“This ancient man is I : Kenneth Rexroth's renderings of Tu Fu” (Publication, 1984)
Year
1984
Text
Ling, Chung. This ancient man is I : Kenneth Rexroth's renderings of Tu Fu. In : Tamkang review ; vol. 15, nos 1-4 (1984-1985). / In : Renditions 21-22 (1984). (Rex5)
Type
Publication
Contributors (1)
Ling, Chung
(Chongqing, Sichuan 1945-) : Professor National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan ; Übersetzerin, Dichterin
Mentioned People (1)
Rexroth, Kenneth
(South Bend, Ind. 1905-1982 Santa Barbara, Calif.) : Dichter, Literaturkritiker, Essayist
[The books of Rexroth are under copyright by New Directions. In the databse are all thr titles and authors of Chinese poems and online poems]..
[There are no translations from his poems in Chinese until 2014].
[The books of Rexroth are under copyright by New Directions. In the databse are all thr titles and authors of Chinese poems and online poems]..
[There are no translations from his poems in Chinese until 2014].
Subjects
Literature : Occident : United States of America
/
References / Sources
Chronology Entries (3)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1955-1979 |
Kenneth Rexroth and China : general. Quellen : Anthologie raisonnée de la littérature chinoise. [Ed. par] G[eorges] Margouliès [ID D7077]. Ayscough, Florence. Travels of a Chinese poet Tu Fu [ID D32199]. Ayscough, Florence. Tu Fu : the autobiography of a Chinese poet, A.D. 712 [ID D10473]. Cent quatrains des T'ang. Trad. du chinois par Lo Ta-kang [Luo Dagang] [ID D32200]. Du, Fu. Du Du xin jie. (Beijing : Zhonghua shu ju, 1961). 讀杜心解 Du, Fu. Du shi jing quan. (Taipei : Yi wen yin shu guan, 1971). 杜詩鏡銓 Hervey de Saint-Denys, Léon. Poésies de l'époque des Thang [ID D2216]. Hung, William. Du shi yin de = A concordance to the poems of Tu Fu. Vol. 2. [ID D10218]. Hung, William. Tu Fu : China’s greatest poet [ID D10264]. Mathews, R[obert] H[enry]. A Chinese-English dictionary dictionary [ID D8646]. Payne, Robert. The white pony [ID D32201]. Florilège des poèmes Song, 960-1277 après J.-C. Traduit du chinois par George Soulié de Morant [ID D7180]. Tu, Fu [Du, Fu]. Gedichte. Übersetzt von Erwin von Zach [ID D4951]. Sekundärliteratur 1984 Ling Chung : Kenneth Rexroth has never taken any formal lessons in the Chinese language. He has perceived an important aspect of Chinese poetics. Chinese landscape poetry often presents nature in its pure, original forms, and the interference of the poet's subjective consciousness is reduced to a minimum. As a result, the reader is brought to a closer contact with nature itself and is put in a state of mind quite similar to being placed in what Rexroth called a 'poetic situation'. He not only applies this rule to the writing of his own poetry, but also to the translation of Chinese poetry. 1988 Shu Yunzhong : Kenneth Rexroth not only translated and imitated Chinese poetry conscientiously but also argued strongly for the merit of Chinese literature in his literary criticism. As a poet, he repeatedly admitted he had saturated himself with Chinese poetry for decades, especially with the poetry of Du Fu. Rexroth's deviation from the original poem in both his translation and imitation of Chinese poetry is contextual and cultural rather than textual. More significantly, because of Rexroth's influence in contemporary American literature, study in this line can further lead us to understand how classical Chinese poetry was adapted to the contemporary American literary milieu. Underlying Rexroth's poetry and translation is the central concept of 'communion'. This concept to Rexroth means a sensual, personal relationship between human beings. Poetry, including translation of poetry, is an expression of embodiment of this communion. Rexroth was an indefatigable critic of the conformist impulses that dominate the contemporary world. Influenced by an existentialist concept of alienation, he thought that in contemporary society human beings become more like things than persons, and the individual, as a result of his alienation from other human beings as well as from himself, loses himself in the end. Poetry, it seems to him, is a remedy that can deliver people from this plight. Rexroth finds that Chinese literature, especially Chinese classical poetry, is very much to his taste because it possesses many characteristics which fit into his concept of 'communion'. The most important characteristic in Chinese poetry, it seems to him, is its humanness. The Chinese philosophers Rexroth liked to talk about are Laozi and Zhuangzi. At first it seems that this is because these two Taoist philosophers deal with the concept of communion in their writings. In Rexroth's poetry the universe does not have its own meaning without human intervention. Ironically, he thinks this is a genrally held idea in Chinese culture. Once we realize the separation between man and the universe in Rexroth's poetry, we can better understand his cosmology which, at first glance, seems to bear some resemblance to Taoism because he sometimes uses Taoist terminology. We may conclude that Rexroth's understanding of classical Chinese poetry is based on his central concept of 'communion', which is conditioned by his Western cultural heritage as well as by a perception of existential need in the contemporary social situation. Therefore his deviation from the Chinese original texts in both his translation and imitation of classical Chinese poetry should be explained in terms of his social milieu, personal philosophy and political learning. 