Year

1924

Text

Type

Publication

Contributors (1)

Mentioned People (1)

Subjects

Chronology Entries (1)

#	Year	Text	Linked Data
1	1924	Bynner, Witter. Citizens of heaven [ID D32343]. Not many years ago, when I bought at the publishers' office a copy of Herbert A. Giles' History of Chinese literature, they told me that I was one of apparently only two persons in America who were interested in the subject. Except for a slight stirring of the shelves by these two persons, the 'History' had been lying stagnant, though it was then, - and, as far as I know, remains now, - the only volume of its kind in English. It was in fact 'the first attempt made in any language, including Chinese, to produce a history of Chinese literature'. Mr. Giles, in his Preface, has pointed out the tremendous extent of his field, 'the voluminous character of a literature which was already in existence some six centuries before the Christian era', and he has offered his synopsis only as an introduction for the interested foreign student or amateur who may thence follow the example of Chinese scholars and men of letters in special study of this or that author or period. By his modest claim, Mr. Giles might have disarmed criti¬cism. Our debt to him as a pioneer has been so great that it seems ungracious to pick flaws. But familiarity breeds criticism. Partly due to his initial searchings, we of the West have become during the past decade fairly familiar with Chinese poetry of the best periods, some of us so familiar and so fond that Alfred Kreymborg can exclaim, "Italy's dead and dull, all Europe gray— Take down that silken copy—Li Tai Po— Open his drunken rivers; let them flow, And haul this junk the Occident away." Interest in Chinese poetry has dated for me only from 1917, my first year in the Orient, and arose primarily from an interest in Chinese painting. The two arts there, in source, in expression, and in use, are so closely interwoven that if you touch one, you have touched the other. Sometimes a painting carries only a line from a poem, sometimes four lines, sometimes eight; but often a single five-character line is enough to reach the heart of any human being who finds in life as it is, the substance of poetry. I had soon found in these poems, as in the paintings, more than mere decorations. I had found poises of life. And so I came back from my first trip to China not only with a precious collection of paintings but, by the same token, with an eager resolve to have more of the poetry of China, to have more than any existent translation in English could give me. Nowhere had I found, professionally translated, the simple beauty which even a rickshaw-boy, in his limited English, could tap for me from an inscription on a painting. What had it meant?—this lack in our literature, this loss to our letters! Had our translators been adding and subtracting, instead of translating? Did it only remain for them to multiply? On my return from China, I was fortunate in meeting, as a fellow-member of the University of California faculty, Dr. Kiang Kang-hu, whose oral translations, from volumes of Chinese poetry, proved as poignant and human as the few that had been made for me, by the rickshaw-boy and others, from inscriptions. We decided to collaborate in translating entire a volume of T'ang poets, the most famous of Chinese anthologies. On my second trip to China, I accompanied Dr. Kiang. This distinguished scholar, who had passed the rigorous examinations of the Imperial regime and been a professor at the Peking Government University, is now President of the Southern University at Shanghai; and the fact that no great effort was made to induce his return to California, after his year's leave, is one of the con¬tinual instances of American stupor, a stupor nowhere more evident than at our institutions of learning. Fatuous and com¬placent through the years, we have given our youngsters diplomas and decreed them literate, without perforce instructing them in the older and nobler half of the world's literature. What does the casual student at an American University know of ancient and modern culture in India, China, Japan? Why have we always stopped short with Mediterranean and Nordic culture, leaving the Orient in our own outer darkness, with nothing much coming through to us but a glint of swarthy magic, a scent of tea and laundry-soap and a little breeze of fans? It was not until the fans began blowing whiffs of gunpowder from Japan that we awoke at all to Oriental culture. Here were results. Here were battleships and guns. What ho! Behind results like these, behind these terms that we could understand, there might be a culture worth noting. There might even be gospels to play with on Sundays. Roughly, then, we owe our