ground. Let me give the carefully simple reading which Dr. Kiang has helped me make for the Outlook of Liu Fang-p'ing's
A SIGH OF SPRING
While twilight passes her silken window
Lonely she weeps in a chamber of gold,
For spring is now leaving a desolate garden,
And a drift of petals closes her door.
And then the long-established version by Prof. Herbert A. Giles:
THE SPINSTER
Dim twilight throws a deeper shade across the window-screen;
Alone within a gilded hall her tear-drops flow unseen.
No sound the lonely court-yard stirs; the spring is all but through;
Around the pear-blooms fade and fall—and no one comes to woo.
When a Chinese poet wishes to present you with flat terms, whatever he may imply by them in the judgment of commentators, he speaks as Wang Chien does in
A BRIDE
On the third day, taking my place to cook,
Washing my hands for the bridal soup,
I resolve that not my mother-in-law
But my husband's young sister shall have the first taste.
But the heart of the poem, A Sigh of Spring, beating forever in its last line, seems to have made on the eminent sinologue who was translating it as The Spinster either no impression at all or else too much of an impression.
The use of metaphor by the T'ang poets? In comparison with our use of it, they hardly use it at all. Their language is compact of it. But so, to a lesser degree, is ours. And it is surely as much an error in translating from the Chinese to drag out from an ideograph its radical metaphor as it would be in translating from the English to uproot the origins of our own idioms. It lands you in a limbo-language. If an English poet incidentally used the phrase, 'at daybreak', and a translator made it appear to a Chinese reader that the phrase read, 'when night was broken by the day', the relation of the phrase to whatever else the English poet might be saying would be distorted and the balance of his poem would be broken by what in itself is a valid and arresting image. 
But the image is now a commonplace. Hence it should be translated into an equivalent phrase in the Chinese and not dislocated by an unintended emphasis. Dr. Kiang once said to me of an English translation, 'Three heavy words in a four-line poem? One would tip it over'. Unfortunately the English poet or reader who approaches a literature like the Chinese or the Greek is so accustomed to our lavish use of surface-images that he feels ashamed of the nudity he sees and hastens to clothe it. Gilbert Murray, even, says in one of his introductions that, if he should translate a play from the Greek in terms as simple as the original, the effect in English, a language naturally ornate, would be so plain as to be bald. That approach seems to me mistaken and a little insular, as though English literature had nothing to learn; and it has caused, on the part of many translators and through their work, a misunderstanding of the spirit and beauty of Chinese poetry. We Westerners are forever expressing things in terms of other things, exalting metaphor too often above truth. The triumph of the great Chinese poets is the art by which they express a thing in its own innermost terms. And it is that very art, concealing itself, which may make them seem to the casual observer persons of slight attainment, not 'literary' enough. A friend remarked to me, on hearing some of Wei Ying-wu's verse, 'There's nothing in that. That's what every one feels and any one could say'. I doubt not that Wei Ying-wu, had he overheard, would have been comforted.
Restricting myself, in order to keep within bounds, to the four-line poems in which the words stop but the sense goes on, I choose from Wei Ying-wu
AN AUTUMN-NIGHT MESSAGE TO CH'IU
As I walk in the cool of the autumn night,
Thinking of you, singing my poem,
And hear a mountain pine-cone fall—
You also seem to be awake.
The poet here selects an exact touch in natural happenings that starts alive a sense of the nearness of a friend—a moment mystic, but not too mystic to be real. He makes no surface metaphor of it by saying that the pine-cone fell like a footstep. His metaphor becomes one only through your own application of it. It is at the very heart of his mood and of his meaning, not on the surface. And it is only as you also are touched by the pulse of it, that you feel what the poet feels when an unexpected sound brings him acutely the sense of life, of motion, of change, and so of human relationship. It is only by your becoming the poet, by his humanly taking you into himself, that you feel the communion of the earth and the presence of his friend. So it is with the concluding suggestion of the petals in the poem of spring. The poet tells what is happening, which is enough in itself to make a charming and wistful picture of a lady and her garden. It is left for you to form, if you like, the metaphor of a drift of loves, of memories, of regrets, closing like petals the door of her youth.
