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Each weekday in April, Poetry Daily brings its email newsletter readers a special poem, selected by a contemporary poet whose work has appeared on Poetry Daily, as part of its annual fund-raising campaign and in celebration of National Poetry Month. This year, Poetry Daily is presenting these poems and comments to its website readers.

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Dick Allen's Poetry Month Pick, April 21, 2009

Three Short Poems
by Po Chü-I (772-846)
translated by Arthur Waley (1889-1966)

The Cranes

The western wind has blown but a few days;
Yet the first leaf already flies from the bough.
On the drying paths I walk in my thin shoes;
In the first cold I have donned my quilted coat.
Through shallow ditches the floods are clearing away;
Through sparse bamboos trickles a slanting light.
In the early dusk, down an alley of green moss,
The garden-boy is leading the cranes home.

My Servant Wakes Me

My servant wakes me: “Master, it is broad day.
Rise from bed; I bring you bowl and comb.
Winter comes and the morning air is chill;
Today your Honour must not venture abroad.”
When I stay at home, no one comes to call;
What must I do with the long, idle hours?
Setting my chair where a faint sunshine falls
I have warmed wine and opened my poetry-books.”

The Poem on the Wall

[Yüan Chen wrote that on his way to exile he had discovered
a poem inscribed by Po Chü-I, on the wall of the Lo-k‘ou Inn.]

My clumsy poem on the inn-wall none cared to see.
With bird-droppings and moss’s growth the letters were
         blotched away.
There came a guest with heart so full, that though a page
         to the Throne,
He did not grudge with his broidered coat to wipe off the
         dust, and read.

Dick Allen Comments:
One line is set down. Then another is set upon it, as if a nearly-transparent sheet of colored glass. And then another, another. Declarative sentence after declarative sentence. End-stopped line after end-stopped line. Wonderfully muted tonal effects, especially in assonance. We can look downwards into the poem, or upwards: allusions and tones commingle. Or at least that’s the effect created by Arthur Waley’s great English versions of Chinese classic poetry. Some anthologies, such as the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, even treat Waley’s versions as much as his poems as those of the poets he was translating.

Yes. And since it may well be, as Robert Frost said, that “poetry is what gets lost in translation,” in our century there’s an increasing acceptance of versions attempting to reproduce the sense of the poem from another language more than attempting word-by-word literalness (when a Chinese poem is literally translated, what we most often get is a string of one syllable words, something only closely approximated in English by such as Robert Francis’s famous “Silent Poem”).

I’ve known and loved Waley’s books of Chinese poems since my high school days. Yet now, in our hugely troubled financial times, I’m drawn even more strongly to them, to such as these three versions of Po Chü-I’s Ninth Century A.D. verses. I’m calmed by the feelings they evoke of quiet confidence, resignation and acceptance—along with their matter-of-factness. I want to copy them out for Wall Street brokers and bankers and foreclosed ex-homeowners and unemployed auto assembly line workers.

To change the metaphor, I like just watching the brushstrokes that add (end-stopped line after end-stopped line, quiet beat after quiet beat) the quilted cloak to the western wind, and then the boy herding cranes home down that “alley of green moss.” Sometimes, nothing more needs to be said, only felt. And I like the naming of objects and things: chair, sunshine, warm wine, poetry books (no other country’s poetry renders old age as well and compassionately as Chinese poetry). In another poem, Po Chü-I / Waley writes, Zen-like and simply, “When food comes, then open your mouth; / When sleep comes, then close your eyes.”

And there’s the self-disparagement of this Po Chü-I that Waley gives us, even as the poet takes quiet pleasure in hearing about how his best friend uncovers Po Chü-I’s poem from beneath bird droppings. That tactile sense of the broidered coat and the dust. That smile of ironic and poignant mindfulness. How much there is in so little.

As Yüan Chen’s heart, my heart is full.

About Dick Allen:
Dick Allen's seventh poetry collection is the Zen Buddhist-influenced Present Vanishing: Poems (Sarabande Books, October, 2008).  His previous collections, The Day Before: New Poems and Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected, also were published by Sarabande.  Allen’s many national awards include a Pushcart Prize, NEA and Ingram Merrill Poetry Writing Fellowships, and inclusion in five editions of The Best American Poetry volumes.  He has new poems forthcoming in American Scholar, Hudson Review, Boulevard, among other magazines, and was featured in an extensive interview in the 2008 October/November issue of The Writer's Chronicle.  Allen teaches a Master Class at the summer West Chester Poetry Conference. He lives in Connecticut, near a Zen lake.

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