2004 Lucas Klein : Every life in poetry is in some ways a development of a voice, and aesthetic identity that marks a poem as written by a certain poet. Even when poets actively rebel against the limits of a single unity, they are nonetheless working within the confines this voice entails. For Rexroth, whose stylistic shifts are soft and whose aesthetic is remarkably steady throughout his poetic career, each poem can illuminate all other poems in a cross-referencing art of light, as each poem benefits from the creation of the context to which it contributes. The reader who approaches this oeuvre is then granted a full view, and my task has been to show how, via prose and translation and notes, Du Fu and Li Qingzhao constitute a significant portion of Rexroth's complete aesthetic context. The key works are sensibility, sexuality, and spirituality. In focusing on these elements in the poetry of Du Fu and Li Qingzhao, Rexroth in turn shifts the focus into these elements within his own poetry. For Rexroth, and for the development of his poetics, the focal point of his contextual arc is his sensibility – his nervous system as completely open as Du Fu's – towards the combination of the sexual and the spritiual, creating a body of work whose love poems are, like those of Li Qingzhao, actually mystical. |
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| 2 | 1956 |
Rexroth, Kenneth. One hundred poems from the Chinese [ID D29176]. Kenneth Rexroth : "I have had the words of Tu Fu by me since adolescence and over the years have come to know these poems better than most of my own ". "Tu Fu is, in my opinion, and in the opinion of a majority of those qualified to speak, the greatest non epic, non-dramatic poet who has survived in any language ". "I have chosen only those poems whose appeal is simple and direct, with a minimum of allusion to past literature or contemporary politics, in other words, poems that speak to me of situations in life like my own. I have thought of my translations as, finally, expressions of myself ". Tu, Fu = Du, Fu (Gongxian, Henan 712-770) Banquet at the Tso Family Manor "The windy forest is checkered By the light of the setting, Waning moon. I tune the lute, Its strings are moist with dew. The brook flows in the darkness Below the flower path. The thatched Roof is crowned with constellations. As we write the candles burn short. Our wits grow sharp as swords while The wine goes round. When the poem Contest is ended, someone Sings a song of the South. And I think of my little boat, And long to be on my way." Written on the Wall at Chang’s Hermitage "It is Spring in the mountains. I come alone seeking you. The sound of chopping wood echoes Between the silent peaks. The streams are still icy. There is snow on the trail. At sunset I reach your grove In the stony mountain pass. You want nothing, although at night You can see the aura of gold And silver ore all around you. You have learned to be gentle As the mountain deer you have tamed. The way back forgotten, hidden Away, I become like you, An empty boat, floating, adrift." Winter Dawn "The men and beasts of the zodiac Have marched over us once more. Green wine bottles and red lobster shells, Both emptied, litter the table. "Should auld acquaintance be forgot?" Each Sits listening to his own thoughts, And the sound of cars starting outside. The birds in the eaves are restless, Because of the noise and light. Soon now In the winter dawn I will face My fortieth year. Borne headlong Towards the long shadows of sunset By the headstrong, stubborn moments, Life whirls past like drunken wildfire." Snow Storm Visiting Ts'an, Abbot of Ta-Yun Moon Festival Jade Flower Palace "The stream swirls. The wind moans in The pines. Grey rats scurry over Broken tiles. What prince, long ago, Built this palace, standing in Ruins beside the cliffs? There are Green ghost fires in the black rooms. The shattered pavements are all Washed away. Ten thousand organ Pipes whistle and roar. The storm Scatters the red autumn leaves. His dancing girls are yellow dust. Their painted cheeks have crumbled Away. His gold chariots And courtiers are gone. Only A stone horse is left of his Glory. I sit on the grass and Start a poem, but the pathos of It overcomes me. The future Slips imperceptibly away. Who can say what the years will bring?" Travelling Northward Waiting for Audience on a Spring Night To Wei Pa, a Retired Scholar "The lives of many men are Shorter than the years since we have Seen each other. Aldebaran And Antares move as we have. And now, what night is this? We sit Here together in the candle Light. How much longer will our prime Last? Our temples are already Grey. I visit my old friends. Half of them have become ghosts. Fear and sorrow choke me and burn My bowels. I never dreamed I would Come this way, after twenty years, A wayfarer to your parlor. When we parted years ago, You were unmarried. Now you have A row of boys and girls, who smile And ask me about my travels. How have I reached this time and place? Before I can