Giles constantly elucidates and sacrifices the poetic suggestiveness of the original. L. Cranmer-Byng, in his Lute of Jade and Feast of Lanterns, overdecorates and thereby forfeits clean selectiveness. To be sure, he makes beautiful Tennysonian lines, such as
Till she of the dark moth-eyebrows, lily-pale,
Shines through tall avenues of spears to die.
But Dr. Kiang assures me that those lines are by Cranmer-Byng, and not by Po Chü-yi, who says, more simply,
Till under their horses' hoofs they trample those moth-eyebrows.
I cannot judge yet of the interesting translations by Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell; but, from the few I have seen, I should say that these authors, also, tend to inflate the poems with too much pomp and color. The contemporary writer who is contributing most of all to spread an erroneous idea of the great Chinese lyrics is E. Powys Mathers in his popular books of translations from the oriental verse of many countries. I suspect that he may be translating them through the French and that the French versions, like the charming paraphrases of Judith Gautier, may be partly to blame. At any rate, he uses, in his book, Coloured Stars, the French name Thou-Sin-Yu for Chu Ch'ing-yu, giving from that poet a whimsical, rather droll little poem, which possibly but not necessarily refers to a telltale among the ladies. Here is the poem, with nothing added, a version accurately checked by Dr. Kiang;
A SONG OF THE PALACE
The palacv-gate quietly closes on flowers;
Ladies file out to a terrace of jade,
Their lips abrim with imperial gossip,
Which they dare not utter because of a parrot. 
Mathers translates this very simple poem as follows:
IN THE PALACE
What rigorous calm! What almost holy silence!
All the doors are shut, and the beds of flowers are giving out scent; discreetly, of course .
Two women that lean against each other, stand to the balustrade
of red marble on the edge of the terrace.
One of them wishes to speak, to confide to her friend the secret
sorrow that is agonizing her heart.
She throws an anxious glance at the motionless leaves, and because
of a paroquet with iridescent wings that perches on a branch,
she sighs and is silent.
I make no comment—except that, fortunately, there is another Englishman, Arthur Waley, whose honest translations are even more popular.
I am often asked whether, in making these translations, I have learned any Chinese myself. No. Wandering through out-of-the-way places in China, following at Si Wu and up through the Yangtze Gorges the very footsteps of the poets in whose work I was engrossed, I learned to ask in several dialects for a few necessaries: but that is a very far cry from being able to read. I learned that 'shan' means mountain and that 'shuei' means water and that 'shan-shuei' means landscape. I learned that 'mountain-water' paintings lack sometimes the mountain and sometimes the water, and I learned to translate the word as landscape. I am not even sure how to spell the word for water. I am spelling it as it sounded when I added to it the word for hot, which I herewith avoid spelling, and summoned, according to a middle or an upper gesture, a hand-basin or a pot of tea. But had I learned Chinese, I should not have fared much better as a translator. I am assured that not even foreigners born in China and knowing the language from childhood are safe guides when it comes to Chinese poetry.
The Chinese themselves vary in their interpretations —not in a way that conflicts with basic and essential clarity, but in one that is only natural, considering the absence from the poems of such grammatical details as person, tense and number. Sometimes I would lay before Dr. Kiang divergent readings from several Chinese whom I had the pleasure of consulting. Dr. Hu Suh, an influential young modernist of Peking Government University and author of widely read poems in the so-called 'vulgar tongue', was a patient listener. And World-of-Jade— otherwise Nieh Shih-chang—the young student and friend who piloted me on many trips, was constantly reading the poems and making helpful suggestions. I remember, too, the charm and delight with which Princess Der Ling, former lady-in-waiting to the Empress Dowager, would recite aloud with me instantaneous translations of the poems, which she knew by heart, as I read my versions. For the most part we would coincide. Now and then she would take issue. And when I would carry her challenges and those of the others to Dr. Kiang, he would make sure that I knew the literal meaning of the successive characters, explain his own preference, give me sometimes my choice of the various interpretations, or even let me make one of my own. It is due him, for better or worse, to say that I generally chose his.
Among the scholars I met in Peking was the queued and aged Dr. Ku Hung-ming, a conservative in both politics and literature, a monarchist and a classicist. Attendant long ago at the University of Edinburgh and familiar with five languages, he is a witty opponent of foreign influence and a doughty upholder of traditional Chinese culture. I cannot do better than to call him as witness in favor of some of my contentions as to T'ang poetry, by quoting a passage or two from The Spirit of the Chinese People, his naively brilliant and stalwart book, written in English but published as yet only in Peking.