cultural awakening to the Japanese soldiery. Smoothly we owe it to various pioneers, like and unlike Professor Giles. Hitherto those of us who have wanted to look eastward have had to look through the eyes of our western merchants, missionaries, professors, and travelers. We have therefore had our information tinctured with percentage, Christianity, pedagogy, and lighter forms of ignorance. Some of the ablest books on China have been so fundamentally prejudiced against Chinese culture that they were like able Mohammedan versions of Christ. After every yes there was a but. Fluent writers like Backhouse and Bland have gratified in China their preference for violent grandeur, their provincial conceptions of romance in imperial garb. Other prejudices and preferences equally provincial have appeared in the works of Arthur H. Smith, D.D., the Rev. J. MacGowan, and many others, including authors of guidebooks and commercial compilations. Fortunately some of the later observers of China have ap¬proached an old civilization with less constraint: scientists like Bertrand Russell, free from racial bias; philosophers like John Dewey, free from religious bias; publicists like Gilbert Reid and Nathaniel Peffer, free from imperialistic bias. Listen to Dr. Reid, for instance ('Foreign Affairs', London, October, 1923): If you say, 'China is full of discord' I ask, 'Does not discord exist in Europe among all the nations? If you say, 'The Chinese Government cannot meet its debts', I ask, 'What country in Europe has the prospect within a century of paying off its indebtedness?' If you say, 'Sentiments of justice, high honor, and humanity are disappearing under the China Republic', I ask in retort, 'Where in Europe do such qualities exist?' These, each in his way exhibiting a new attitude, are fair- minded men. Their services, to the excited West and to the somewhat bewildered East, have been immeasurable. And yet likely to outlast even such services are those of the lovers of art who, after blind centuries, are finding in Chinese painting and poetry a light to lighten the Gentiles, a harmony of spirit and of expression too lovely, too human, too leavening, to be withheld forever from the world at large. Professor Giles, exploring in an earlier generation, experienced a solid content in his discoveries, rather than an ardent and reverent delight. He explored with his head, rather than with his heart and bowels. He has been a scholarly gentleman, rather than a fond mortal. Hence he has brought from his Chinese adventures not a mountain-side of bamboo, but a library alcove. Considering his prodigious task, the vast range of material, and the numbing influence of Chinese commentators, he has proved himself, surprisingly, an architect of light. There are glimpses of sky above his book-racks,—not a mere Chinese sky, a world-sky. His approach, in other words, has been not only deeply laborious, but a bit lustrous. Among many kindred volumes, Professor Giles has published his translations, Chinese Poetry in English and Gems from Chinese Literature; and 'acting upon the suggestion of Mr. Gosse', he has devoted a large part of his History to his own translations. It is here that I begin finding fault with Mr. Giles. His prose translations, competent and often distinguished, have an amiable dignity, graced with rhythm and wit; but when we consider his verse translations, we find him with a Spencerian pen, with a ponderous ingenuity, inscribing the names of Chinese poets to the album-English of his time. Under Dr. Kiang's guidance, I have been for five years now studying poetry of the T'ang Dynasty, 600-900 a.d. I shall therefore consider especially, both in the History and in the two complementary volumes just mentioned, Giles’ translations from the T'ang poets. From the point of view of a scholar, my five years are nothing; but combined with my quarter-century as a poet, they properly prompt my complaint against our pioneer. Here, then, is a typical Giles translation of a four-line poem, Ch'en T'ao's A Song of Lung-hsi: They swore the Huns should perish: they would die if needs they must . . . And now five thousand, sable-clad, have bit the Tartar dust. Along the river-bank their bones lie scattered where they may, But still their forms in dreams arise to fair ones far away. The poem reads literally: Swear sweep Huns not care self Five thousand embroidery sable perish desert dust Alas Wu-ting riverside bones Still Spring chambers dream inside men. I can not resist adding an English version given me in Peking by the late Dr. Ku Hung-ming. In what he called his 'free translation' this old Chinese scholar proved to be more at ease with English verse than Dr. Giles has been: They vowed to sweep the heathen hordes From off their