Now every day I eat them recklessly - Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese poems

I read Arthur Waley’s first two books, A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918) and More Translations from the Chinese (1919) in some hope of getting more context for what contemporary Modernist poets like Ezra Pound and H. D. were doing, digging around in older poetic traditions – Classical Greek, medieval Provençal, a range of Chinese poetry – to juice up their own art.  What, “make it new,” no – a thousand years ago everyone was doing it this way.  Nothing new about any of this.

Pound’s Cathay (1915) precedes Waley, but that little book only has a few poems.  The bulk of Waley’s books must have been a shock, and the range (4th century BCE to 11th CE, plus a single 17th century poem for some reason).  Oh, Chinese poems are like this – and this – and also this.

The Other Side of the Valley

I am a prisoner in the hands of the enemy,
Enduring the shame of captivity.
My bones stick out and my strength is gone
Through not getting enough to eat.
My brother is Mandarin
And his horses are fed on maize.
Why can’t he spare a little money
To send and ransom me?  (1st C. BCE)

Familiar and exotic.  Not so different in content from a Spanish or Anglo-Saxon ballad.

The oddest aspect of Waley’s anthologies is the relative absence of T’ang poets, relative, I mean, to the attention they have been given by later translators.  Not a single Du Fu poem, for example, not that there is a shortage of Du Fu in English at this point.  Waley chose, for the second book, to translate a substantial amount of a single T’ang poet, Po Chü-i.  Long-lived and prolific, Waley’s Po Chü-i becomes an autobiography in verse, with plenty of narrative movement and lots of personality.

from Eating Bamboo-Shoots

My new province is a land of bamboo-groves:
Their shoots in spring fill the valleys and hills…
I put the shoots in a great earthen pot
And heat them up along with boiling rice.
The purple nodules broken, – like an old brocade;
The white skin opened, – like new pearls.
Now every day I eat them recklessly…

But all too soon he is transferred again, “relegated to deep seclusion / In a bottomless gorge,” in a province where the “inhabitants of Pa resemble wild apes; / Fierce and lusty,” and the poet is “pleased with anyone who is even remotely human” (“On Being Removed from Hsün-yang and Sent to Chung-chou”).  In the next poem, he plants flowers:

from Planting Flowers on the Embankment

… The people of Pa do not care for flowers;
All the spring no one has come to look.
But their Governor General [the poet], alone with his cup of wine
Sits till evening and will not move from the place!

His friends, illnesses, exiles, returns to favor, aging, fame, baldness (“On His Baldness: My tiresome comb for ever is laid aside”, and even his death, almost (“Last Poem: I lie back on my pillows and sleep with my face to the South”) – a life committed to seventeen volumes of poems, a version of it extracted by Waley.  This long section of Po Chü-i poems was a highlight for me, perhaps because it was more like a kind of book with which I was already familiar, but I think rather because the genial poet’s company was a pleasure.

I did not really learn too much about what other Modernist poets were doing, though.  Some similar books were written around the same time.

I actually read these poems as collected, rearranged, and revised in Translations from the Chinese (1941), so all quotations are from that text.

A Ming Dynasty magic fox cautionary tale - don't steal books from foxes

“Divine Foxes Lose a Book at Small Water Bay” by Feng Menglong, a story published in Constant Words to Awaken the World in 1627, translated by Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang in Stories to Awaken the World: A Ming Dynasty Collection, Volume 3 (University of Washington Press, 2009).  Constant Words to Awaken the World is not much of a title, so I can see why it was changed.  “Divine Foxes Lose a Book at Small Water Bay” is an unsurpassable title.  Its only problem is that it overpromises.

Ricardo de la Caravana de Recuerdos was asking forfavorite short stories several months ago.  Amid the usual suspects, commenters supplied many curiosities, none more curious than “Divine Foxes,” suggested by humblehappiness aka Cleanthess, who I am pleased to say also visits Wuthering Expectations on occasion.

The narrator begins with an old story about a man who saves an injured bird and is rewarded by the bird with good fortune.  Everyone knows this story in some form.

