“Original / translation : the aesthetic context of Kenneth Rexroth's translations of Du Fu and Li Qingzhao” (Publication, 2004)
Year
2004
Text
Klein, Lucas. Original / translation : the aesthetic context of Kenneth Rexroth's translations of Du Fu and Li Qingzhao. (2004). [The article contains descriptions of the poems I pass the night at General Headquarters, To the tune 'Plum Blossoms Fall and Scatter', To the tune 'The Honor of a Fisherman'.]
http://www.bigbridge.org/issue10/original_translation_from_big_bridge.pdf. (Rex12)
http://www.bigbridge.org/issue10/original_translation_from_big_bridge.pdf. (Rex12)
Type
Publication
Contributors (1)
Klein, Lucas
(um 2004) : Assistant Professor School of Chinese, University of Hong Kong ; Übersetzer
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 (2)
| # | 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 | 1979 |
Li, Ch'ing-chao [Li, Qingzhao]. Complete poems. Transl. and ed. by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung [ID D32233]. Sekundärliteratur 1985 William Lockwood : The poems are Rexroth's approach to the task of making Li Qingzhao's poems accessible to an English-speaking Western audience. With a clear grasp of what had been accomplished in the western tradition of lyric poetry. I suggest that Rexroth brought, especially to Li's most sophisticated love poems, resources of language and of sensibility that made him more fully adequate to the task. If he were to succeed in making Li's world familiar, that success would have to originate in such a resourceful capacity for discovering in his own ordinary world such extraordinary satisfaction as Li found in hers. Rexroth's attentiveness to his own vital dwelling place was linked to a comprehensive awareness of what had been achieved by men and women of articulate imagination in the history of civilized thought and feeling. The English-speaking reader has not often found language so witty and so finely elegiac, within the lyric mode, over recent centuries of literary history. In this occasion of translating Li, Rexroth makes it available again. Among Li's most complex poems, those written out of occasions of separation from her husband during his travels to the mountains or his duty as magistrate in another town, seem most resistent to translation. Such poems project into the geographical landscape of Li's Shantung province the landscape of her own heart and mind. Rexroth's versions of Li's song written in remembrance of lost love – following her exile from Shantung and the death of her husband – likewise retain a sensuous and luminous texture. We are grateful for Rexroth's ability to recreate the luminousness of Li's daydreaming songs and so to bring into our lives her bright, resourceful personality. In Rexroth's poems we have witnessed the affinity of one great love poet for another, at times, almost a merging of those kindred personalities, and the pleasure we take in those poems is very likely intensified by our own dreadful sense of living in 'the most loveless time imaginable'. The remarkable achievement of his versions of Li originates in his ability to make accessible and familiar to the English-language reader a sense of the fortitude with which he suffered losses as well as the resourcefulness by which she found satisfactions ; that he was impelled to recreate the wholeness of her world because he urgently felt the western world was losing such wholeness ; and that his own life-long journeying as an original poet and as a responsible man of letters had prepared him for the task. I began by suggesting that Rexroth at age 74, viewed Li's poems as a kind of garden or imaginary landscape in which he might recover the self-realizing resourcefulness of his youth ; and I would like to close by suggesting that it also became an occasion for acknowledging a world-wide sense of homelessness. 2004 Lucas Klein : Working with Ling Chung for the complete volume, Rexroth's translations – at least in the final versions – can be expected to be closer to the original Chinese, rather than representative of the partial portrayals found in his Du Fu. Comparing earlier translations with late, paying attention to the notes he offers for her translations, will elucidate the development of Rexroth's poetic, as well as how he uses words to create a specific reading of his poetry. |
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