native soil or die: Five thousand tasselled knights, sable-clad, All dead now on the desert lie. Alas! the white bones that bleach cold Far off along the Wu-ting stream Still come and go as living men Home somewhere in the loved one's dream. Since I have instanced elsewhere (Asia, December, 1921) Giles' outrageous version of Liu Fang-p'ing's A Sigh of Spring, callously called A Spinster, let me quote here as a further example of almost the worst that can be done in the way,—literally in the way,—of translation, Giles' treatment of Liu Yü-hsi's Spring Song, wantonly called The Odalisque: A gaily dressed damsel steps forth from her bower, Bewailing the fate that forbids her to roam; In the courtyard she counts up the buds on each flower, While a dragon-fly flutters and sits on her comb. Crushed here is the lovely hint that in her count she is forgetting herself. I risk our own closer translation for comparison: In chosen robes she comes down from her chamber Into her courtyard, enclosure of spring. When she tries from the center to count her flowers, On her hairpin of jade a dragon-fly poises. When Giles interprets a poet like Han Yu, who was essentially a scholar, there is a more congenial result,—for instance, the famous satire: 'Who know, speak not; who speak, know naught', Are words from Lao Tzu's lore. What then becomes of Lao Tzu’s own Five thousand words and more ? Even here, I submit that an ordinarily sensitive ear would have preferred 'not' to 'naught' and 'become' to 'becomes'; and imagining an exigency of rhyme, I suspect 'and more'. Instead of cavilling at such insensibilities in a man who is obviously no lyrist, it would be more gracious to acknowledge such comparative simplicities as Hsieh Jung's Musing: At eve, along the river bank, The mist-crowned wavelets lure me on To think how all antiquity Has floated down the stream and gone! Now and then there will be a thoroughly fine line, like 'Noise is not in the market-place nor quiet on the hills'. Li She's On Highwaymen, and Han Yu's Humanity, have fared well at Giles' hands. On the whole, however, he has done the T'ang poets little service. His intention was proper; but the results are lamentable. He is not a Chinese nightingale, but a secretary-bird. It may be objected that in 1901 he had no better translations to draw upon than his own. (Legge's Chinese Classics, from which he also quotes, are even heavier.) If the case rested there, we might say no more. We might acknowledge our debt to Giles as a pioneering scholar and respect his attempts to convey to us, with a scholar’s painstaking effort, the poetic fruits of China. Unfortunately, Mr. Giles has seen fit to attack with acerbity intruders upon the poetic corner of his preempted field. Not long ago I saw from his pen, based on very minor charges of error, a sharp condemnation of the work of Arthur Waley. Waley, both from internal evidence and from hearsay, is some¬what more of a scholar than a poet; but he is enough of a poet to have drawn the general attention of English readers for the first time to the merits of Chinese poetry. Except for Waley and others like him, Giles’ work would in all likelihood be still lying stagnant on the publishers’ shelves, instead of being sent out clean and notable in a new edition. After this tart arrogance toward Waley, the reappearance of Giles’ own translated poems in the present new edition justifies a bluntly critical estimate. More is due now than meek and grateful reverence toward a standard work newly raised from the dead. There were better translations to draw on this time than Giles’ own. There are other citizens of heaven. Cranmer-Byng, in his Lute of Jade and Feast of Lanterns, began, some years ago, attracting a small public to his Tennysonian versions. Taking the same sort of liberty with Chinese poetry that Gilbert Murray takes with Greek poetry, fearing apparently that people would not understand the clean simplicity of the originals, making free therefore to deck them with ribands, this translator has none the less done charmingly what he set out to do. So have Helen Waddell in her little book, and Ezra Pound in his, and Judith Gautier in French and Hans Heilman in German; each taking his own sort of liberty, and changing the Chinese to more or less un-Chinese proportions. E. Powys Mathers, on the other hand, true though he may be to the poetic spirit of India, Siam, or Senegal, is utterly false to the dominant poetic spirit of China. He pours into his trans¬lations the expected incense, perfumed passion, and rich obliq¬uity of the East; but when it comes to Chinese poems, the obliquity is all on the part of Mr. Mathers. I have noted in another journal, but cannot forbear noting again, the mistaken or deliberate excesses with which he lards a humorous little poem, Chu Ch'ing-yü's A Song of the Palace, which undoubtedly alludes to a feminine tell-tale. Here is our version of it: The palace-gate quietly encloses its flowers And the ladies file out to a bower of jade, Their lips abrira with imperial gossip Which they dare not utter because of a parrot. Besides calling the poem In the Harem, Giles, as usual, quenches the point: It was the time of flowers, the gate was closed; Within an arbor's shade fair girls reposed. But though their hearts were full, they nothing said, Fearing the tell-tale parrot overhead. But what beautiful rubbish Mr. Mathers makes of it, what pretentious orientalism, what mysterious verbiage!  