Bynner, Witter
(Brooklyn, New York 1881-1968 Santa Fe) : Schriftsteller, Dichter, Übersetzer
Subjects
Index of Names : Occident
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Literature : Occident : United States of America
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Translator
Chronology Entries (14)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
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| 1 | 1917 |
Witter Bynner travels in Korea, Japan and China from March 15 to June. Bynner brought back four Chinese scoll paintings. One of these, Two fishermen, stimualted him to write the essay The Chinese brush. |
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| 2 | 1917-1964 |
Bynner, Witter. The selected Witter Bynner [ID D32346]. 1917 Letter from Witter Bynner to Barry Faulkner ; Shanghai, May 22 / 27 (1917). Korea was exciting - but Peking is almost everything. I can't get my breath from the wonder of it. Japan is but bothersome dust in the nostrils of the dragon. Thank heaven I was away and this far away when the Thing happened [The US declared a state of war on April 6] ! I can get a clearer view of its large aspects and better find my own place than if I had been on the spot of agitation. China's holy mountains counseling across deserts of ancient dead bid the soul smile at the hand. An so I cannot feel excitement or ardor – or even as yet resignation… China still stirs me to the depths – Japan (Kobe) seemed strange this morning, exquisite, clean, courteaous, suave, civilized, assured after that vast magnificent chaos. 1920 Letter from Witter Bynner to Haniel Long ; China, Aug. 1 (1920). Settled at last—in just the place I had dreamed of! On the top of a mountain, whispering with bamboos and our own waterfall, brilliant hot with sun, cool with moon; and before us, or rather under us precipitate, and then reaching far off, glimmer by glimmer, to the sea the sublimest landscape I have ever seen from a dwelling, all the Chinese mountain paintings put end to end, enchanted with mists and with unearthly green, blessed with great rainbows, guarded by fantastic deities of cloud: quiet folds and folds of healing, always another fold! Our luck was prodigious. The heat in China is all that is said of it. Six days in Shanghai, though important after my fatuous misconception of Shanghai as uninteresting, wilted us into wet beings almost unbalanced. Kiang was to take us to West Lake (Si Wu) for refuge; but the day before the day we had planned, in a blind rush which may only be described as panic, we fled to Hangchou (two miles from West Lake) not even letting Kiang know. We lacked his address; but a day was more than we could wait, so off we went, leaving a brief note of farewell. Kiang and I had talked for two years of visiting Si Wu together, a place rich with beauties and memories, a haunt of our poets; and yet it was a week before I could manage to send him word as to what had become of us. I tell you this to show you that there is a kind of madness in the weather. Hangchou was as bad as Shanghai, and after one day the Fickes fled again, to Mokanshan, a mountain of whose coolness we had heard. I, in a kind of spell, stayed behind and for three days in a city of 350,000 Chinese saw the faces of only three foreigners. I had moved to a native hotel and, consumed with heat and mosquitoes and unable to sleep much on the bed of slung matting, was physically miserable. Fortunately I like the food and, clad in only a long linen Chinese coat, ate it on my own picturesque little balcony—ardently companioned by two Chinese students of twenty who had come to my rescue with a little English on the roof of the Hangchou hotel, where I was listening, my first night there, to some singsong girls. The two likable lads were with me after that from dawn to eve, my guides, my bargainers, my friends. In return I paid their slight expenses on our jaunts and taught them English. With the elder and abler I became more and more charmed. His gentleness, his courtesy, his fine young integrity are interwoven for me with the beauty and wonder of West Lake. There is plenty of age in China ; I was glad of some youth. And I realized again, as I realize often in my experience, that the accidental move, the inexplicable, even the unintelligent, like this running away from dear Kiang, brings a happy outcome and adds to the general good. I needed, for instance, to discover for myself, anonymously, so to speak, without introduction, the simple beautiful humanness of a Chinese. And there it was, written quick for me, a new verse in my gospel. Incidentally I discovered him on the edge of Christianity and discouraged him for all I was worth from differentiating among the wise and appointed teachers, from singling one of them out to the disparagement of the others, from yielding one jot of his birthright in Confucius, in Buddha, in Laotzu. There was a glad light in our eyes, and I knew for a moment the joy of being a missionary. When Nieh's vacation ended, so did mine; and I followed the Fickes to this rare place where we have taken a house and are at regular work again. Kiang will be joining us in a month (we are here till the 15th of September), and I shall have all I can do to put the first volume of Chinese poems into shape for his final revision. That means that I must renounce letter writing, in spite of all I have to say to you and a few others; but I could not rest nor work without sending you just this fond word to let you know of my happiness and of my love for you. I am hoping, before long, to hear from you that you are in patience with me again. I will not have it otherwise. Someday in a place like this you will be in person with me and there shall be long rich exchanges. Or perhaps something will bring about our living together in Berkeley; for that is where I wish eventually to have my being. I have even broached it to mother. I had rather be underground in Berkeley than above ground in New York. There will be difficulties; but I am not afraid of difficulties any more: I have a steadier spirit than once I had and a little money. Meantime this is what I wanted. I took it, and I am glad. China has much more to teach me at present than America. The discouragements in both places are the same: the greed of an eminent few corrupting the simple decency of the many. The marvel is how much a few can accomplish, whether for evil or for good. With a reminder to you that people may be hypocritical but that books are more so and with my two arms out to the three of you. 1920 Letter from Witter Bynner to Edna St. Vincent Millay ; Shanghai, Sept. 10 (1920). … I have written you another poem. I enclose it. It is not so much about you as about the holy wonders of this place, this Chinese mountaintop. In Japan, nature is material for artistic man ; here man is material for artistic nature. I shall try to explain it some time in verse, but I shall fail. I wish you were here to do it. I do not think of anyone else who could. For Edna. From a Mountain in China To the Young Poet Millay If I sent in a flash these hills to you Would you be hushed like me ? Or must one's heart fill with a view Gradually? And might you merely nod your head, Accepting as your due Valleys not to be mistreated Even by you – And not to be sent to you by me, No matter what I said Or sang or painted? Let it be. The wish is dead. 1921 Letter from Witter Bynner to Albert M. Bender ; Shanghai, Jan. 2 (1921). Your kindnesses heap up like the cliffs along the Yang-tse Gorges and darken my conscience. I do not deserve them. But that would be the last of your considerations, wouldn't it !... Kiang, according to the strange ways of life, I have only just found, again after four months. He is lecturing everywhere, enormously popular, offered governorships, etc. – and yet suspect and ahadowed as a former Socialist and possible future Bolshevik. Dewey I have played with ; and I have enjoyed and admired Bertrand Russell. The month ahead is to be intensive work with Kiang in Peking, whither I return from Shanghai as soon as I have dispatched mby friend, Mrs. Simeon Ford, with a note to you… I'll be lodging in Peking by another quirk of fortune, in the Chinese house of George Atcheson, one of my poetry pupils. He is a student-interpreter at the American Legation and is living there in one of the beautiful small buildings of what was formerly a fine old temple. I think I sail on February 28 for S.F.; but I never know much of anything – except that you and Anne are among those closest to the heart of. 1923 Letter from Witter Bynner to Kiang Kang-hu ; Hotel Arzapalo, Chapala, July 20 (1923). … Thanks for you comment on the Li Po translations. I enclose you a letter from a Chinese student, S.Y. Chu, with a referenct to Li Po's 'A song of Chang-Kan'. In it you will find some penciled queries which I wish you would answer. Long ago, by the way, I sent you a complete list of the poets in our anthology asking you to fill in such dates as I lacked. I wonder if that list failed to reach you. I enclose another. The book progresses a little more rapidly ; and as I have said before, the delay is advantageous for us in the fact that many of the poems are appearing in magazines and giving the volue, before its issue, a growing prestige. The question of notes troubles me. It seems to me that figures set here and there against words in the text are disfiguring and distracting. Hence I am arranging our note system and am thinking seriously of a geographical index at the back of the book in which those interested might find the modern equivalenst of T'ang places. The difficulty would be that some of these T'ang names, like Wu, mean in different poems, different places. In the case of such names I should have to differentiate and make specific references to the poems in which they appear. I mention this because I wish you would take pains on the group of manuscripts I am sending you today under separate cover, to set down the modern names of places for such us as I propose. You may either return me the manuscripts with your comments or send me the comments in a letter carefully listing them under the titles. From time to time as I can supply you with copies, I shall send you other groups of the poems, hoping thereby to save extensive revision on the proofs, and consequent expense. Please notice that I wish your supervision on the printed poems as well as those typed… Hoping to be in China within two years… 1931 Letter from Witter Bynner to Miss MacKinnon ; Santa Fe, July 20 (1931). [Betr. Fir-flower tablets by Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough]. The third question is more difficult. I should say, first of all, that I consider my method more faithful to the balanced meaning of the original than Mrs. Ayscough's method. Suppose, for instance, the radical meaning of composite English words were translated into a for¬eign tongue—suppose "extravagant terms" were translated "beyond- straying terms" or "at daybreak" "when the day cracked"—then you might have a literal translation of what, in English, correspond to a combination of root strokes in a Chinese character; but the meaning and stress of the word in its context would be distorted and swollen beyond the intent of the author. It is true that a Chinese scholar pleasingly feels in an ideograph the two or three roots that make the meaning. It is true also that a Western scholar feels, say, in a word made from Greek or Latin the interesting original courtship of images which have quieted into a final everyday marriage of meaning. The Chinese character for "quarrel" indicates two women under one roof; but imagine translating it that way. Equally absurd is it to say "upper and lower garments" when the character, though literally conveying that, means "clothes." I made my translations from literal texts given me by Dr. Kiang —or my other Chinese friends. Their phrases were often, of course, odd and tickling to the fancy. My constant effort, however, was to I let detailed fancy go, for the sake of the imagination behind the poem—to find as nearly as I could, the exact English equivalent of, the Chinese word—the real rather than the literal translation—that I is if "literal translation" means translating parts of words and then | binding the parts of words into phrases rather than translating the customary finished meaning of the composite word. In a way, I was lucky in not knowing the Chinese language. A moderate knowledge might have tempted me astray from poetry into etymology. My first interest in Chinese poetry came from Chinese friends whom I met in California during 1917 and 1918. With their help I translated "ancient" poems (mostly from the Confucian "Book of Poetry", I believe) which appear in my "Canticle of Pan" (Knopf). In 1918, Dr. Kiang (on the faculty of the University of California, as I was) initiated me deeper into the realm, and ever since then I have been working with him on "The Jade Mountain", which the Chinese call "modern" poetry. Before that, in 1916, on my first trip to China, I had been drawn to its poetry by stanzas written on the earliest acquired of my collection of Chinese paintings. Some day I shall translate those inscriptions. 