by Jess Row

Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology, edited and translated by David Hinton
The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition,
     Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenellosa; edited by Saussy, Stalling, and Klein

from The Threepenny Review, Winter 2010

"Po Chu-i, balding old politician, / What's the use?" James Wright writes, beginning his 1963 classic The Branch Will Not Break:

I think of you,
Uneasily entering the gorges of the Yangtze ...
Did you find the city of isolated men beyond
     mountains?
Or have you been holding the end of a frayed
     rope
For a thousand years?

What does it mean, exactly, to say "I think of you"? It's an oddly capacious phrase, referring as it does to near and far alike: an invocation, a pointing, rather than an informed review of the facts—"I think about you"—or an intimate, even slightly sentimental "I'm thinking about you." To think of is not necessarily to know much about. Yet even allowing for a certain willful ignorance—what Keats called negative capability—there's something extraordinarily intimate, almost photographically transparent, in the way American poets of the last century have thought of their ancient Chinese counterparts. Introducing his translations of the Tang hermit-poet Han Shan, Gary Snyder writes that because the "imagery of cold, height, isolation, mountains is still available to our contemporary experience," he made use of imagery associated with the Sierra Nevadas as "an analog (a 'translation') of the lower, wetter, greener mountains of southern China." In other words, without quite saying so (in this context), Snyder thinks of himself effectively as a twentieth-century Han Shan, as one mountain recluse thinking of another.

That this represents tremendous artistic and intellectual hubris seems hardly worth noticing anymore. We think we know what Chinese poetry is, in the same way that (existing in a certain social milieu) we know what Zen and feng shui and the Tao Te Ching are. One of the great fortunes of such an age is that immensely talented scholars like David Hinton can make a living retranslating poems that already exist in multiple English versions. The appearance of his Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology—the most virtuosic set of translations to appear in a generation—is also an opportunity to ask two very basic questions: How did this miraculous kinship come about? And can we sustain it, in good faith; can we pass the rope on without breaking it?

THE AMERICAN romance with classical Chinese poetry begins, as if out of nowhere, with Ezra Pound's redacted version of Ernest Fenellosa's essay The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. In Pound's version, this essay presents the Chinese character as an ideogram, a recognizable visual image of what the word represents. This fidelity of word and image was best represented for Pound by the character 信 meaning "belief" or "trust," which is composed of the elements 人 "man" and 言"word," i.e., "a man standing by his word." Pound's invocation of the ideogram as an exact analogy to Imagist poetics essentially created an agenda, if not the agenda, for American poetry after the 1920s. The translation of Chinese poetry evolved largely, if not exclusively, in step with that agenda.

The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, as several generations of scholars have pointed out, is at best an incomplete and skewed "picture" of how classical Chinese actually works as a language; in reality only a small percentage of all Chinese characters have a recognizable pictorial element, and Chinese readers in ordinary circumstances pay as little attention to them as readers of English do to the Greek and Latin prefixes in "analysis" or "substantial." To think of the Chinese character as "the thing in itself," as a potent, solitary cell of meaning, is largely, but not entirely, a figment of the Western imagination; we might say it's a tool Westerners have used to conceive of the concepts of Tao, or emptiness, or self-sufficient existence, which English words can't fully explain. Furthermore, in literary terms, the identification of classical Chinese poetry with Imagism ignores the formalized strictures of the original texts, which even at their most unconstrained involve elaborate parallelism and rhyme schemes, not to mention layers of literary and religious allusions. A. C. Graham sums up this dilemma beautifully in the introduction to his 1965 Poems of the Late Tang:

Fidelity to the image is impossible without a complete disregard of the verse forms of the original, some of which are as rigid and elaborate as the sonnet ... The sacrifice of strict form for the sake of content was first made possible by the doctrine that the essence of poetry is the Image, the exact presentation of which imposes an absolute rhythm out of accord with regular verse forms ... [This] gives most Chinese translations a little of the period look of Chapman's Homer, combining the visual precision, transitive drive, and emotional reticence common to Chinese and early modernist English poetry with a rhythmic freedom and naturalness of diction which belong to the latter alone.

The contemporary critic Michelle Yeh has gone even farther in arguing that by denying the role of metaphor and figurative language, translators in the Pound tradition have created an image of "the Chinese poem" which is inherently misleading, "a select representative of an essentialized view of Chinese language and culture." It's hard to dispute this point, especially when we consider just how influential Pound's conception of the Chinese poem has been. Much of what young Americans are taught in creative writing classes even today—"no ideas but in things," "no superfluous words," even "show, don't tell"—is drawn, uncritically, from Pound and William Carlos Williams, who believed, with great sincerity, that they had discovered in Chinese literature and culture a kind of parallel universe that prized direct representation over "viewy"-ness and artifice, and daily personal experience over elaborate conceptual or rhetorical devices. In the face of this it's very difficult to point out that Du Fu's poems are elaborate rhetorical devices, but that is, in fact, what they are. Contemporary Chinese readers still love and celebrate these poems, the way we love Shakespeare's sonnets or Dante's terza rima; but if they want contemporary poetry, they read—for example—Guo Moruo, Bei Dao, or Shang Qin.

