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This Selected Poems fills a significant gap in the Chinese
poetry available in the English language. Even though revered as a canonical
author in China, Po Chu-I (772-846 AD) is still little known in the
English-speaking world. Individual poems of his have appeared in many
anthologies, and in particular his work represents a large chunk of Arthur
Waley's Chinese Poems, but
anthologising a poet with a prodigious output and a long, varied career has
tended to make his work seem indistinguishable from those of his
contemporaries. (Waley did in fact write a whole book about the poet, The
Life and Times of Po Chu-I, incorporating
many of his poems, which rather contradicts the statement on the back of the
Hinton translation that 'his poems have been known in the West only through
scattered versionsÉ', but Waley's book has been long out of print). This
relative neglect has been damaging to any assessment of Po Chu-I, because as
a statesman and administrator, his work, seen in its entirety, cuts against
the usual Western view of Chinese poetry of this period as quietist,
tranquil, concerned with insights gained from nature and inner reflection.
There is, in fact, all of this in Po Chu-I's poetry, but he was also a
political poet who (and this is where, to me, his greatest significance lies)
successfully used his poetry as a tool for reform and against social
injustice. While still young, he became an advisor to the emperor, and
finding any attempt at reform obstructed by a conservative court, he wrote a
series of popular and political poems, the 'new Yueh-fu'. As David Hinton writes in his brief biographical
introduction:
They were a
systematic attempt to return poetry to the moral
dimensions of
The Book of Songs, and they had
a very real political
force as
well. As Po's poetry was read and sung throughout the land,
his 'New Yueh-fu' not only directly and forcefully influenced the
emperor, they
also stirred up popular indignation and broad support
for reforms.
This made them a double affront against conservative
elements in
the administration.
(Introduction, xix.)
despite this, some of these poems seem indirect to the modern reader
unfamiliar with Chinese history, and more editorial notes contextualising
these lyrics would have been useful here, especially since Po Chu-I is
reported to have been so intent on writing in an easily understood language
that he would, reportedly, recite his poems to an old blind peasant woman,
and if there was anything she did not understand, he would throw it out. The
titles give an indication of the problem: 'Hundred-Fire Mirror', 'Twin
Vermilion Gates', 'Crimson Weave Carpet', 'A Dragon in the Dark Lake' all
seem quite culture-specific to me, yet they are glossed minimally or not at
all, and I am sure that as a reader I am missing many references. However, many of the
poems speak very powerfully with an anti-war message that has not diminished
over the centuries:
my name was
listed on those roles at the Department of War,
so in the
depths of night, careful to keep my plan well-hidden,
I stole away,
found a big rock, and hacked my arm until it broke.
Too lame to
draw a bow or lift banners and flags into the wind,
I escaped:
they didn't send me off to fight their was in Yun-NanÉ.
I'm the only
man in my district who lived to enjoy old age.
(here I would query the translator's choice of the word 'lame' for having a
broken arm, but maladroit expressions such as this are quite rare in the book
as a whole. Waley translates the line: 'For drawing the bow and waving the
banner now wholly unfit', which also is not great as poetry.).
The political poems are only a small section of this large book, and the
chronological arrangement of the whole makes the book read something like an
autobiography. Soon after his 'new Yueh-fu' poems, his mother died, obliging him to enter a
three-year period of mourning. After this, he fell from favour at the court,
and entered a long period of exile and rehabilitations to various provincial
governorships. Although still often powerful, he never seems to have been
ever quite as powerful as when he was an advisor to the emperor in his
thirties. His poems often reference his age and status, and many of his most
powerful poems are from the point of view of a cultured exile from court,
facing advanced years.
A characteristic poem from this later period would be 'Up Early' (p. 106):
Sunrise
flares in my room, roofbeams ablaze, incandescent.
Somewhere a
door opens: and it's a booming drum sounded once.
Our dog's
asleep on the stairs, meaning a rain-soaked earth,
but birds
chattering at the window tell me about clear skies.
Last night's
wine not yet thinned away, my head feels heavy,
and no longer
wearing winter clothes, my body's light again.
Dozing off,
it's clear how empty mind is, how thought expires.
Even dreams
of homeÑthese days they rarely go all the way.
This is a poet's translation, concerned with reduplicating effects, finding
ways to make the English version work as a modern poem. Waley's version was
possibly more accurate, and despite having a metre, is much more prosey. It
starts 'The early light of the rising sun shines on the beams of my house',
Hinton's lovely 5th line is much more clumsy in Waley's version ('With new
doffing of winter clothes my body has grown light'). Waley's last line is
different in sense: 'Lately, for many nights on end, I have not dreamt of
home'. The only part of Waley's version that is better than Hinton's is line
3: 'The dog lies curled on the stone step, for the earth is wet with dew',
which is more compact and explanatory.