1962 1962 Letter from Witter Bynner to Mabel MacDonald Carver ; June 12 (1962). [Kiang Kang-hu is believed to have died in prison in Shanghai on December 6 or 7, 1954]. Poor Kiang made the grave error of accepting the secretaryship of education in the cabinet of Henry Pu Yi in the Manchukuo, called the Puppet Government. Kiang insisted to the end that he merely wished to keep the youngsters in his country educated, while subject ot Japan, and that he hever was in the least politically active. Unfortunately, the Nationalists did not take it that way and put the man in jail where later the Communists kept him until his tragic death there. A am amazed that my inscribed copy of The way of life was allowed to reach the prisoner and his note about it allowed to reach me. The sad en was when a note of his did reach his daughter living in China, asking her if she could bring him some candy. She did, only to be told by an official at the prison : Your father died last nith of malnutrition. They did not even return her the candy. 1964 Letter from Witter Bynner to Ruth Witt-Diamant ; Santa Fe, Aug. 7 (1964). … I envy you the life in Japan. In 1917 and 1920, when I wen there and to China, I found the beauty and assuagements of Japan very pleasant both before entering, and after leaving China. I think an indication of what was a bit difficult was the fact that in Japan, for all the slight squirming and giggling, I was never sure whether or not we were seeing and feeling with the same humor, whereas in China the mirth bottle would pop with champagne. Perhaps this Japanese eagerness to be laughing with us has reached through the years toward an inclination to be laughing at us. When I was in the Orient, I thought it would have taken very little decency for us to earn and keep a warm liking from the Chinese people, whereas the Japanese largely baffled me with their apparent eagerness toward a liking they could not really muster. And I shoud say that on the whole we Americans were better then all round than we are now – both more real and more civilized. But as I say I wish I could go again to the Orient. |
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| 3 | 1918 | Witter Bynner taught poetry at the University of California Berkeley and met the Chinese scholar Jiang Kanghu. They began to translate an anthology of three hundred Tang poems. | |
| 4 | 1920-1921 | Witter Bynner traveled to China from June 22, 1920-April 3, 1921 with Beniamino Bufano : Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Mogashan, Yangzi. He studied Chinese literature, had a meeting with Sun Yatsen and John Dewey. He shipped back to America about two hundred scroll paintings and over a hundred jade girdle clasps. |
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| 5 | 1921 |
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. |
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| 6 | 1922 |
Bynner, Witter. Translating Wang Wei [ID D32337]. Just as Tu Fu and Li Po are often spoken of in conjunction by the Chinese, so are two other great poets of the T'ang Dynasty, Meng Hao-jan and Wang Wei. The latter, who lived 699-759 A. D., is distinguished among the poets of China by a deep and beautiful optimism. The melancholy that wounded Tu Fu and Meng Hao-jan seems not to have touched Wang Wei beneath the surface. And, whereas Li Po sought in wine solace from the ills and sorrows of life, Wang Wei found an abiding content in the "green and healing hills" and in the highly humbled and attuned mysticism of Lao-tzu's teaching. As a young man, Wang Wei became Assistant Secretary of State; but at the age of thirty-one, when his wife died, he left his post and retired to live near Mount Chung-nan. Two of his poems about Mount Chung-nan are published in this number, both breathing the sober sweetness and simplicity of his retired life. One of them begins with the line, "My heart in middle age found the Way"; the Chinese word for the Way being Tao, the first character of the title of Lao-tzu's book, Tao-Te-Ching, which may be translated in whole as The Way and the Exemplification. Taoism appears, then, to have been the consolation of Wang Wei, although Professor Herbert M. Giles, in his volume Chinese Literature, declares it to have been Buddhism. We realize, not only from the direct statement in this one poem, but from the spirit of all his poems, that he had serenely accepted the Way, the natural way of the universe. There was for a while a strong division between the followers of Lao-tzu and the followers of Confucius. Po Chu-yi ridiculed Taoist doctrines in the following four lines, crisply translated by Professor Giles: "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 or more? The answer is that Lao-tzu's words, fused now with both Buddhism and Confucianism, have become an integral part of the religion of China. Here are two characteristic quotations from his gospel: Follow diligently the Way in your own heart, but make no display of it to the world. Do nothing, and all things will be done. Among the selections printed in this issue, note the last two lines of the poem, Answering Vice-Prefect Chang: a question asked in terms of complicated morality and answered in terms of simple happiness: You ask me about good and evil? Hark, on the lake there's a fisherman singing. This does not mean that the ideal Taoist literally "did nothing." As a matter of fact Wang Wei was a physician, a high government official, a great poet, and also one of China's most illustrious painters. (A scroll attributed to him is on view at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.) His activities, however, were all in flow with universal forces: they sang like the fisherman — there was no fret, no jealousy, no self-exaltation, no irritated struggle; only harmony, humility, exalted identity with nature — a true and wide knowledge of values, making him a master of words, a master of the brush, and a master of life. Yes, there was a sure gaiety in Wang Wei, instanced in his Message to P'ai Ti, the fellow-poet with whom he longed to drink again and to "sing a wild poem"; or in the verses already mentioned, My Retreat at Chung-nan, in which he happily anticipated the day when he should "meet an old wood-cutter, and talk and laugh and never return." In the last two lines of the poem to P'ai Ti, he addressed his friend, according to a too frequent Chinese manner, by the name of Chieh-yu, who was a recluse of the Ch'u kingdom, famous somewhat for drinking, but more for stopping Confucius' chariot and warning him against politics with the song: O phoenix, O phoenix, Virtue is corrupted! What is past is past all counsel, What is future may be moulded. Come away! Come away! Politics are dangerous! And Wang Wei's reference in the final line of this same poem is to the place where he will be drinking with his friend; yet Five Willows is the place named, where long ago T'ao Ch'ien had lived, another famous recluse who was both a great writer and a great drinker. The last two lines of the poem In my Lodge at Wang-Ch'uan after a Long Rain, clear and significant as they are in themselves, yet contain, for the Chinese reader, enriching allusion and connotation. There was once a scholar, Yang-tzu, who, before he became a student of Lao-tzu, was highly respected and honored by his fellow-men. Later, through the many years of his discipleship, he lost his prestige, and even a boor would take precedence over him; but he was glad because he had formerly been proud and pretentious. The last line refers to a hermit who was fond of sea-gulls; they followed him wherever he went. His father asked why they were not afraid and bade the son bring him some; but next day, when the hermit went out intending to take them to his father, they all flew away. The poem in the group most in need of explanation, because of its allusion to historic events and personages, is The Beautiful Hsi-shih; and the last two lines of A Song of Young Girls from Lo-Yang also require the following summary: During the Chou Dynasty, when the Yueh kingdom was conquered by the Wu kingdom, the Yueh king still held his throne and plotted to throw off the tributary yoke. Aided by his able minister, Fan Li, he planned to distract the king of Wu with women. Fan Li searched through the Yueh kingdom for girls to beguile him and came upon Hsi-shih washing clothes by a lake. Conquering his own love for her, he fiercely persuaded her to his scheme. She remained at court for some time; and the Wu king, in his infatuation, forgot affairs of state. Weakened by this means, the Wu kingdom was overcome by the Yueh kingdom; and Fan Li eventually accepted Hsi-shih as his reward. The whimsical phrasing of the line "If by wrinkling their brows they can copy her beauty" alludes to the fact that she had heart trouble, and it was said that her drawn brows, her look of gentleness in suffering, which the girls of her time tried unsuccessfully to imitate, made her more beautiful. One might enlarge upon references in others of the poems. For instance, the quatrain called Lines contains the phrase "my silken window." This is not a decorative adjective. It merely means that, before the use of paper or glass, windows in China were of silk. The last line of the same poem is made lovelier by knowledge that the mei, or plum blossom, is in China the earliest flower of spring. It is interesting to know that A Song at Wei-Cheng, which was written for music, is still popular through China as a song of farewell, and that to this day "since we picked willow-branches at Wei-Cheng" means "since we parted." The beauty of the four lines called A Parting, with its simple, profound expression of the abiding presence of friendly nature and the transient presence of friendly man, is heightened by the reader's response to the grace of the name Wang Sun, which from a dim and ancient origin still means in China a noblehearted young scholar, or sometimes lover. But on the whole, these T'ang poems are so valid and universal in uttering beauty that they may vitally enter the poetic consciousness of a westerner still ignorant of the various allusions. Translating the work of Wang Wei and others in the Three Hundred Poems of the Tang Dynasty, Dr. Kiang and I have tried constantly to transfer the Chinese idiom into an equivalent idiom in English, rather than to stress the local novelty and pungency of Chinese phrasing. It would be as erroneous to overemphasize the component radicals of a Chinese character as to overemphasize the component meanings of such words in English as day-break, breakfast, nightfall or landscape. The delicate importance of the translator's office lies in bringing from one language to another the rounded and proportioned effect of a whole poem. And we, conscientiously, have tried to make felt, in our translations, the high honesty and wise humanness of poets who have in many ways, and in one Wei especially, lived closer to the heart of life than importunate passion brings the poets of the West. |