Why even bother to tell it?  Well, dear audience, I did so because I plan to move on to a story about a young man who also hit nonhuman beings with slingshot pellets.  But, unlike the one who repented after having hurt the bird, this young man ruined his family’s considerable fortune as a consequence of his action and became an object of ridicule.  (117)

The young man who errs, Wang Chen, “had only a slight acquaintance with the classics and histories and barely knew the rudiments of writing,” which is what makes his sin especially serious when he comes upon “two wild foxes talking and laughing” who “were discussing the book that one of them was holding in its hand” and injures them both with his slingshot just to get a look at the book.  What does he care about books?  And then it turns out that it is “printed in ancient tadpole-like characters completely unknown to him” (119).

For the rest of the story, the foxes, who have magic powers mostly related to disguise, try to get their book back.  Wang Chen keeps it from them out of nothing but peevishness.  Eventually, the foxes succeed through a scheme that seems unnecessarily complex, in the process not exactly ruining Wang Chen, but causing his family to lose half of its wealth.

The narrator occasionally inserts poems and italicized commentary, such as this one at the end (Wang Zai is Wang Chen’s brother:

(What did Wang Zai do to deserve such punishment?  The foxes were wicked enough.  That’s why they don’t get reincarnated as humans, after all.)

A glimpse into another ethical world appears there, almost as strange as the central mystery of the story, the book that the foxes were discussing so intensely.  What could be in it?  The true catalog to Borges’s Library of Babel; the key to all mythologies.  Something like that.  Or perhaps just the Tang Dynasty fairy fox equivalent of George R. R. Martin, stolen before either fox had reached the end.

Book bloggers will sympathize with the foxes.

I guess this counts as a kind of Halloween story.  Magic Chinese foxes instead of ghosts.

Of the 2,800 pages of Feng Menglong that has been translated, I have only read “Divine Foxes.”  Cleanthess – what’s the wise thing to do next?

Relief that they had not fallen in - some 9th century Chinese monkeys

from The South Mountains

North of the great lake of K'un-ming,
On a brilliant day, I came to view the mountain.
It dropped straight down as far as I could see
Trapped wrongside up and steeped in the clear water.
When ripples stirred on the face of the pool
The rowdy monkeys hopped and skipped,
Shrieked with amazement to see their shattered shapes,
Looked up and gaped with relief that they had not fallen in.

Han Yü (768-824)

Boy oh boy am I glad I did not start my reading of Chinese poetry with this book, Poems of the Late T'ang (1965), translated by A. C. Graham. Unlike David Hinton or Kenneth Rexroth, this earlier editor is attracted to the most difficult, allusive, or plain weird poems. It's good to see some different sides of this complex subject, but Graham would have scared me right back to Europe.

Still, I sure like those confused, happy monkeys. Still, also, on vacation.

Thoughts of home aching across such distances

Out on the Road, Skies Clearing

Though I've left Pa's ridge rain behind,
I'm still not free of Shu's muddy slopes

when skies open out, late light aslant,
mountain peaks breaching low clouds.

In grasses, everywhere, rainfall glistens.
Trickles keep streams swelling. Tonight,

a cold moon will light thoughts of home
aching across such distances, distances.

Meng Hao-Jan (689-740), from The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan, tr. David Hinton, a very attractive book.

I'm still wandering about. Skies open out, late light aslant.

An eight year old recommended this academic history of China

Just a bit on the actual book, first. So feel free to skip ahead to the eight year old if uninterested in the history of classical China.

The book is The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (2007, Harvard University Press) by Mark Edward Lewis, a distinguished Stanford professor. The book is excellent for its purpose, which is to cram one with knowledge. Since I started from little, the Return on Investment has been very high. Just as an example, I can now place Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, buried with his terra cotta warriors, in some real context. He's not just a very old Chinese emperor now. Please, do not test me on this in five years. Or months.

It is not a narrative history, not a book of personalities or dramatic events. Chapters are titled "Kinship," "Rural Society," "Religion." Sounds a little snoozy, looked at that way. But I'm used to, and can even enjoy, this sort of thing, and, look, the eight year old kid liked it fine.