come to the end Of an endless tale, the children Have brought out the wine. We go Out in the night and cut young Onions in the rainy darkness. We eat them with hot, steaming, Yellow millet. You say, "It is Sad, meeting each other again." We drink ten toasts rapidly from The rhinoceros horn cups. Ten cups, and still we are not drunk. We still love each other as We did when we were schoolboys. Tomorrow morning mountain peaks Will come between us, and with them The endless, oblivious Business of the world." By the Winding River I By the Winding River II To Pi Ssu Yao Loneliness Clear After Rain New Moon Overlooking the Desert Visitors Country Cottage The Willow Sunset Farewell to my Friend Yen A Restless Night in Camp South Wind Another Spring http://www.chinese-poems.com/rex.html. "White birds over the grey river. Scarlet flowers on the green hills. I watch the Spring go by and wonder If I shall ever return home." I Pass the Night at General Headquarters Far up the River Clear Evening after Rain Full Moon "Isolate and full, the moon Floats over the house by the river. Into the night the cold water rushes away below the gate. The bright gold spilled on the river is never still. The brilliance of my quilt is greater than precious silk. The circle without blemish. The empty mountains without sound. The moon hangs in the vacant, wide constellations. Pine cones drop in the old garden. The senna trees bloom. The same clear glory extends for ten thousand miles." Night in the House by the River Dawn Over the Mountains Homecoming — Late at Night Stars and Moon on the River Night Thoughts While Travelling Brimming Water Mai, Yao Ch'en = Mei, Yaochen (1002-1060) An Excuse for Not Returning a Visit Next Door Melon Girl Fish Peddler The Crescent Moon On the Death of a New Born Child Sorrow A Dream at Night I Remember the Blue River On the Death of His Wife In Broad Daylight I Dream of My Dead Wife I Remember the Paver at Wu Sung A Friend Advises Me to Stop Drinking Ou Yang Hsiu = Ouyang, Xiu (Luling, Jiangxi 1007-1072 Yingzhou, Anhui) In the Evening I walk by the River Fisherman Spring Walk East Wind Green Jade Plum Trees in Spring When the Moon is in the River of Heaven Song of Liang Chou Reading the Poems of an Absent Friend An Answer to Ting Yuan Ch'en Spring Day on West Lake Old Age Su, Tung P'o = Su, Dongpo = Su, Shi (Meishan, Sichuan 1037-1101 Changzhou, Jiangsu) The Red Cliff At Gold Hill Monastery On the Death of His Baby Son The Terrace in the Snow The Weaker the Wine The Last Day of the Year Harvest Sacrifice A Walk in the Country To a Traveler The Purple Peach Tree The Shadow of Flowers The End of the Year On the Siu Cheng Road Thoughts in Exile Looking from the Pavilion The Southern Room Over the River 83 Epigram At the Washing of My Son Moon, Flowers, Man Begonias Rain in the Aspens The Turning Year Autumn Spring Night Spring Li, Ch'ing Chao = Li, Qingzhao (Licheng, Shandong 1084-1151) Autumn Evening Beside the Lake Two Springs Quail Sky Alone in the Night Peach Blossoms Fall and Scatter The Day of Cold Food Mist Lu, Yu (Boat on Wei River 1125-1209) The Wild Flower Man Phoenix Hairpins Leaving the Monastery Rain on the River Evening in the Village I Walk Out in the Country at Night Idleness Night Thoughts Sekundärliteratur 1958 Achilles Fang : Although the names of these nine poets are given in Chinese, the book is primarily intended for readers who know no Chinese ; it does not reprint the original text, nor does it give any reference to the text Rexroth used. The notes contain biographies of the poets from which sinologists will profit little. On the whole, Rexroth is successful and even (with some modifications) accurate when a piece is short and direct. But he often takes what appear to be unwarranted liberties with the text. Rexroth apparently has an adequate knowledge of Chinese ; to be sure, he is an amateur (perhaps even an autodidact), but his omissions and commissions are not much more than one expects from a professional. Still, some of the many flaws may stem from the fact that he sought help from his Chinese friends, none of them specialists. And heightening the dangers of such recourse, occasionally failure in communication must be assumed to account for some of the errors. 1958 John L. Bishop : Mr. Rexroth is a poet who shows in his own work an unusual sympathy to the Chinese poet's technique of using the precise images of daily experience for their extended universal significance, of concentrating fixedly on the opaque fabric of life's ordinary happenings until behind it the landscape of the human spirit which it has curtained begins to be discerned. For the effectiveness of his translations and their readability as self-sufficient English poems, one can have only the highest admiration. Mr. Rexroth has made no attempt to reproduce the formal prosody of Chinese verse ; he has dispensed with rhyme, regular meter, and fixed line length and has employed parallelism between lines sparingly enough to avoid the rigid monotony which this device gives to English verse. The general effect of these English versions is one of clarity and simplicity, with even some of the conciseness of the original. The surface of factual statement is never overweighted with too great a burden of implication. Although