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| 7 | 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. |
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| 8 | 1925 |
Bynner, Witter. To one in China. In : Poetry ; vol. 25, no 4 (1925). Following westward, where we heard you call, The willing sun and I have come away, Noon to its covert, I to burial In the most golden darkness of Cathay. Enclose me with your shadows, wrap me round With the wonder of the midnight of your breath ! I yield my forehead to the living ground, I am obeisant to the touch of death. |
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| 9 | 1929.3 |
Bynner, Witter. The jade mountain [ID D9794]. (3) Sekundärliteratur 1930 David Morton : It is no longer possible to regard Chinese poetry as an entirely alien and exotic product that can have no very real significance for us and our tradition. American poetry of recent years has given increasing evidence of contact with the nature poetry of China. It is not merely that such poets at Amy Lowell and others have poured characteristically Chines images and colors into their verse. The method and even the temper of American poetry has been affected to a degree which, in the near future, will suggest the necessity of our knowing something of this alien tradition that has touched our poetry and left it changed. It is not without significance that such western figures as Cranmer-Byng and Judith Gautier and our own Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound and Witter Bynner havr found something in this Chinese poetry to satisfy a need unsatisfied by the poetry of our own tradition, and that our own poetry has been so hospitable in assimilating something of this alien art. This gives peculiar point to the appearance of Mr. Bynner'd book, it would be welcomed, I fancy, merely on the score that it is a beautiful thing, nnd that it ii his. And no better reasons arc needed for reading it. But it will be especially welcomed by those who see in it another entrance into that world that is so richly entrancing in itself and that is becoming increasingly significant for the English tradition because of certain congenial elements which are assimilated by American poetry, to the latter's great enrichment. The introductory essays of Mr. Bynner and Mr. Kiang-Hu will serve to quicken the memories of some and to inform others. Thus Mr. Bynner does much to prepare the reader for the proper approach to the poems, when he says: "They are the heart of an intimate letter. They bring the true, the beautiful, the everlasting, into simple, easy touch with the human, the homely and the immediate." He might have said, also, that the poetry as a whole has a marked diarist character, that to read any considerable quantity of a single poet's work, is to acquire the feeling that one is reading that poet’s diary, his day-by-day journal, where the casual and apparently trivial is set down side by side with the crucial and affecting. Thu characteristic is emphasized in the title and arrangement of Mrs. Ayscough's new translations, The Autobiography of Tu Fu. The effect is—on the English reader, at first—of a kind of pointless horizontalism. There are so few peaks. And it is only after initiation, that the English reader acquires the feeling of the profound richness of this poetry into which a whole life has passed—a poetry which did not confine itself to selected moments of thrilling intensity and significance, but recorded also the sweet and common uses of everyday experience, which after all, make our lives what they are. One acquires the feeling that these poets observe, for the sheer love of observing, and contemplate, for the sheer love of contemplating, and the observations and contemplations are re¬corded for that delight, whether they be peculiarly acute and significant or not. The intricacy of Chinese verse forms is an appalling thing and has little interest save for the curious—beyond furnishing furtive hint of what is necessarily lost in translation, which cannot hope to reproduce the tone effects which those prescriptions were designed to create. The music we must count as lost. But we turn for consolation to the good fortune which directed so gifted and musical a poet as Witter Bynner to the Chinese field. It is no disparagement of Arthur Waley, pioneer and excellent scholar in the field, to rejoice in the fact that one who is first and essentially a poet, has turned his attention to Chinese poetry. Mr. Bynner has resisted what must have been a temptation to make English verse out of his originals—verse characterized by the cryptic turn of thought and phrase, or resolving into the catch-throat denouement. In the absence of these, the poems have, in his version, the dignity and quiet integrity which we think of Chinese poetry as possessing. The poems are all taken from T'ang Dynasty (618-906) the golden age of Chinese poetry. In addition to the prefaces by Mr. Bynner and his translator, Mr. Kiang Kang-Hu, the book is supplied with a historical chronology, a chronology of the poets, a topography and explanatory notes on the poems. 1930 Isidor Schneider : The Jade Mountain is a translation of a Chinese anthology of classical poetry published late in the eighteenth century—a sort of Chinese Golden Treasury, but limited to the poetry of the Tang-Dynasty (seventh to tenth century). This was the classical age of poetry in China, and since the classics are living literature in China and have fixed literary forms to this day, this relume may be regarded as fairly representative of Chinese poetry as a whole. Although Dr. Kiang's excellent introduction gives a lucid description of the complex Chinese prosody, the reader cannot, even with its help, reproduce for himself in thfcse (or in any) translations the immediate sensory effects of the original. These are based on elements absent in other languages, one of which is the Chinese written character, which, being essentially a pictograph, gives a more physical and immediate sense of movement than our letters can. Another is the monosyllabic structure of the language, which affords different rhythmic effects. A third is the system of tones, classical Chinese having five tones or pitches of the voice, in each of which an identical sound lias a different meaning. Harmonies of these tones are as important in Chinese poetry as rhythm or rhyme. It is also true that Chinese poetry, which makes use of allusion as freely as we make use of metaphor, and, in a way, uses allusion instead of metaphor, presents the ob¬stacle of an entire alien civilization to translation. Its allusions are to an ancient history, to religions, mythologies, philosophies and a geography unknown or unfamiliar to us. Even to one who has read much about China these allusions are difficult; for the value of an allusion is the spontaneous response to it that comes with long and intimate association. And there is, also, the difference of subject matter. Women not being regarded as personalities /in Chinese life (I am speaking generally), there is almost no love poetry in Chinese literature. Friendship poetry takes its place. Again, the family and local affiliation being extremely strong in China, departure is always represented tragically, whereas in the West it would be represented with the glow of adventure. In some of these parting poems, as in the verses of the inveterate wanderer Tu Fu, I felt that a convention was being obeyed, that the poet pretended to sigh when he was impatient to be off, just as in the West we rarely dare to confess a disinclination to 'adventure'. Also, Chinese poetry presents the horrors, but almost never the glory, of war. These instances, which can be liberally added to, are enough to show how much more than words must be translated here. There is, however, still another special difference which should be noted—the attitude of the Chinese poet to nature. To him, nature is not symbolized. Nature is very near, is understood with a directness and simplicity that must make a Westerner despair. The ifiore we worship nature, the further it gets away from us. We have reason to envy the Chinese poets. It will be seen, then, that considerable patience is necessary for the enjoyment of Chinese poetry. The reader will be mystified at the beginning, but further acquaintance will give him a pleasure equal in intensity to the pleasure to be found in any major poetry. I am not able to agree with Mr. Bynaer, who says that in Chinese poetry "I have begun to feel a new, finer and deeper education than ever came to me from the Hebrew or Greek". But I feel that a stream of culture as valuable as any similar element in our civilization is being introduced by the translation of Chinese poetry. Mr. Bynner's and Dr. Kiang's versions are excellent. The unfortunately few translations ('Cathay', by Ezra Pound), done from the notes of Fenollosa, are more vigorous; and Waley's translations are more terse; but on the whole 'The Jade Mountain' stands as the best single volume of Chinese poetry now available. 1995 Richard Wilbur : A farewell to a friend by Du Fu : The exemplary translation illustrates everything which Bynner found attractive and corrective in Chinese poetry. Everything is distributed, in these quiet lines, with an evenness of attention. Everything in the scene and situation is actual, and presented in a natural sequence… |
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| 10 | 1929.1 |
