I am back after a long time. Thanks to my friend Jyoti, I have decided to be active once more and share the treasures I have from the great civilization of China. China has a language which defies definition. As we are used to speaking in English, we cannot really grasp the nuances of Chinese. I have tried to share some information about Chinese Poetry.
Chinese poetry is not material which I understand intellectually but it is an experience which approaches rapture. How shall I share this experience with you? This is something which one hears even a profound Chinese scholar repeating.
Once upon a time there was a Chinese student who fell in love with a lady in a temple fresco. So he stood gazing at the wall, transfixed with beauty — a case of dementia praecox, your psychiatrists would declare. But in his vision he dreamed that the gates opened to him. He married the girl and lived happily for many years. At last he woke up to tell us the story. Now how should I tell you my story? My lady does not speak your language, nor any plain language. She hardly ever speaks without insinuation. Her grammar is atrocious. In fact she uses no grammar at all.
The rough, exotic, kaleidoscopic language structure of the Chinese poets has always been a stumbling block to one who attempts translation. Whether Chinese poetry can ever be translated into any Western language still remains in doubt. Take the example of the English version of the very first stanza of the Book of Odes.
Hark! from the islet in the stream the voice
Of the fish-hawks that o’er their nest rejoice!
From them our thoughts to that young lady go,
Modest and virtuous, loth herself to show.
Where could be found, to share our prince’s state,
So fair, so virtuous, and so fit a mate?
It goes without saying no Victorian ever lived in the Far East twenty-one centuries ago. In the original the first stanza of the song contains only sixteen syllables.
The ju jiu (chu-chiou) is a water bird distantly related to the brightly colored mandarin duck. Guan guan (Kuan-kuan) is the call of the male for the female.
Guan guan the ju-jiu
From the islet in the stream.
A sweet retiring girl
The princely man will woo.*
* Legge’s prose version of the same song begins as follows:
Kwan-kwan, go the ospreys
On the islet in the river.
The modest, retiring, virtuous, young lady:
For our prince a good mate she.
The Chinese Classics, Vol. IV. Pt. I. London, 1872. p.1. This translation is fairly accurate, considering the politico-ethical bias in interpreting the classics then prevalent in China.
If it be necessary to render this stanza into conventional verse form, I for one would prefer the following doggerel:
From the islet in the stream
The ju-jiu calls, “coo coo”.
A sweet, retiring girl
The princely man will woo.
But we have lost all the grace and motion of the original. The words no longer cut capers like:
Guan guan ju jiu
(Kuan-kuan chu-chiou)
Zai he zhi zhou
(Tsai ho chih chou)
More recently the trend of translation has turned to free verse. One can still breathe Chinese air in some of Arthur Waley’s renderings.* A Japanese student of English literature, Shigeyoshi Obata has translated one hundred and twenty-four poems of Li Bai (Li Pai, or Li PoLike a true son of the Orient, he knows our beloved drunkard. Reading Obata gives one that touch of intimacy born of common understanding. Yet I wonder whether Mr. Obata has fully succeeded in interpreting Li Bai for the English reading public. With all his brilliant command of English, has he reproduced the color, the nuance, the graceful sweep of Li Bai’s seven-syllable lines? *** Without any intention to disparage the service he has rendered us, I shall present one or two examples from his translations to illustrate how well-nigh impossible it is to really understand the Chinese poets through the medium of another language.
Some of the extracts are from a famous lecture series on Chinese literature I am very fond of. I couldnt somehow post Chinese characters here. But I will try to overcome this problem and improve this post.
Tags: Poetry