Maybe he was nine, I don't know. I never met him. See this piece at Anecdotal Evidence, in which Patrick Kurp encounters the Mark Edward Lewis book in the hands of a schoolkid who is also a master wizard. Or something. Anyway, I'm not going to be outread by a dang third grader.

I am actually reading this book because of this kid, and Kurp. Since my surprise trip to Japan last summer convinced me that classic Japanese literature was far more accessible than I had thought, I have been trying to read a little bit of Asian literature, mostly old poems. Japanese poetry led to Chinese poetry. Chinese poetry led to a desire to fill in some substantial gaps in my knowledge of Chinese history. And then somehow I remembered Kurp's post, and that eight year old.

The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han is the "first of a six-volume series on the history of imperial China." I'll bet that kid is already way ahead of me. But I'm gonna catch up.

A poem for the first day of spring - We had a drinking party to admire the peonies

Drinking with Friends Amongst the Blooming Peonies

We had a drinking party
To admire the peonies.
I drank cup after cup till
I was drunk. Then to my shame
I heard the flowers whisper,
“What are we doing, blooming
For these old alcoholics?”

Liu Yu Hsi (772-842)

Tr. Kenneth Rexroth, Love and the Turning Year: 100 More Poems from the Chinese

A poem for the last day of winter - Do you know what time it is?

Winter Night

It is late in the Winter night.
I am absorbed in a book
And forget to go to bed.
My wife takes my lamp and says,
“Do you know what time it is?”

Yuan Mei (1716-1797)

Tr. Kenneth Rexroth, Love and the Turning Year: 100 More Poems from the Chinese

I find empty rivers and mountains - in which I fail to comprehend the religious ideas in Ihara Saikaku and Wang Wei

Here are the endings - last sentences - of three of the stories in Ihara Saikaku's Five Women Who Loved Love:

1. "About this time the story of Onatsu was made into a play in the Kyoto-Osaka region, and from there it spread to even the most remote provinces, winding through each town and hamlet as an endless stream of love, on which men and women might embark with all their cares and float as light as bubbles through the Fleeting World."

2. "Their names, known in countless ballads and songs, spread to distant provinces with the warning: This is a stern world and sin never goes unpunished."

3. "And so this tale is told, with all its love and sadness, to show how unreal and uncertain life is, how much like a wild, fantastic dream."

All three tales end tragically, basically, and I suspect that any of these morals could be attached to any of the stories. Only the final story ends differently, with the gay husband examining his wife's teacups and salted mermaids and planning his sexual dissipation, which is much like a wild, fantastic dream, and not much like a stern world where sin never goes unpunished.

Saikaku's stories are built, in one way or another, on Buddhist religious ethics. This, to the reader new to Japanese literature, ignorant of Buddhist tenets (I mean me), is an obstacle to understanding. Saikaku's ironic use of these religious ideas is a futher complication. I have no idea when or if Saikaku is serious. How did a contemporary Japanese reader reconcile those endings? Or was that the, or a, point, a way that the five stories turn into one book?

Well, that's one reason we read fiction, right, to learn about the world. No reason I have to understand it all right away, or ever.

I'm making progress, though, with a lot of help. Here is a poem by the 8th century Chinese "hermit" poet Wang Wei, translated by David Hinton:

Mourning Meng Hao-Jan

My dear friend nowhere in sight,
this Han River keeps flowing east.

Now, if I look for old masters here,
I find empty rivers and mountains.

Let's see. The friend, "the first of the great T'ang Dynasty poets," is absent, yet the world (the river) continues on its way. The landscape is empty of the friend, thus the poet's sadness. But the last line has a second meaning, that the "empty rivers and mountains" are themselves old masters. There's the Buddhism, the transcendent idea, the landscape imbued with meaning.

Have I crushed the poem to powder yet? Well, simplicity first, complexity later. I'm at least beginning to get an idea of what I should be looking for, even if I don't know what to do with it once I've found it. Small steps.

Here's a link to David Hinton's book of Wang Wei poems, with a few additional examples.