he disarms criticism by denying any value for his work as Oriental scholarship and by frankly admitting that he considers his translations as expressions of himself. Fidelity to the spirit of the original poems requires first of all constant attention to the original text and secondly a highly critical use of existing translations. A cause of mistranslation in Mr. Rexroth's volume is a disregard for the formal structure of a Chinese poem. Granted that the Chinese poet frequently takes liberties with the rules of prosody, they are so ingrained in his versification that they can usually be assumed by the translator as a guide, in the absence of better, through the variants, ambiguities, and ellipses of a Chinese poem. The most serious kind of error found in these translations is that of disregarding the function of literary allusion in Chinese poetry. Fidelity to the spirit of the originals is well-nigh impossible in translation without an adequate knowledge of the corpus of literature known and constantly employed by the individual poet, without the services of a commentator whose annotations will supply our deficiencies. A number of Mr. Rexroth's deviations from the central intent of a poem seems to stem from attributing to the Chinese poet attitudes and ideals consistent with a Western lyric poet of the 19th or 20th century and ignoring the framework of ideas and conditioned thinking in which the Chinese poet worked. 1984 Ling Chung : Rexroth's Du Fu translations do not follow closely the source texts ; instead, the source texts by and large only serve as a departure point from which his imagination could soar freely. Literal exactness has never been Rexroth's goal ; he states his ambition thus : his translation should be 'true to the spirit of the originals, and valid English poems. Furthermore, many source texts which he consulted were not the original Chinese, but translations of Du Fu, in English, French, or German. The power and the beauty of his translation often lies in the passages which he rendered most freely and which bear little resemblance to the Chinese texts. Whenever Rexroth encountered anything which might have been unfamiliar to his readers, such as allusions to classical literature, history, and politics as well as traditional Chinese customs, manners and daily necessities, he would almost without exception find a more comprehensive substitute. In spite of the fact that Rexroth so often gives inaccurate, partial, or distorted presentation of Du Fu's poems, he is still far in advance of many other translators of Chinese verse in his comprehension of the Chinese poetic mind at work. Rexroth believes that the great artistry of Du Fu's poetry lies in his power to present 'himself immediately as a person in total communication' in a pure, simple, and direct way. He professed that among Du Fu's poems he chose those in which he could find experience identical to his own, those that would speak to him of similar situation in his own life, and eventually he came to regard his Du Fu translations as expressions of himself. 1988 Paul Kahn : The book has remained enormously popular for over three decades and many of its translations have been anthologized elsewhere. A major part of the book is devoted to translations of Du Fu. The thirty-five poems share several themes : observation of the movement of the seasons and the stars as a backdrop for and measure of human actions ; a recording of the simple pleasures of male friendship ; the tracing of a singular spirit's struggle to endure against the pressures of war, neglect, and aging. In poem after poem, the movement of constellations and figures of the zodiac are noted, the autumn leaves scatter and the spring wind begins in the mountains. The movements of the gull, the cormorants, the orioles, and the sparrows are observed along with the sounds of war. The poet places himself walking in a manured field, sitting in the grass, alone in a boat, pulling onions in a garden, strolling towards a hut by the river. Rexroth shows no interest in informing the reader about the characteristics of the Chinese language, nor about the formal qualities of Du Fu's poetry. The structure of the original poems is entirely subordinate to the structure of the verse Rexroth uses to convey their 'spirit' and sense in translation. He systematically deforms the basic unit on which Du Fu's poetry is built, the couplet. In place of the structure of the gu-shi and lü-shi he substitutes a prosody informed by a century of Anglo-American experimentation in free verse. Rexroth gets a sound and sprung rhythm from the sentences which wrap from line to line. [The article contains descriptions of the poems To Wei Pa, a retired scholar, Snow storm, Night thoughts while travelling]. |
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| 3 | 1979 | William Stanley Merwin : One evening I picked up Kenneth Rexroth's One hundred poems from the Chinese again, after several years, and read it through once more, at a sitting, with a great wave of gratitude, and a sense of its vividness and life – a book which I have known and read for so many years now. |
Cited by (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2000- | Asien-Orient-Institut Universität Zürich | Organisation / AOI |
|