What rigorous calm! What almost holy silencel 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. A still newer edition of the History of Chinese Literature, though it should, of course, avoid this sort of thing from E. Powys Mathers or the dull translations of Charles Budd, Brian Brown, and Jordan Herbert Stabler, would be incalculably en¬riched if judicious and critical selection were made for it from some of the other translators I have mentioned, especially from Arthur Waley, and also from Shigeyoshi Obata's translations of Li Po and from the collaborative work of Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell. At least the impression would no longer be given that Chinese lyrics are for the most part either sententious or trifling and in both kinds rather flat. Mr. Giles might object that Arthur Waley misses much of the grace of the originals, that Obata smooths away some of their power and that Lowell overdresses their simplicity. It is true that Waley is a bit subdued to the grayness of the British Museum, that Lowell can not help stressing ornamental detail and that Obata, little as one might guess it from his text, is writing in a language which has not grown up directly with his own fibre and muscle. But each of these devotees has contributed a true quality to his undertaking: a rugged homeliness, Lowell a rounded emphasis and a quiet ease. Due more to these later comers than to pioneers like Giles, a fairly wide public is already listening to the poets of China. I enter my own incidental testimony. One or two editors of our especially 'literary' magazines wrote me some time ago that they doubted the appeal here of this 'exotic' poetry. And yet, out of the three hundred T'ang poems in The Jade Mountain, the anthology I am working on, I have already seen more than two hundred appear in American and English magazines of every sort and description. There are signs all about that the T'ang masters are at last coming to the fore in the Western world, each in his own right. Waley has been specializing in Po Chu-yi, Obata in Li Po, Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell in Tu Fu, and, Dr. Kiang and I in Wang Wei, who is to me the most memorable genius of the whole golden period. A thousand years have not in the least estranged us from these friendly masters. Truth is that the T'ang poems are not nearly so 'exotic' to normal human beings as are a great many of the seemingly popular latter-day poems which assume to express America or Britain or the present generation and which are given liberal leave for their quirks by the very editors who feared from the Chinese something too strange for our understanding. T'ang poetry is so normal, so human, so simple, so universal in its content and essential appeal, that many an undersophisti¬cated or oversophisticated Westerner can not see that it amounts to anything at all. It does not seem to him 'poetic', because it is not, like a good deal of our own established poetry, exaggerated, theatrical, overladen, ornate—because, in fact, it is not 'exotic'. Apart from exceptions that only prove the rule, it is concerned at heart with affecting experiences common to mankind, rather than with affected experiences common to man more or less than kind; and through an art which is at the same time as invisible as the air we breathe and yet colors everything we see, it owns a distinction which Mr. Giles, for all his pioneer labors, has never even guessed. In short these poems are not poises of poetry but, as I said earlier, poises of life. The poise is Chinese. The life is ours.	Person: Bynner, Witter Person: Giles, Herbert A.

Cited by (1)

#	Year	Bibliographical Data	Type / Abbreviation	Linked Data
1	2000-	Asien-Orient-Institut Universität Zürich	Organisation / AOI	Cited by: Huppertz, Josefine ; Köster, Hermann. Kleine China-Beiträge. (St. Augustin : Selbstverlag, 1979). [Hermann Köster zum 75. Geburtstag]. [Enthält : Ostasieneise von Wilhelm Schmidt 1935 von Josefine Huppertz ; Konfuzianismus von Xunzi von Hermann Köster]. (Huppe1, Published)