'The classica majora Chinese is not difficult', says he, 'because, like the spoken or colloquial Chinese, it is extremely simple… plain in words and style… simple in ideas… and yet how deep in thought, how deep in feeling it is !'
Consequently, 'Chinese is difficult because it is deep. It is difficult because it is a language for expressing deep feeling in simple words'. Dr. Ku then gives a translation of his own of a rather long poem by Tu Fu, and comments, 'The above version, I admit, is almost doggerel. The Chinese text is not doggerel, but poetry – poetry simple to the verge of colloquialism, yet with a grace, dignity, pathos and nobleness which I cannot reproduce and which perhaps it is impossible to reproduce, in English, in such simple language'. A passage from another essay of his may explain to us in wider terms the warm, live presence of the Chinese poets: 'The wonderful peculiarity of the Chinese people is that, while living a life o the heart, the life of a child, they yet have a power of mind and rationality which you do not find in the Christian people of medieval Europe or in any other primitive people. For a people who have lived so long as a grown-up nation, as a nation of adult reason, they are yet able to this day to live the life of a child – a life of the heart. Instead, therefore, of saying that the Chinese are a people of arrested development, one ought rather to say that the Chinese are a people who never grow old. The real Chinaman is a man who lives the life of a man of adult reason with the heart of a child: the head of a grown-up man and the heart of a child. The Chinese spirit, therefore, is a spirit of perpetual youth, the spirit of national immortality'.
This quality which Dr. Ku describes in the Chinese spirit, this directness, this pulse of the heart, is the quality by which the T'ang poetry endures. Sinister and devious the Chinese are not, except to shield themselves from even more sinister and devious foreigners, or to outwit brutal explitation. They are not to be judged from the depraved conduct of scheming enuchs, of profligate monarchs and courtiers, nor from the debased callousness of generals and soldiers; they are not to be judged by a foreigner who arrogates to himself racial superiority. They are to be judged from the spirit of the people at large; they are to be judged evenly and honestly. And then will be found in them the deep simplicity of the T'ang poets.
The clothes of poetry change from age to age; fashion, manner, decoration. The body of poetry is the same a thousand years ago, a thousand years hence. Poetry that depends on its trappings dies; but poetry that is bare and vital and true is imperishable. There are many Chinese court pieces and poems of official adulation that are overloaded with artifice and ornament. As curiosities, they may survive to astonish the eye of the literary tourist – jade for the jaded. But the power that makes the best of the T'ang poetry permanent is the honest bareness of its beauty, relating it to the poetic hearts of any race or time.
As artist and as human being, I cherish my three years' labor and the hope that it will help to interpret for the West not only the perfected artistry of the Chinese but the spirit expressed through that artistry—a spirit as nobly simple and as nobly sad, after all, as the spirit we Westerners must find fundamental in ourselves whenever we have time to be alone with it. Before there can be political equity in the world, there must be human equity, an end of racial ignorance and snobbery on all sides, an end of the superstition that superficial differ-ences of skin and mold mean fundamental differences of mind and spirit. East and West, there is only one human spirit in the world, though knaves and fools would keep it divided. And it is the nearest thing we know to what we confidently call the divine spirit. At its best it is the spirit of beauty, whether in nature, in art or in the conduct of man. And still, through the centuries, the poets are its heralds.
New poets from the West are now assembling, as well they may, in the spirit-house of Wei Ying-wu at Soochow, where he greets them as, long ago, he greeted other poets:
ENTERTAINING LITERARY MEN IN MY OFFICIAL RESIDENCE ON A RAINY DAY
Outside are insignia, shown in state,
But here are sweet incense-clouds, quietly guarded.
Wind and rain, coming in from sea,
Have cooled this pavilion over the lake
And driven the feverish heat away
From where my eminent guests assemble.
Ashamed though I am of my high position
While people lead unhappy lives,
Let's reasonably banish care
And just be friends enjoying nature.
Are fish and meat prohibitive?
There are plenty of fruits and vegetables.
We bow, we take our cups of wine,
We lend, our ears to beautiful poems.
When the spirit is high, the body is lightened
And feels as if it could float in the wind.
Wu is famed as a center of letters;
And modern writers, crowding here,
Prove that the name of a great land
Is made by other things than wealth.