The jade mountain. (1) Bynner, Witter. Poetry and culture [ID D9794]. Like most of us who have been schooled in this western world, I was afforded in my youth a study of culture flowing mainly from two sources, the Greek and the Hebrew. I had come to feel that poetic literature must contain streams from one or the other of these two sources: on the one hand the clean, objective, symmetrical, athletic beauty of the Greek; on the other hand the turgid, subiectivf, distorted, elaborated beauty of the Hebrew. Like my fellow students, I had been offered nothing of the literatures of the Far East. I am still doubtful that I could ever feel any real adherence to the ornate and entranced literature of India; but I have come by accident into as close touch with Chinese poetry as a westerner is able to come without a knowledge of the Chinese tongue. And I feel with conviction that in the matter of poetry I have begun to receive a new, finer, and deeper education than ever came to me from the Hebrew or the Greek. Centuries ago cultivated Chinese had reached the intellectual saturation which has tired the mind of the modern European. The Chinese gendeman knew the ancient folk-songs, compiled by Confucius. He knew also, all around .him, a profoundly rich civilization, a more poised and particularized sophistication than we westerners have yet attained. Through the Asian centuries everyone has written verse. In fact, from early imperial days down to these even worse disordered days of the Republic, the sense of poetry as a natural and solacing part of life has lasted among the Chinese people. Whether or not the individual may form or enjoy his poetry in metrical shape, he is constantly aware of the kinship Detween the beauty of the world and the beauty of imaginative phrase. On any Chinese mountain-climb toward a temple, rock after rock with its terse and suggestive inscription will"hear witness to this temper. So will thé street cries of the peddlers, or the names of the tea-houses, and on many hill-tops and lake-sides the casual but reverent jottings of this or that anonymous appreciator of natural beauty. When Whitman said: "To have great poets there must be great audiences too", he must have had in the back of his mind enriched generations like the Elizabethan in England or like almost any generation in China. In those great audiences each man, to the limit of his capacity and with natural ease, was a poet. There is a simple secret in these generations. It is told in a pamphlet by a venerable Chinese scholar who, until his death two years ago, was still with infinite passion adhering to the precepts of his ancestors, and with infinite patience, acceptably expressed by the way among foreigners, adhering to his conviction that foreigners impair the health of China. 'His name is Ku Hung- ming. His pamphlet, written in English, one of the five languages which he could use, is called The Spirit of the Chinese People. In it he advances, as reason for the eternal youth of the Chinesè people, the fact that the average Chihese has managed to maintain within himself the head of a man and the heart of a child. On this brief he is absorbingly interesting, explaining the continuance of Chinese culture, the only ancient culture still racially existent. My immediate concern with his brief is more special. I detect in it something that he does not specify: a reason foi the continuance of poetry as a live factor among his people and, more than that( the best reason I know of for the persistence of poetry anywhere among cultured races. Music may be the most intimate of the arts, I am not sure. Except for simple melodies, music is beyond the reach of anv individual who is not a technician. Painting and sculpture are obviously arts expressing themselves in single given objects, which, although they may be copied and so circulated, are for the most part accessible only to the privileged dr to those who make pilgrimages. Poetry more than any other of the arts may be carried about by a man either in his own remembering heart or else in compact and easily available printed form. It belongs to anyone. It is of all the arts the closest to a man; and it will so continue to be, in spite of the apparent shocks given it by the noises of mddern cdmmerce and science and jazz. It has been a common occurrence in China that poets, even the best of them, devote their earlier years to some form or public service. Century after century, Chinese poems reflect this deep devotion of their authors to the good of the State — their unwavering allegiance to righteousness, even when it meant demotin or exile or death. In modern western times there have been periods when poetry has seemed to be a candle-lit and thin-blooded occupation. I venture to surmise that poetry written in that sort of atmosphere grows with time less and less valid, less and less noticed. As a matter of fact, the outstanding English poets have been acutely concerned with the happiness of their fellow men and have given themselves warmly to public causes in which they believed. Similarly present-day poets in America, with amazingly few exceptions, have clustered to the defence of noble souls at bay like Eugene Debs, or have been quick to protest against doubtful justice, as in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti. This sort of zeal may not result in poetry of a high order immediately connected with the specific cause; but there is no question that but for this bravery, this heat on behalf of man's better nature, there would not be in the hearts of the poets so fine a crucible for their more-personal alchemies. Let me say a more general word than Dr, Kiang's as to the characteristic method of the best Chinese poetry I am not referring to the technical means by which a Chinese poet makes his words balanced and melodious. The discovery which has largely undone my previous convictions as to the way of writing poetry has rather to do with use of substance than with turns of expression. Mencius said long ago, in reference to the Odes collected by Confucius: "Those who explain the Odes must not insist on one term so as to do violence to a sentence, nor on a sentence so as to do violence to the general scope. They must try with their thoughts to meet that Scope, and then they will apprehend it." In the poetry of the west we are accustomed to let our appreciative minds accept with joy this or that passage in a poem — to prefer the occasional glitter of a jewel to the straight light of the sun. The Chinese poet seldom lets any portion of what he is saying unbalance the entirety. Moreover, with the exception of a particular tlass of writing — adulatory verse written for the court — Chinese poetry rarely trespasses beyond the bounds of actuality. Whereas western poets will take actualities as points of departure for exaggeration or fantasy, or else as shadows of contrast against dreams of unreality, the great Chinese poets accept the world exactly as they find it in all its terms, and with profound simplicity find therein sufficient solace. Even in phraseology they seldom talk about one thing in terms of another, but are able enough and sure enough as artists to make the ultimately exact terms become the beautiful terms. If a metaphor is used, it is a metaphor directly relating to the theme, not something borrowed from the ends of the earth. The metaphor must be concurrent with the action or flow of the poem; not merely superinduced, but an integral part of both the scene and the emotion. Wordsworth, of our poets, comes closest to the Chinese; but their poetry cleaves evpn nearer to nature than his. They perform the miracle of identifying the wonder of beauty with common sense. Rather, they prove that the simplest common sense, the most salutary, and the most nearly universal, is the sense of the beauty of nature, quickened and yet sobered by the wistful warmth of human friendship. For our taste, used as we are to the operatic in poetry, the substance of Chinese poems seems often mild or even trivial; but if we will be honest with ourselves and with our appreciation of what is lastingly important, we shall find these very same poems to be momentous details in the immense patience of beauty. They are the heart of an intimate letter. They bring the true, the beautiful, the everlasting, into simple, easy touch with the human, the homely, and the immediate. And I predict that future western poets will go to school with the masters of the T'ang Dynasty, as well as with the masters of the golden age of Greece, or with the Hebrew prophets, or with the English dramatists or romanticists — to learn how best may be expressed, for themselves and others, that passionate patience which is the core of life. It is not necessary that culture bring about the death of poetry, as it did in the Rome of Virgil. The cynics are wrong who see in our future no place for an art which belongs, they say, to the childhood of- the race. The head of a man and the heart of a child working together as in the Chinese have made possible with one race and may make possible with any race, even in the thick of thf most intricate culture, the continuance of the purest poetry. Because of the absence of tenses, of personal pronouns and of connectives generally, the translator of Chinese poetry, like the Chinese reader himself, has considerable leeway as to interpretation. If even in English, so much more definite a language, there may be varying interpretations of a given poem, it is no wonder that critics and annotators have differed as to the meaning of poems in Chinese. There have been frequent instances in this volume where Dr. Kiang and I have discussed several possible meanings of a poem and have chosen for translation into the more definite language the meaning we preferred. With his sanction I have decided that for readers in English it is better to eliminate or use only seldom the names of places and persons not highly important to the sense of a poem: to use 'southern' or 'eastern' for instance, instead of regional names unfamiliar in the Occident; to indicate the person meant when the poem, according to Chinese custom, employs the name and attributes of some other similar well-known person, and to embody in the English text something of the significance which would be conveyed to any Chinese reader, but not to western readers, by historical or literary allusions. At the risk of criticism, I have made certain reasonable compromises. I have used the sometimes inaccurate term 'Tartar' instead of 'Hun', or 'barbarian', the term 'China' instead of 'Han', the term 'Turkestan' when it roughly corresponded to the ancient term. There are many other approximations which have seemed advisable. Once in a while, for good reason, I have cnanged a title. And there are occasional unimportant omissions. I have omitted, for instance, - the 'ninth-born' or 'eleventh- born', frequently added in the original to names of persons, and meaning the ninth or eleventh child in a family. Whenever possible, I have avoided phraseology which, natural and familiar in Chinese, would be exotic or quaint in English; I have hoped rather to accent in these T'ang masterpieces the human and universal qualities by which they have endured. |
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| 11 | 1929.2 |