How can we come to a new understanding of Chinese classical literature when our inherited view of it is so powerfully shaped and conditioned by a "strong misreading," which is a vital part of our own poetic language? This question afflicts Haun Saussy in his extraordinary introduction to a new critical edition of The Chinese Written Character, which presents both the edited and original versions of Fenellosa's essay. In Fenellosa's drafts, Saussy identifies entire passages that present a counter-reading of Chinese poetry based on the idea of the "overtones" of words—"the halos of secondary meanings which cling to them ... vibrating with physical life and the warm wealth of human feeling." Not only does this threaten to undo Pound's conception of each character as a unitary, self-sufficient image, Saussy says, it also accords with a tradition of Buddhist thought that Fenellosa understood but Pound (based on his limited reading in Chinese philosophy) dismissed as "decadent" and irrelevant.

This Buddhist counter-tradition is profoundly significant—both as a way of understanding what is lost in Pound's idea of "Chinese poetry" and as a crucial flaw in the Imagist project that stemmed from it. It is rooted in the concept of pratitya-samutpada, or "dependent co-origination," which describes the universe as an interconnected and simultaneous network, where each individual phenomenon is contingent on, and coextensive with, all other phenomena. Pratitya-samutpada explains the way in which all phenomena can appear to us as both "empty" (transient, unstable) and "full" (contingent and interconnected). In this world view, the word is not a concrete or objective thing, but, as Saussy puts it, a "bundle of relations"; words work "collectively, not in isolated inky bursts."

This creates any number of problems for Western readers of Chinese poetry who want to feel, as James Wright felt, a sense of intimacy and yearning that stretches across time and cultural boundaries. On the simplest level, it tells us that reading and translating the characters one by one often misses the point: we can't assume the existence of an "objective" correlative. The Chinese character shan 山, "mountain," may, in different contexts, mean more or less than we assume it does; it may refer to a particular mountain, an association of a particular person or teaching with a mountain (common in the Zen tradition), landscape in general, as in the common term "mountains and rivers." To say that the three-pointed shan is "a picture of a thing," as Pound does, is simply not enough.

So what is to be done? As Stephen Owen puts it in his wonderful (and now sadly out of print) Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics, "we can only imaginatively recreate examples of reading, examples adequate to the historical contracts of the text." For Owen, this means understanding the poem as a subjective expression, as a record of the poet's mind in a certain time and place, but also as a simultaneous expression of mind and the universe meeting as one design, or wen: a term which means both "word" or "literature" and, more generally, "aesthetic pattern." In the Chinese poem, Owen argues, word, feeling, immediate reference, and allusion operate within principles of harmony and balance that can only be very painstakingly teased out, if they can be grasped at all. We have to admit that what we are doing is "overhearing" the poem: trying to imagine what it would be like to understand it.

IN THE introduction to Classical Chinese Poetry, David Hinton describes Chinese poetry in this way:

The language doesn't simply replicate but actually participates in the deep structure of the cosmos and its dynamic process; it is in fact an organic part of that process ... [T]he pictographic nature of the words, enacting as it does the "thusness" of the ten thousand things, reflects ... the mechanism by which the dynamic process of the cosmos proceeds, as presence arises out of absence.

Conceptually, at least, Hinton has staked out for himself a middle ground between those who insist on a transparent, immediate connection between the ancient Chinese world and ours—what Pound called "ideogrammatic civilization"—and those, like Owen, Saussy, and Yeh, who see any such connection as naive, self-serving, and anachronistic. In one sense Hinton is unquestionably an essentialist of Chinese culture, with the explicit goal of bringing his own particular conception of the "Taoist/Zen" worldview to bear on the contemporary Anglophone world. But he is also an immensely thoughtful and thorough scholar who goes to great lengths, through detailed notes and a glossary of key terms, to help the reader discover what Owen calls "the historical contracts of the text." Previous anthologies of Chinese poetry generally have included a dizzying number of poems with very little commentary on each one; Hinton moves in the opposite direction, limiting himself to a relatively small number of poets and translating ten or fifteen poems from each, just enough for a fleeting—but distinct—impression.

