Kunst, Arthur E.
(1934-)
Name Alternative(s)
Kunst, Arthur Egon
Subjects
Index of Names : Occident
Chronology Entries (1)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1969 |
Kunst, Arthur E. A critical analysis of Witter Bynners "A night mooring near Maple bridge" [ID D32342]. Zhang Ji. "While I watch the moon go down, a crow caws through the frost ; Under the shadows of maple-trees, a fisherman moves with his torch ; And I hear, from beyond Su-chou, from the temple on Cold Mountain ; Ringing for me, here in my boat, the midnight bell." Bynner's poem makes a typically modern effort to translate the conventional and personal vers of the Chinese into modern English rhythm. He does have sensitivity to phonetic patterns. The poem is just too short to properly set out a panoply of English sounds. Whereas the English has spaces at uneven points in the sequence, the lines are pulled apart onto separate planes, torn up in the interior by punctuation marks at odd intervals, and rung up and down from lower case to capital letters. All of which, like all of the Chinese, is very conventional. Categorizing the grammatical functions of Classical Chinese has never been easy. Bynner's poem has a similar grammatical structure : two clauses, one clause, and an extended clause. The huge preponderance of noun-functioning words in the Chinese is not matched by Bynner's major tribute to English convention occurs : explicit subjects for verbs, enumerative articles for nouns, and directional prepositions for precisioning relationships. The Chinese seems quite precise about objects, the English distracts us from the objects by being precise about number, position, direction, and observer. One must similarly explore the relations of things in space and in time ; the result is to see how the Bynner version, unlike the Chinese, insists on placing everything for the reader. The very lack of enumeration in the Chinese underlies the feeling of reverberating sounds and lights that leads ultimately to the echo at the end. And the freedeom from grammatically explicit relations keeps each new object ready for a number of possible ways of fitting into the existing context. The overall effect in the Chinese was a series of eruptions, and impression of instability and strangeness ; in the English, the same pervading night gives the effect of the ominous, partially through the self-conscious nervousness of the traveller, partially through the definite but unaccounted-for relation of the actions observed. |
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Bibliography (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1969 |
Kunst, Arthur E. A critical analysis of Witter Bynners "A night mooring near Maple bridge". In : Tsing hua journal of Chinese studies, vol. 7 (1968-1969). http://nthur.lib.nthu.edu.tw/retrieve/72584/JA01_1968_p114.pdf. |
Publication / Byn5 |