The jade mountain. (2) Kiang, Kang-hu [Jiang, Kanghu]. Chinese poetry [ID D9794]. Poems of the Early Period Chinese poetry began with our written history about 5500 years ago. The oldest poems now extant were written by the Emperor Yao (2357 B.C.); and one of them was adopted as the Chinese national song in the beginning of the Republic, because Yao was in reality a life president of the most ancient republic in the world, and this poem expresses the republican spirit. Shun and Yü, the other two sagacious presidents, left with us also some poems. Their works, together with other verses by following emperors and statesmen, mav be found in our classics and official histories. In the Chou Dynasty (1122-256.B.C.) poetry became more important, not only to individual and social life, but also to the government. Emperors used to travel over all the feudal states and to collect the most popular and typical poems or songs. The collection being then examined by the official historians and musicians, public opinion and the welfare of the people jn the respective states would thus be ascertained and attested. In the ceremonies of sacrifice, inter-state convention, official banquet, and school and military exercises, various poems were sung and harmonized with music Poetry in this period was not a special literary task for scholars, but a means of expression common to both sexes of all classes. The Classical Poems One of the five Confucian classics is the Boo\ of Poetry. It is a selection of poems of the Chou Dynasty, classified under different types. This selection was made by Confucius out of the governmental collections of many states. It contains three hundred and eleven poems, all of high standard, both as literature and as music. Since the loss of the Confucian Book of Music during the period of the Great Destruction (221-211 B.C.) the musical significance of this classic can hardly be traced, but its literary value remains and the distinction of the classical poems, which can never bf duplicated. Poems Since the Han Dynasty The classical poems were usually composed of lines of four characters, or words, with every other line rhymed. Lines were allowed, however, of more or fewer words. Under the reign of the Emperor Wu (140-87 B.C.) of the Western Han Dynasty new types of poetry were introduoed; and the five-character and seven-character poems became popular and have dominated ever since. The Emperor himself invented the latter; while Li Ling and Su Wu, two of his statesmen-generals, wrote their verses in the former type. The number of characters of each line was uniform; no irregular line might occur. These two types were afterwards named the 'ancient' or 'unruled' poems. Nearly all poems before the T'ang Dynasty were in this form. The Emperor Wu introduced also the Po Liang style, which is a seven-character poem with every line rhyming in the last word. Po Liang was the name of a pavilion in the Emperor's garden where, while he banqueted his literary attendants, each wrote one line to complete a long poem. This has been a favourite game among Chinese poets. The Poems of the T'ang Dynasty As many a dynasty in Chinese history is marked by some phase of success representing the thought and life of that period, the T'ang Dynasty is commonly recognized as the golden age of poetry. Beginning with the founder of the dynasty, down to the last ruler, almost every one of the emperors was a great lover and patron of poetry, and many were poets themselves. A special tribute should be paid to the Empress Wu Chao or the 'Woman Empero' (684-704), through whose influence poetry became a requisite in examinations for degrees and an important course leading to official promotion. This made every official as well as every scholar a poet. The poems required in the examination, after long years of gradual development, followed a formula, and many regulations were established. Not only must the length of a line be limited to a certain number of characters, usually five or seven, but also the length of a poem was limited to a certain number of lines, usually four or eight or twelve. The maintenance of rhymes, the parallelism of characters, and the balance of tones were other rules considered essential. This is called the 'modern' or 'ruled' poetry. In the Ch'ing or Manchu Dynasty the examination poem was standardized as a five-character-line ooem of sixteen lines with every other, line rhymed. This 'eight-rhyme' poem was accompanied by the famous 'eight-legged' literature (a form of literature divided into eight sections) as a guiding light tor entrance into mandarin life. The above-mentioned rules of poetry applied first only to examination poems. But afterwards they became a common exercise with 'modern' or 'ruled' poems in general. Chinese poetry since the T'ang Dynasty has followed practically only two forms, the 'modern' or 'ruled' form and the 'ancient' or 'unruled' form. A poet usually writes both. The 'eight-rhyme' poem, however, was practised tor official examinations only. The progress of T'ang poetry may be viewed through a division into four periods, as distinguished by different styles and a differing spirit. There were, of course, exceptional works, especially at the transient points, and it is difficult to draw an exact boundary-line between any two periods. The first period is approximately from A.D. 620 to 700, the second from 700 to 780, the third from 780 to 850, and the fourth from 850 to 900. The second period, corresponding to the summer season. of the year, is regarded as the most celebrated epoch. Its representative figures are Li Po (705-762), the genie of poetry; Tu Fu, (712-720), the sage of poetry; Wang Wei (699-759) and Meng Hao-jan (689-740), the two hermit-poets, and Ts'en Ts'an (given degree, 744) and Wei Ying-wu (about 740-830), the two magistrate-poets. The first period is represei ted by Chang Yiieh (667-730) and Chang Chiu-ling (673-740), two premiers, and by Sung Chih-wcn (died 710) and Tu Shen-yen (between the seventh and the eighth centuries); the third, by Yuan Chen (779-832) and Po Chii-yi (772-846), two cabinet ministers, and by Han Yii (768-824) and Liu Tsung- yüan (773-819) two master literati more famous for their prose writing than for their verse; and the fourth, by Wen T'ing-yün (ninth century) and Li Shang-yin (813-858), the founders of the Hsi K'un school, and by Hsü Hun (given degree, 832) and Yao He (A.D. 9th century). All these poets had their works published in a considerable number of volumes. Secondary poets in the T'ang Dynasty were legion. Poems after the T'ang Dynasty Since the T'ang Dynasty, poetry has become even more popular. Its requirement as one of the subjects in the governmental examinations has continued, for a thousand years, to the end of the last century, through all changes of dynasty. Many great poets have arisen during this time. Su Shih (1036-1101), Huang T'ing-chien (1050-1110), Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-1072) and Lu Yu (1125- 1209), of the Sung Dynasty, are names as celebrated as those great names of the second period of the T'ang Dynasty. But people still honour the works of the T'ang poets as the model for ever-coming generations, though many of more varied literary taste prefer the Sung works. Chao Meng-fu (1254-1322) of the Yüan Dynasty and Yuan Hao-wen (1190-1258) of the Kin Dynasty were the shining stars of that dark age. Many poets of the Ming Dynasty, such as Liu Chi (1311-1375), Sung Lien (1310-1381), Li Tung-yang (1447-1516), and Ho Ching-ming (1483-1521) were very famous. Still greater poets lived in the Ch'ing Dynasty. Ch'ien Ch'ien-yi (1581-1664), Wu Wei-yeh (1699I-1671), Wang Shih-cheng (1526-1593), Chao Yi (1727-1814), Chiang Shih-ch'üan (1725-1784), Yuan Mei (1715-1797), Huang Ching-jen (1749-1783), and Chang Wen-t'ao (1764—1814) are some of the immortals. Their works are by no means inferior to those in the previous dynasties. Literature differs from science. It changes according to times and conditions, but shows, on the whole, neither rapid improvement nor gradual betterment. Later writings might appear to be more expressive and therefore more inspiring, but the dignity and beauty of ancient works are inextinguishable and even unapproached. This is especially true of poetry and of the T'ang poems, for the reason that during those three hundred years the thinking capacity and the working energy of all excellent citizens in the Empire were encouraged and induced to this single subject. Neither before nor after has there been such an age for poetry. Selections of the T'ang Poems Hundreds of collections and selections of T'ang poems have been published during the succeeding dynasties. Two compiled in the Ch’ing Dynasty are considered the best. One is the Complete Collection of T'ang Poems and the other is the Three Hundred T'ang Poems. These two have no similarity in nature and in purpose. The first is an imperial edition aiming to include every line of existing T'ang poetry: which amounts to 48,900 poems by 2,200 poets in 900 volumes. The second is but a small text-hook for elementary students, giving only 311 better-known works by 77 of the better-known writers, the same number of poems as in the Confucian Classic of Poetry. This selection was made by an anonymous editor who signed himself 'Heng T'ang T'uei Shih' or 'A Retired Scholar at the Lotus Pool', first published in the reign of the Emperor Ch'ien Lung (1735-1795). The title of this selection was based upon a common saying: 'By reading thoroughly three hundred T'ang poems, one will write verse without learning. ' In the preface the compiler assures us that 'this is but a family reader for children: but it will hold good until our hair is white'. This statement, as years have passed, has proved true. The collection has always stood in China as the most popular volume of poetry, tar poets and for the mass of the people alike. Even illiterates are familiar with the title of the book and with lines from it. Other selections may he of a higher standard and please scholars better, but none can compare with this in extensive circulation and accessible influence. The anthology in Chinese is in two volumes. The first contains all 'ancient' or 'unruled' poems, and the second all 'modern' or 'ruled' poems. The former is again divided into two parts of five-character lines and seven-character lines, the latter into four parts: (i) eight five-character lines, (2) eight seven-character lines, (3) four five-character lines, and (4) four seven-character lines. In learning Chinese poems the order is always reversed. The shorter line of fewer characters should come first. We have, however, re¬arranged the volume in English, according to poets rather than to poetic technique, the poets following one another in the alpha- Detical order of their surnames. (The surname in Chinese comes first.) Under each poet we have kept the following order of poems: 1. Modern poems of four five-character lines. 2. Modern poems of four Seven-character lines. 3. Modern poems of eight five-character lines. 4. Modern poems of eight seven-character lines. 5. Ancient poems of five-character lines. 6. Ancient poems of seven-character lines. Various Poetic Regulations and Forms There are more strict regulations in writing poems in Chinese than in any other language. This is because Chinese is the only living, language governed by the following rules: First, it is made of individual hierographic characters; second, each character or word is monosyllabic; and third, each character has its fixed tone. Hence certain very important regulations in Chinese poetry are little considered or even unknown to the poetry of other languages. For instance, the avoidance of using a word twice, the parallelism pf words of the same nature and the balancing of words of different tones, all need special preliminary explanation. The first of these regulations is possible only in Chinese poetry. We find many long poems with hundreds or even thousands of characters, and not a single one repeated, as in the form of p'ai-lü or 'arranged rule'. The second means that all the characters of one line should parallel as parts of speech those of the next line; thus noun with noun, adjective with adjective, verb with verb, etc. Even in the same parts of speech, nouns designating animals should be parallel, adjectives of colour, numbers, etc. The third means that all the characters of a line should balance, in the opposite group of tones, those of the next line. There are five tones in the Chinese written language. The first is called the upper even tone; the second, the lower even tone; the third, the upper tone; the fourth, the departing tone; and the fifth, the entering tone. The first two are in one group, named 'even tones', and the last three are in the other group and named 'uneven tones'. Thus, if any character in a line is of the even group, the character which balances with it in the next line should be of the uneven group, and vice versa. These strict regulations, though, very important