We might be forgiven for assuming that a translator of this kind might strive to produce versions of the poems that are as close as possible to the original—reproducing the language that, as he says, "participates in the deep structure of the cosmos." The great paradox of Hinton's project, however, is that he has created a new form for Chinese poetry in English, bearing very little resemblance to the original text. Compare, for example, these three versions of a passage from Li Bai's Changkan xing (better known as "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter"):

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
                                         (Pound)

Falling leaves; autumn winds are early.
In the eighth month butterflies come
In pairs over the West Garden.
These smite my heart.
                                         (Wai-lim Yip)

And autumn's come early. Leaves fall.

It's September now. Butterflies appear
in the west garden. They fly in pairs,

and it hurts. I sit all heart-stricken ...
                                         (Hinton)

The customary practice in the Pound tradition calls for the use of an unregulated line, simple, limited syntax, and short, sometimes fragmentary sentences, with the overriding goal of preserving the unity of the Chinese line (a key component of reproducing the "pictographic" effect, one might say). Hinton's translation doesn't follow the Chinese line nearly as closely; he enjambs the lines into couplets of fixed line length in English, sometimes marking a connection explicitly that the Chinese leaves implicit: for example, "They fly in pairs, // and it hurts." The effect is visually and linguistically striking: from a highly regulated Chinese poem, which appears, in printed form, as an exact rectangle of characters, Hinton produces a similarly visually regulated English poem which internally is much freer than other translations.

The "content" of Hinton's translations, as some reviewers have pointed out, is not very different from previous versions, but his willingness to suspend the rules gives him far more flexibility. This becomes especially significant when he works with poets like Meng Jiao, Li Ho, and Li Shangyin, whose dreamlike imagery and intricately meshed allusions are opaque even to most Chinese readers. Meng Jiao's poems, to me, are the highlight of this book, because they are so strange in Chinese that, paradoxically, they lose relatively little when translated; the hallucinatory nature of the images lends itself to Hinton's incantatory style:

Triple Gorge one thread of heaven over
ten thousand cascading throngs of water,

slivers of sun and moon sheering away
above, and wild swells walled-in below

Compare this to A.C. Graham's 1965 version:

Above the gorges, one thread of sky:
Cascades in the gorges twine a thousand cords.
High up, the slant of splintered sunlight, moonlight:
Below, curbs to the wild heave of the waves.

Graham's lines try to stay as close to the Chinese as possible, even in these difficult circumstances; he repeats "gorges" in the first couplet, mimicking Meng Jiao's anaphora, which would literally translate as

Three gorges one thread heaven
Three gorges ten thousand rope cascade

The result, though quite beautiful, is stilted; it lacks the "flow" of Hinton's lines, which mimic (as an English free verse poet naturally would) the overflowing imagery of rapids in the gorges.

IT WAS in one of Hinton's translations of Meng Jiao, however, that I found a glaring example of the perils he has to contend with. In one section of Meng's sequence "Cold Creek" (not included in Classical Chinese Poetry but in his earlier book, The Late Poems of Meng Chiao), Hinton's version of the passage is as follows:

If we make loving-kindness a weapon,
loving-kindness lives at knife point,

and at knife-point, loving-kindness
reeks. Where's the nobility in that?

On first reading I assumed that "loving-kindness" was a translation of the Buddhist term metta, or love without attachment, which in Chinese is ci. (Metta is indeed so universally known as "loving-kindness" in English that a Google search for it turned up 264,000 results). Years later, when I read the poem in Chinese, I realized that the word was actually ren yi, a term associated most closely with Confucianism which is usually translated as "righteousness" or "being morally upstanding." Meng Jiao could have referred to metta (certainly he would have known what it meant) but ren yi has a vastly different connotation; it's the central concept in the whole Confucian social order.

Was it a mistake to translate ren yi with a term that has more positive connotations in contemporary American English than "righteousness"? It depends on what we expect of translation itself. Is there such a thing as a final English version of a Chinese poem, which preserves and transports, in toto, not just the essence of the poem but the immensity of the ancient Chinese worldview? Or should we regard any translation, no matter how beautiful, as a rough draft, as a scaffolding built around a ruin to show what the ruin may originally have looked like? The problem is compounded by the fact that some of us, at least, like to think that certain aspects of this ruin live on, whether in the seemingly timeless words of the Daodejing or the "special transmission" from Zen master to student. Can we reconcile ourselves to the partial, fragmentary quality of our understanding of the classical Chinese tradition, or should we declare a truce, a kind of King James Bible, with which to proceed? Hinton's Classical Chinese Poetry is such an accomplishment that one almost wants to say it has exhausted the subject. But the original poems are still speaking, and we will never overhear all they have to say.

About the Author
Jess Row's recent story in The Threepenny Review, "Sheep May Safely Graze," was selected for this year's O. Henry Prize anthology.

The Threepenny Review
Berkeley, California

Editor and Publisher: Wendy Lesser
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