We follow the poet as he narrates the course of his life through illness, old
age, and the contemplation of his own death. He had a comfortable life:
servants, wives, concubines, children. Almost as in a novel we see them come
and go, as if in his prolific career (roughly 3,000 of his poems have
survived, and he wrote many more) he was able to become his own narrator,
distant enough from his own life to view it with detachment and irony. This is
the kind of poetry that needs a long tradition behind it: not strenuous,
heroic, or particularly religious in the Western sense. Almost like much of
our contemporary poetry, its habitual mode is to take an aspect of the
writer's life and measure it for ironies or deeper resonances. A luxury that
it would take a long time for English-language poetry to arrive at; his life
covers the same period as that of the very first recorded poetry in
Anglo-Saxon.
Overall, I found the book a pleasure to read. I would only have wished for
more explanatory and contextualising notes, and in particular I would have
welcomed some remarks on Po Chu-I's poetics, and the clear challenges that
Hinton must have faced in translating this fascinating body of work.
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A contrasting book of Chinese poetry brought out by the
same publisher is Unlock by Bei Dao
(published 2006 here, but 2000 in the U.S. Are we that far behind?). This
contemporary Chinese poet has in common with Po Chu-I a strain of dissidence,
the fact of exile (in Bei Dao's case much more severe, although now
apparently revoked), and great popularity. Their differences seem greater.
Bei Dao was the founder of a literary group called the 'Misty' poets, so
called because they were criticized by the Chinese state for obscurity or
'mistiness' as compared to the state-supported social-realism of sanctioned
Chinese literature; a term which the group then adopted for themselves. Thus
while clarity was important for Po Chu-I, obscurity or difficulty became a
signature for Bei Dao.
To be a dissident from a regime well-known for its monolithic and repressive
character might be expected to evoke a poetry of explicit resistance: satire,
elegy, argument, condemnation. Being a 'misty' poet, Bei Dao does not use any
of these registers. Any references to his home country in this book are
oblique. In the years before his exile, Bei Dao must have found that an
effective (and more survivable)
answer to totalitarianism is to reject the tools of realism and to
construct a discourse that is invisible to the censor and the bureaucrat. In
the title-poem (p. 101) he writes 'at the crux of meaning / they slip
alongside the executioner'. His poetry in the eighties became very popular
among dissidents within China. It seems that this is not obscurity (compared
to many poems of the alternative tradition in British poetry, or indeed with
earlier modernisms such as surrealism, these translations do not seem
particularly obscure), so much as a kind of poetic abstraction. The second
poem of the book is a good example. It is called 'Reading' (probably not the
town in Berkshire) (p.11):
Taste the
unnecessary tears
you star
stays
alit still
for one charmed day
a hand is
birth's
most
expressive thing
a word
changes
dancing
in search of
its roots
read the text
of summer
the moonlight
from which
that person
drinks tea
is the true
golden age
for disciples
of crows in the ruins
all the
subservient meanings
broke
fingernails
all the
growing smoke
seeped into
the promises
taste the
unnecessary sea
the salt
betrayed
I like a lot of this, in particular the word 'alit' which has a wonderful
ambivalence here, presumably it functions adjectivally with the meaning
'alighted' (as in, disembarked, on land), but vividly suggesting (as a star
does) lit, light. There is an accumulation of things here, many of them from different spheres or
categories. The nouns in this poem are (in order): tears, star, day, hand,
birth, thing, word, root, text, summer, moonlight, person, tea, age,
disciple, crow, ruins, meanings, fingernails, smoke, promises, sea, salt. An
interplay between cosmic, human, and natural things. It is unusual (even in
'difficult' poetry) to see this switching between types of noun-object. The
effect seems to be one of opening (the 'Unlock' of the title), inviting a
receptivity in the act of reading.
Without exception the translations read fluidly and authentically as poems in
English. This is perhaps because the translators worked so closely with Bei
Dao. In fact it is almost as if translation is an integral part of the
production of this book since it was first published like this, as a parallel
text, in 2001, without hope of publication in China. I imagine the readership
for these poems is now in fact greater in English than Chinese, a situation
which must force Bei Dao into a relationship with the English versions of
these poems. The translators consulted closely with Bei Dao and in certain
cases, where there was a syntactical ambiguity in the Chinese that would have
to be resolved in the English version, Bei Dao actually changed the Chinese
version!
For me, these poems are most successful in images and in lines. 'a wisp of
smoke conducts an orchestra of streetlights' ('Fifth Street', 107); 'at
sunset you listen closely / to a new city / built by a string quartet' (Dry
Season', 105);
I know
tomorrow morning
the repairman
will wait in the doorway
then take the
scenery with him
at opening
time he'll replace me
walking into
this book
('Poppy
Night', 91)
This is a poetry of memory-fragments, openness to thought and impression,
with a tone that is actually often similar, in lines and riffs, to Po Chu-I.
In 'Moat' (p. 109) he writes 'old now / I'm like a willow sinking into
dreams'. There is always the influence of the ancestors. He concludes the
same poem magnificently:
words are
bait
up in the
dead the illustrious dead
fish for us.
I was less sure about these poems, with their deadpan referential titles
('Mistake', 'Postwar', 'Smells', 'Crying', 'Deleting', 'Soap', etc.) work as
wholes; sometimes I suspect the connections are unknowable, and the book
works as a volume in which the theme is receptivity, openness to impression
and memory, drift; a journey in which thought-provoked readers are part of
the constellation.
© Giles
Goodland 2006
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