to 'modern' or 'ruled' poems, do not apply to 'ancient' or 'unruled' poems. The ancient form' is very liberal. There are but two regulations for it—namely, a limit to the number of characters in each line, five or seven; and rhyme on the last character of every other line. The seven-character 'ancient' poem gives even more leeway. It may have irregular lines of more or fewer characters, and every line may rhyme as in the Po Liang style. There are also, as in English, perfect rhymes and allowable rhymes. The perfect rhymes are standardized by an Imperial Rhyming Dictionary. In this dictionary all characters are arranged, first according to the five tones, and then to different rhymes. The two even tones have 30 rhymes; the third, 29; the fourth, 30; and the fifth, a very short sound, only 17. These rhymes are so grouped, following the old classical pronunciation, that some rhyming words may seem to the modern ear discordant. The allowable rhymes include words that rhymed before the standard was made. The 'modern' poem must observe perfect rhymes; the 'ancient' poem is permitted allowable rhymes. Again, the former should use only one rhyme pf the even tones; the latter may use many different rhymes of different tones in one poem. The 'modern' poem has also its fixed pattern of tones. There are four patterns for the five-character poems and four for the seven-character poems. The signs used in the following charts are commonly adopted in Chinese pcetry: —indicates an even tone; indicates an uneven tone; indicates that the character should be of an even tone; but that an uneven is permitted; indicates the reverse; indicates the rhyme. The first group of a 'ruled poem' is named the 'rising pair'; the second, the 'receiving pair'; the third, the 'turning pair'; and the fourth, the 'concluding pair'. This exampie shows us that in writing a 'modern' or 'ruled' poem many essential regulations are involved. They may be summed up in six rules: 1. Limitation of lines (four or eight, though the p'ai-lü or 'arranged rule' poem may have as many lines as the writer likes). 2. Limitation of characters in each line (five or seven). 3. Observation of the tone pattern (the five-character four-line poems in old times did not ohserve this rule stricdy). 4. Parallelism of the nature of words in each couplet (though the first and the last couplets may be exempted). 5. Selection of a single rhyme from the even tones and rhyming the last characters of alternate lines (the second, the fourth, the sixth, ana the eighth lines; sometimes the first line also). The five-character four-line poems in the old days, however, were allowed rhymes from the uneven tones. 6. Avoidance of using a character twice unless deliberately repeated for effect. Thus we see the great difficulty in writing a 'modern' poem. But poets have always believed that the 'modern' poem, though difficult to learn, is easy to write, while the 'ancient' poem, though easy to learn, is very difficult to write well. Besides, the 'modern' poem is constructed in a very convenient length. It enables the poet to finish his whole work while his thought is still fresh and inspiring; and, if necessary, he can express it in a series, either connected or separated. We find, ever since the T'ang Dynasty, most of the poets writing most of their poems in the 'modern' forms. Chinese Poetry in General All the above statements treat only poems which are in Chinese called shih. This word is too narrow to correspond to the English word 'poetry', which is more like the Chinese word 'yün-wen' or rhythmic literature, and yet 'yün-wen' has a broader content, for includes also drama. There are, however, many other kinds of yün-wen besides shih, not only drama, but poetry in general. I will give a brief explanation of each; my idea being that the works we present in this volume, though the most common type of Chinese poetry, are but one of many types. In the later part of the Chou Dynasty two new types of poetry were originated; one is the ch'u-ts'u, by Ch'ü Yuan (fourth century, B.C.), and the other fu, by Hsün K'uang (fourth century B.C.). They are both, though rhymed, called rhythmic prose, and have been much practised ever since. The latter is more popular and used to be a subject in the official examinations. Since the Han Dynasty, the yüeh-fu, or poem 'written for music', has been introduced into literature. We have a few examples in this volume in different forms. Because we do not sing them with their old music, which has vanished, they have practically lost their original quality, though still distinguished by title and style. Another type of poetry, named ts'ü, was formulated in the second period of the T'ang Dynasty, but was not commonly practised until the last, or fourth, period. The Sung Dynasty is the golden age of the ts'u poems and Li Ch'ing-chao and Chu Shu-cheng, two woman poets, are the most famous specialists. This form is composed of-lines irregular, but according to fixed patterns. There are hundreds of patterns, each regulated as to the number of characters, group of tones, etc. In the same dynasty the ch'ü, or dramatic song, the t'an-ts'u, or string song, and the ku-shu, or drum tale, were also brought into existence. The next dynasty, the Yuan or Mongol Dynasty, is known as the golden age of these forms of literature. Professional story-tellers or readers are found everywhere singing them with string instruments or drums. Besides these, the ch'uan-ch'i, or classical play, the chiao-pen, or common play, and the hsiao-tiao, or folk-song, are all very popular. There are numberless Chinese poems written in the revolving order, to be read back and forth. The most amazing poerns in human history are the Huei-wen-t'ü or the revolving chart, by Lady Su Huei, of the Chin Dynasty (265-419), and the Ch'ien-tzu-wen, or thousand-character literature, by Chou Hsing-ssu, (fifth century A.D.) The former is composed of eight hundred characters, originally woven in five colors on a piece of silk, being a love-poem written and sent to her husband, General Tou T'ap, who was then guarding the northern boundary against the Tartar invasion. The characters can be read from different ends in different directions and so form numerous poems. Four hundred have already been found, some short and some very long. It is believed that there are still more undiscovered. The latter, made of a thousand different characters was a collection of stone inscriptions left by the master calligrapher, Wang Hsi-chih. They had been but loose characters in no order and with no connexion, but were arranged and rhymed as a perfect poem by Chou Hsing-ssu. The same thousand characters have been made into poems by ten or more authors; and these marvels in the poetical world can never be dreamed of by people who speak language other than Chinese! All these various forms under various names are not shih in the Chinese sense, but are poetry in the English sense. Each of them possesses its own footing in the common ground of Chinese poetry. To make any remarks bn Chinese poetry at large, or to draw any conclusions from it, one must take into consideration not only the shih, but all the various forms. I sometimes hear foreigners, as well as young Chinese students, blaming Chinese poems as being too stiff or confined. They do not realize that some forms of Chinese poetry are even freer than English free verse. They also criticize the Chinese for having no long poems, as other races have, ignoring the fact that many fu poems are thousands of lines long, with tens of thousands of characters, and that many rhythmic historical tales fill ten or more volumes, each volume rollowing a single rhyme. |
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| 12 | 1945 |
Bynner, Witter. New China in old verse : review. [ID D32341]. New China in Verse, by Cheng Chi-yu. The Gillick Press, Berkeley, California, 1944 The Tang emperor, Hsüan-tsung (685-761), about whom Po Chü-yi (772-846) wrote his great narrative, The Song of Unending Sorrow, was himself on occasion a poet. One of his poems, / Pass through the Lu Dukedom with a Sigh and a Sacrifice for Confucius, begins, as Dr. Kiang Kang-hu and I have translated it in The Jade Mountain, O Master, how did the world repay Your life of long solicitude? Cheng Chi-yu in 1944 begins a poem to Confucius, O Master! Why did you fail to complete The social reforms which you instituted? Hsiian-tsung, depressed by the pathos of mortality, concludes, Can this sacrifice I watch here between two temple-pillars Be the self-same omen of death you dreamed of long ago? Cheng Chi-yu, impressed by the mechanistic importance of West- ern civilization, concludes, You loved antiquity but lacked the creative mind, so that na scientific achievements have been made in the territory under your influence. This statement and a few touches such as ...funnels send their smoke To the mountains afar; While the sparks from the machines of the welders Light many a distant star may be a voice expressive of "new China"; but on the whole Mr. Cheng's themes and phrasing (though I am convinced that no one should try rhymes in a foreign language) are markedly akin to poems as written in his homeland a thousand years ago. Po Chü-yi has the murdered Lady Yang send a message from heaven to Emperor Hsiüan-tsung (these lines also from The Jade Mountain, ...we wished to fly in heaven, two birds with the wings of one, And to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree. In Wedding Picture by the modern poet The echo answers, We two who are one, like branches of the same stock, wish to be Darby and Joan. Such acknowledged classical allusion is fair enough; but in another poem, On Climbing the Yellow Crane Terrace, a favorite theme of the ancients, the modern lines weave together lines from two more T'ang poets. Mr. Cheng's ...mingling with Beauty among the flowers, I, through the dream of an afternoon nap, have forgotten myself closely resembles Liu Chang-ch'ing's ...mingling with Truth among the flowers, I have forgotten what to say and Mr. Cheng's ...twilight grows dark with the mist of grief is almost identical with Tsuei Hao's ...twilight grows dark with a mist of grief. And then Mr. Cheng's POETRY : A Magazine of Verse Walking on the rocky path is harder than climbing to the blue sky is like Li Po's Such travelling is harder than scaling the blue sky, Mr. Cheng's ...my heritage is lost through disorder and famine like Po Chü-yi's My heritage lost through disorder and famine and Mr. Cheng's Cease for a while, Oh, tumult of the world like Tu Fu's Hush for a moment, O tumult of the world. Very little in New China in Verse seems to me to be new or to depart from traditional theme and phrasing, certainly Mr. Cheng presents no such showing as modernists in Western verse who have devised innovation or cast the old aside. Perhaps no one has thought before to say, as Mr. Cheng says in A Song on Burying a Flower, No music to be played, nor any sort of service As your petals are placed in the shallow grave... No eulogy or monument shall stain Your having-been, nor vulgarize your glory. Perhaps no one has felt as tenderly toward the rooster as he does in his poem, Written on the Way to An-king, I am certainly wandering one of straightened circumstances. The cocks seem to comprehend me, Consoling me with beautiful voices in the early morning. But Mr. Cheng's contemporary lines: Unbearable to think that a world disaster Is followed by a year of famine, And still the army calls for recruits . . . It is bitter to think of the good earth become waste land. are no newer than Laotzu's observation five hundred years before Christ: An army's harvest is a waste of thorns, Conscription of a multitude of men Drains the next year dry Mr. Cheng, however, speaks amply for himself in the following passage from his introduction to the book, an introduction which contains for the most part helpful information and considerable sense: You will find in these poems my close contact with cosmic and ultimate reality, my new forms and specific techniques in producing the variety, power and charm by means of direct vision and simple diction, and my deliberation in the interesting subject, the proper metonymy, the concrete method, the attractive manner, and the sublime style..., . Some of my poems are only for the display of my intellectual attainments as well as classical allusions; some of them are written with my own specific forms of long and short lines... but all of them show originality. Witter Bynner |
