Mountains and Rivers Without End: two millennia of classical Chinese poetry
Starting with the work of that eminent late Victorian sinologist, Professor Herbert Allen Giles, Kevin Maynard contrasted this scholar’s technically skilful but now somewhat fusty and faded work with that of two Modernist trailblazers, the Imagist firebrand Ezra Pound and the mild-mannered Bloomsbury polyglot Arthur Waley. Pound’s ‘Cathay’ exploded onto the literary scene in 1915, and transformed not just British and American poetic literature, but also several European ones as well. Other translators of note mentioned were Witter Bynner, Kenneth Rexroth, Burton Watson, A C Graham, Gary Snyder, Sam Hamill, Jerome Seaton, and David Hinton.
Kevin then claimed that, perhaps in many cases without being aware of it, we’d been living through a veritable ‘Golden Age’ of subsequent translation, mostly of Chinese poetry, but also of poetry from other Far Eastern literatures.
This, he said, had started in the late 1940s and continued through the subsequent two or three decades, when a group of highly gifted Americans, many of whom had been stationed in Japan after the war had ended, fell in love with Chinese and Japanese culture, and devoted the rest of their lives to translating those astonishingly rich and varied poetic traditions into modern, idiomatic American English.
Examples from the work of the ten translators mentioned above, only two of whom were British, endeavoured to demonstrate how spare and simple their language could be, and how impressive the poems they refashioned in our language now seem in retrospect. Easy to understand at a glance, and minimalist in both style and appearance on the page, such literature in translation could be seen to have achieved a kind of universal appeal.
The features of vividness, purity and simplicity revealed to Westerners in classical Chinese poetry were related to a characteristic Chinese aesthetic—the aesthetic of ABSENCE and EMPTINESS. And it in turn was said to derive from a philosophical concept central to two of the three dominant Chinese religions: Daoism and Buddhism. In practice, it wasn’t unlike what we might today just call ‘minimalism’: the notion that less frequently ends up meaning more. Chinese paintings exemplify the same idea. (Examples were provided.)
Several Chinese poems in translation followed: poems by the great Jin dynasty poet, Tao Qian; Tang dynasty poets Wang Wei, Li Bo, Du Fu, and Bai Juyi; the greatest Song dynasty poet, Su Dongpo, as well as one poem from another Song poet, Yang Wanli; the Yuan dynasty poets Zhang Kejiu and Ma Zhyuan; and one seventeenth-century poet, Jin Renrui.
Finally, the ideas of ‘Grace’, ‘Lucidity’ and ‘Restraint’ were briefly considered, both in relation to Chinese poetry and to Chinese ceramics.
An affectionately humorous take on the whole phenomenon was supplied by former American Poet Laureate Billy Collins via two more poems displayed at the end of Kevin’s talk.
Our thanks to Kevin for the above summary of his fascinating presentation on a topic I believe most of us knew little about.
The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry trans by Burton Watson Recommended anthology.
300 Tang Poems Ed. Geoffrey Water, Michael Farman, and David Lunde (White Pine Press, 2011)
And a couple of the poems:
Red Cockatoo
Sent as a present from Annam –
A red cockatoo.
Coloured like the peach-tree blossom
Speaking with the speech of men
And they did to it what is always done
To the learned and eloquent
They took a cage with stout bars
And shut it up inside
Arthur Waley translation from Po Chü-i
Blue Pines
Lois Coulthart
Kevin Maynard