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| 13 | 1953 |
Bynner, Witter. Remembering a gentle scholar [Jiang Kanghu]. [ID D32411]. In suggesting that, after an interval of many years, I again contribute to The Occident, its editor wrote me that the autumn issue "is to focus upon Asiatic literature" and added that "this theme was given impetus by a sense of its necessity in our present Western thought." With more time and space, I should have liked to dwell on the theme as it relates to that necessity, our present political involvement with Asia making acutely necessary our understanding of the Oriental spirit; but I hope that a brief factual account of my connection with Chinese poetry and philosophy will not only record experience pertinent to the theme and to the impetus prompting it—as well as incidentally pertinent to the University of California—but will help to indicate the fact that human emotion and thought are of sympathetic kinship the world over and that such thought in Chinese philosophy as has lasted from the 6th century B.C. and in Chinese poetry from the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries A.D. is basically close to what is likely to last of "present Western thought." In 1918, when I was a member of the faculty at Berkeley, I met a fellow member, Dr. Kiang Kang-hu, to whom I was at once drawn. What he had recently done as a man of principle and brave action was enough to evoke my interest even before I learned to know him as a gentle scholar and stimulating companion. He had been secretary to Yuan Shih-k'ai, China's first president after Sun Yat-sen's provisional presidency and patriotic withdrawal. When in 1916, Yuan schemed to make himself emperor, Dr. Kiang, denouncing the plot and instrumental in blocking it, had to flee for his life and, landing in the United States, speedily learned enough English to become an able and popular teacher at the University of California. Like most Americans, I had been trained exclusively in the European culture which stems from Athens, Rome and Jerusalem. Until 1917, the best part of which year I spent in Japan and China, I had known next to nothing of the world's Asiatic background; and now at Berkeley I was finding myself moved by it as it reflected in Dr. Kiang, especially by fragments of Chinese poetry with which he would now and then illuminate his conversation. I had been superficially familiar with the ethical teachings of Confucius, had respected his sense of order, his successful rejection of divine attributes, and his intelligent concern with one world at a time, but had been a bit chilled by his preoccupation with domestic and social etiquette, his elaborate anticipation of Emerson's findings that in some respects manners are morals. Through glimpses of the calm, kind, almost democratic thinking, the intuitional sense of oneness in man, nature and eternity, which permeates many of the T'ang poems, I began seeing for the first time into an ancient society of individual spirits not shackled by dogma, by fixed commandment or code, not shadowed by jealous deity. Against the burdens and buffets of life, these poets had found an inner peace and a good will toward men at least as sure and sweet, it seemed to me, as any peace or good will found in a later world. Jesus says, Leave all else and follow Me, which no all-powerful God would need to say and no man, impotent against change, should assume to say. His followers say, God died for us. It's the Me and the me. T'ang poets, living their Taoism, had eased meship into the whole current of life itself, no god or man intervening. They acknowledged the melancholy natural to man over his predicaments, but had not let it become anything like the morbidly mystical egotism in which Christianity has mythologized it. Wang Wei says, I shall some day meet an old wood-cutter And talk and laugh and never return. Han Hung asks, Who need be craving a world beyond this one? Here, among men, are the Purple Hills! Meng Chiao asks, What troubling wave can arrive to vex A spirit like water in a timeless well? Liu Chang-ch'ing confesses, Mingling with Truth among the flowers, I have forgotten what to say. A wisdom was here, I thought, relaxed and open, of which Christian civilization—perhaps Buddhist civilization also—stood in need for a simplifying and cleansing and strengthening of life; a wisdom which, I felt, some unnecessary screen had been hiding from us of the West. Perhaps the screen was the fact that, through priesthood and pathetic credulity, Taoism had degenerated from a pure philosophic faith into superstition and claptrap, much as the teachings of Jesus have done; some of the Christian mythology seeming to me as savage as that of Greece but less engaging. Perhaps Jesus needs Laotzu over here, I won¬dered, and Laotzu needs Jesus over there. I tried to find Laotzu in translations of his sayings; but the translations only clouded him for me, whereas Kiang's oral Anglicizing of T'ang poets, and of their Taoism, illumined him. So I asked Kiang if he and I might not try collaborating in translating poems by Wang Wei. I wish we had then thought of trying to translate the source, the Tao Teh Ching itself. But Kiang proposed an 18th century anthology, Three Hundred Pearls of the T'ang Dynasty (618 to 906 A.D.) the compiler of which had remarked in his preface, "This is but a family reader for children, but it will hold good until our hair is white": a collection of far wider popularity in China than, say, The Golden Treasury here. 170 Chinese Poems, the first book of translations by Arthur Waley, Britain's distinguished Sinologist, had not then appeared and resounded, or I might have quit my project; and earlier translations, except a few by Helen Waddell, had not held what I wanted. Ezra Pound's small sheaf, Cathay, printed in London three years before, contained passages arrestingly fine, as well as prophetic of Waley's direct manner; but Kiang, wondering why the American poet should call Li Po only by his Japanese name, Rihaku, recited off-hand versions of the same poems Pound had chosen, which I found, even in Kiang's halting English, still finer. So we went to work, believing that in a year's time we could string the three hundred Chinese pearls on English thread. Two years later we sailed for China together, planning continuance through the summer of our far from finished task. By a freak of fortune we lost each other. He was to spend a fortnight with relatives and on business in Shanghai. He had given me as his address a Chinese hotel there; but he had advised my going ahead with the Arthur Davison Fickes, our travelling companions, to Si Wu, the lake resort near Hangchow where he would join us later, for escape from Shanghai's terrific heat. When we still had to flee heat, we wrote giving him our address on Mokan-shan, a comparatively cool mountain, still farther from Shanghai. His hotel, being full as we learned afterwards, not only had no room for him but apparently took no interest in his mail, though he called there again and again and I wrote there again and again all summer, he thinking as ill of an American as I of a Chinese. In the autumn, we met by accident on a Shanghai street. Since he had left with me his rough literal texts of the poems and I had been hard at work on them, we were able to go over them for accuracy, as we had done before and were to do again many times. The publishers' announcement of The Jade Mountain for 1921, when we had expected it to be ready, led to an amusing literary panic of which I knew nothing until 1946 when, asked to review a volume of correspondence between Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough, I discovered how hard Miss Lowell had driven her collaborator in order to issue their translations from the Chinese ahead of ours. As it happened, Fir-Flower Tablets appeared in 1921 and The Jade Mountain—after eight more years of work on it—in 1929. Meanwhile the popular welcome given Arthur Waley's and Shigeyoshi Obata's translations, as well as magazine publication of nearly all our three hundred "pearls," had shown a marked Western interest in Chinese poetry, not as something exotic or picturesque but as a record of human feeling and thought so simply and rightly expressed as almost to conceal its artistry. I often wish that among our own contemporary poets there were more of the T'ang awareness that "a poem can be tipped over by one heavy word." In poetry, apart from political comments, officially commanded tributes or playful literary games, those old boys used no ponderous or intricate symbolism, no foppish babble, but the grace of an art in which a man's mind never grows childish and a child's heart never dies. It is of course gratifying to me that Dr. Kiang's work and mine, as translators, stays alive; and I attribute its vitality to the fact that in spirit and expression the poems remain as close as we could keep them to what the originals mean in China. Mr. Waley, who knows Chinese, greeted the book warmly and took generous pains to point out a number of initial errors which have been corrected in later editions. I trust that the vogue of flashy, deliberately false translations, like those of Powys Mathers in Colored Stars, is past. I used to argue with Miss Lowell and Mrs. Ayscough against their exaggerated use of root-meanings in Chinese characters, so that under their hands what was natural, direct, every-day expression in the Orient would become in English odd or complex or literary. The temptation to dart toward such glitter is easy to understand; but I early agreed with Kiang that for translators the bright fly concealed a hook. I quote from one of Mrs. Ayscough's letters: "Take, for instance, yu, formed of the two radicals 'the wind' and 'to speak'; instead of just saying 'a gale Miss Lowell has rendered this 'shouts on the clearness of a gale.' One must be careful not to exaggerate," continues her collaborator, "but it makes lovely poems." Though it may gratify Mrs. Ayscough's weakness for "lovely poems" and though Chinese scholars may have sensitive feelers for the roots of their written characters, such translation does not give the reader or auditor in English the equivalent of what a Chinese reads or hears in the original. Poets write for people, not for etymologists. Whether or not Po Chü-yi, as is said, tested his poems by reading them to his cook, they are as human and simple as if he had done so and can be finally as appealing in Canton, Ohio, as in Canton, Kwangtung. On Second Avenue in New York I noticed years ago a Chinese restaurant called The Jade Mountain and, told by a waiter that the owner had taken the title from a book of translated poems, I hoped it was because they were well translated. But it was more probably because of magic in the name, Kiang Kang-hu. I had already been shown respect by the proprietor of a Chinese restaurant in Santa Fe due to my connection with "a great scholar." These days when Kiang is mentioned in The New Canton Cafe, my friend there shakes his head sadly and observes, "Maybe he was too ambitious, but he is still a great scholar." It happened that, during the Sino-Japanese war, Dr. Kiang joined the puppet government at Nanking as Minister of Education. He wrote me that he considered his act not political but a means of serving his people in captivity, as a scholar should. Unfortunately, when he became later a captive of the Nationalists, they did not relish his explanation and sentenced him to death. Because of appeals from many sources, including two American generals who had met and admired him, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. There had to be more appeals before he was permitted brush and paper for writing. It was after his imprisonment that, still unsatisfied with English versions of the Tao Teh Ching, even with Arthur Waley's and Lin Yutang's which were published after my earlier research, I decided that I must attempt one by myself, must try to uncover in Laotzu's book the secret of his profound influence on China's loftiest thinkers and doers. Without Kiang's help, except for the general perception due to our eleven years of collaborating, I pondered and worked for many months, digging out from a dozen or so translations in English what I felt Laotzu must have meant; and for better or worse the resultant "American version" has maintained remarkable popularity in the United States through the past decade. Innumerable letters have certified a readiness among all sorts and conditions of Americans to add Laotzu's wisdom to the wisdom of the West. Partly because Arthur Waley had thought my turns of expression too smooth and had questioned some of my interpretations, partly because I feared that I had been presumptuous, but finally because I would rather have my readings in The Way of Life approved by Kiang than by anyone else, I needed most the letter which came from his Nanking prison, dated August 13, 1948, four years after I had sent him the book. I have heard nothing from him since; and for several years his wife and children have received no answer concerning him from Chinese authorities. But through the silence I hear again, in his letter, the gentle scholar I first heard in Berkeley thirty-five years ago. "As to your interpretation of Lao-tse" (he uses the older English spelling, instead of my Anglicized form, comparable to our spelling Kung Fu-tze, Confucius) "I can only say that it was entirely your insight of a 'fore-Nature' understanding that rendered it so simple and yet so profound. Lao-tse's text is direct, and we have to go around about it. It is impossible to translate it without an interpretation. Most of the former translations were based on the interpretations of certain commentators, but you chiefly took its interpretation from your own insight, which I term the 'fore-Nature' understanding or, in Chinese, Hsien-T'ien. This Hsien-T'ien understanding is above and beyond words. As the Chinese say, 'All human beings are of the same heart, and all human hearts are for the same reason.' If this reason was not sidetracked by anything of an 'after-Nature,' then everyone would come to an identical or similar understanding. So the translation could be very close to the original text, even without knowledge of the words. I am grateful to you indeed for your kind dedication, but rather shameful for not being able to assist you in any way." Though he does not commit himself to my interpretation, this gentle comment from Kiang Kang-hu has assisted me in more ways than one. I have tried to thank him in China, and I thank him here. It is a warming phenomenon that our having been to all purposes at war with the present government of China's mainland—this fact has not turned our people against the Chinese as people. Russia, behind China, has been our real dread. And I doubt that the Chinese people will long be docile to foreign-inspired masters. Docility to any master is not in their nature nor in their history. Although the Soviet system, insofar as it means local government by guilds, originated in China, the Soviet system as developed by Russia into a police state is alien to Chinese character and tradition. From earliest times scholars and poets have held high place in Chinese government and, though often punished for individualism and candor, have seldom feared to criticize and to oppose and undo tyranny, as Dr. Kiang opposed and helped to thwart the attempted tyranny of Yuan Shih-k'ai. It is notable today that not only a statesman like Syngman Rhee but many thousands of Korean and Chinese soldiers are gallantly, stoutly opposing both Communist tyranny and our own powerful, disgraceful and unprecedented tyranny in imprisoning and tormenting our declared friends. I have a feeling that our own people at large are ashamed of our captains and bargainers. At least there is no surging popular sentiment among us favoring assault on the people of China. And I am convinced that under similar circumstances our feeling would have been less civilized fifty years ago, that among people in the Occident an understanding of people in the Orient has subtly and surely arisen and that this understanding is due more than we realize to the fact that Asian thought and art has reached and touched the West, that we now know Chinese civilization, for instance, to be not only the oldest civilization still vigorous but to be a civiliza¬tion profoundly informed as to lasting values. At the moment the element which controls China would seem to have set its face against the wisdom of philosophers and poets who have made China great in the past and who have lately come alive anew in conveying a sense of its greatness to a wider world. But are we less fluctuant, we in the West? Three years ago I was calling on the Minister of War in London. He had recently returned from an official trip in the Orient and said that during his stay there he had written a poem which was to have been published in The London Observer. The Prime Minister, happening to notice a proof of it on the War Minister's desk, had to ask and be told what it was. He advised that it be withdrawn, since poetry writing was beneath the dignity of a Cabinet Member. He probably did not even know that for centuries Chinese Emperors, Premiers and Generals had been proud to write poetry, nor had he any suspicion that his own successor as Prime Minister in Britain would receive a Nobel award for literature. Cabinet Members come and go. But Li Shang-yin, a gentle scholar, continues saying, as he said in the 9th century: Literature endures, like the universal spirit, And its breath becomes a part of the vitals of all men. And Kiang Kang-hu continues quoting, even in prison: "All human beings are of the same heart, and all human hearts are for the same reason." |
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| 14 | 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 (13)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1921 | Bynner, Witter. On translating Chinese poetry. In : Asia, vol. 21 (1921). | Publication / Byn15 |
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| 2 | 1922 |
Bynner, Witter. Translating Wang Wei. In : Poetry ; no 19 (Febr. 1922). https://archive.org/details/jstor-20573468. |
Publication / Byn3 |
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| 3 | 1924 | Bynner, Witter. Citizens of heaven. In : The Forum ; March (1924). [Betr. History of Chinese literature by Herbert A. Giles]. | Publication / Byn6 | |
| 4 | 1924 | Bynner, Witter. An import of China : an appeal to the American business man to watch his step in his relations with China. (Newark, N.J. : Newark Museum and Public Library, 1924). | Publication / Byn16 |
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| 5 | 1929 |
Hengtangtuishi. The jade mountain : a Chinese anthology ; being Three hundred poems of the T'ang dynasty, 617-906. Translated by Witter Bynner from the texts of Kiang Kang-hu [Jiang Kanghu]. (New York, N.Y. : A. A. Knopf, 1929). [Übersetzung von Tang shi san bai shou]. 唐詩三百首 [Enthält] : Bynner, Witter. Poetry and culture. Kiang, Kang-hu. Chinese poetry. http://www.shigeku.org/xlib/lingshidao/hanshi/tang.htm. [Siehe Appendices] |
Publication / Byn1 | |
| 6 | 1944 |
Laotzu. The way of life according to Laotzu : an American version. By Witter Bynner. (New York, N.Y. : Jon Day, 1944). [Laozi. Dao de jing]. [Buch siehe Appendices]. http://terebess.hu/english/tao/bynner.html. |
Publication / Byn10 |
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| 7 | 1945 | Bynner, Witter. New China in old verse. In : Poetry ; vol. 63, no 4 (1945). | Publication / Byn4 |
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| 8 | 1953 | Bynner, Witter. Remembering a gentle scholar. In : The Occident ; Winter (1953). [Betr. Jiang Kanghu]. | Publication / Byn20 | |
| 9 | 1978 |
Bynner, Witter. The Chinese translations. General ed., James Kraft. (New York, N.Y. : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978). (The works of Witter Bynner). [Enthält] : Bynner, Witter. Remembering a gentle scholar. The jade mountain Watson, Burton. Introduction to "The jade mountain". Lattimore, David. Introduction to The way of life according to Laotzu. The way of life according to Laotzu. |
Publication / Byn19 | |
| 10 | 1981 | Bynner, Witter. Selected letters. Ed., and with an introd. by James Kraft. (New York, N.Y. : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981). | Publication / Byn7 | |
| 11 | 1995 | Bynner, Witter. The selected Witter Bynner : poems, plays, translations, prose, and letters. Ed. by James Kraft. (Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 1995). | Publication / Byn11 | |
| 12 | 2014 | Wang, Wei. Two poems. Translated from the Chinese by Witter Bynner and Kiang Ganghu. (Pittsburgh : Laboratory Press, 1923). (Students' Projet (Carnegie Institute of Technology Laboratory Press) ; Specimen, no. 5). | Publication / Byn8 | |
| 13 | 2014 | Tu, Fu [Du, Fu]. A drawing of a horse by General Ts'ao Secretary Wei Feng's house. Translated from the Chinese by Witter Bynner and Kiang Ganghu. (Pittsburgh : Laboratory Press, 1931). (Students' Projet (Carnegie Institute of Technology Laboratory Press) ; Specimen, no. 112). | Publication / Byn13 |
Secondary Literature (5)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1930 | Schneider, Isidor. A Chinese anthology : The Jade Mountain : [review]. Transl. by Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-Hu. In : The new Republic ; April 9 (1930). | Publication / Byn14 | |
| 2 | 1930 | Morton, David. More Chinese translations : review : The jade mountain : A Chinese anthology by Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-Hu. In : Commonweal ; April 30 (1930). | Publication / Byn17 | |
| 3 | 1955 | Chinese paintings from the Witter Bynner collection : lent by the Roswell Museum : Arizona Art Foundation, Scottsdale, Febr. 15 to March 20, 1955. (Scottsdale, Ariz. : The Foundation, 1955). | Publication / Byn12 |
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| 4 | 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 | |
| 5 | 1995 | Kraft, James. Who is Witter Bynner ? : a biography. (Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 1995). | Publication / Byn9 |
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