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1
The pleasures of poetry are – like those of trope
play more generally – aligned with affinity for the impossible: the
impossible place, the impossible way, conversations that simply can’t
happen. What more pleasant impossibility than the cinematic voyeurism which
gives us the desert without the flies, fifth century Athens sans war and
slavery? Or perhaps a conversation with the giants (and lesser figures) of Tang
poetry, minus the sundry privations of their age? Or some other dynasty if that
seems better.
paragraph 2
It all started for me with a couple of lines from a poem by Meng Jiao, one of the ancients to whom some of us were introduced by Pink Floyd ( ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’):
3
Inch of heart in the grass/ no gratitude for the sunshine of Spring
4
Somewhere revisiting A.C. Graham’s Meng Jiao translations in Poems of the Late T’ang, I lit on the solution to a problem which had been troubling me as a teacher of Creative Writing.
5
The cluster of related projects I account for here began with a single simple frustration. Teaching poetry (production from reception) between cultures (in China) I have found it difficult to avoid a seesaw of disappointing results. On the one hand we have the greeting card thing (with the motherhood business) on the other the sledgehammer (which deafens rather than changes the world). Both of these poetastings conform to Oscar Wilde’s dictum with regard to the guaranteed sincerity of bad poetry. There is as well a set of problems which relate to what Michelle Yeh has described of the ‘artist as hero’ phenomenon as it manifests in the ‘cult of poetry’ in China today (190) – afflictions recognisably influenced by western Modernism. The poet/artist as incomprehensible (so misunderstood) inspired suffering outsider: this persona has corollaries in practice: obfuscation, moral posturing, superior man business. The artist as hero needs not make sense, rather he (sic.) needs to be fatally flawed.
6
Mindful of these kinds of danger, my aim has been to skip the genius + inspiration trip in favour of the teaching of writing through models for the purpose intended. Along these lines, a revelation to me was Kenneth Koch’s 1990 book Rose Where Did You Get That Red. Koch’s book seemed to me based on an unlikely premise – that children could learn to write well through exposure to poetic models which appeared to be far ahead of what they could comprehend as readers, let alone produce as writers. But many teachers had found the method did in fact work; I had wanted to take this pedagogy further, to serve more specific (and cross-cultural) needs. In my situation, specifically teaching poetry writing to non-natives, I was looking for a way of bringing the novice non-native writer of English language poetry to models which would help her respond expressively to her own cultural milieu, to introduce that milieu and responses engendered to those foreign to her culture (for instance me) and to respond as well to the process of crossing, i.e. of coming into the new culture. Of course I was interested to see what impact engagement of this kind might have on my own practice in poetry.
7
The hypothesis operational here is that the poet in modern times wishes to do the kinds of things in and to her own language that the foreign learner cannot help but do to the language she is entering. Consider Octavio Paz’s conception of the ‘new’ poem: ‘Each new poetic work challenges the public’s mind and taste. To appreciate it a reader must learn the vocabulary of the work and assimilate its syntax’ (96). To some extent the creation of such works entails taking the mechanism of language apart to get an idea of how it runs. In these hands the worn coin is re-forged. In the terms the Russian Formalists adopted, the poet strives to de-familiarise the language s/he uses, to bring back to life dead metaphors and metonymies. The non-native cannot help but draw attention to these automatised features of language which are opaque to her. It is by drawing attention to them – for instance through a question – she manages to understand what (and perhaps how) words mean. And so both poet and the subject entering culture (= language) find themselves bearing witness in quite similar ways. Each witnesses the truths of culture which use has drawn from our (everyday) attention. As with witness more generally, we can expect trauma to result from those encounters which draw attention to lost truths, to truths yet to be found. For Immanuel Levinas, this trauma is in the nature of language/communication more generally. Discourse, Levinas writes is the ‘experience of something absolutely foreign, a pure “knowledge” or “experience”, a traumatism of astonishment’ (73).
8
While my goals in working with Chinese poetry were immediately pedagogical, they were ethically framed and ultimately ontological, or at least identity-oriented. My hope was to engage students through poetry (as a process) with the meaning of being between languages, cultures; to engage the meaning of a conversation of that kind. The specific focus the work has taken is simply to honour our ancestors in poetry by keeping the conversation with them going. Commencing with Meng Jiao, over the past three years I have evolved a series of overlapping collaborative projects, each focused on responding to a particular classical Chinese poet.
9
In the rest of this piece I will tell a
little of the method involved in these engagements and introduce some results
– in the form of a poem or three – from each of the projects. The
poets concerned are (in chronological order) Tao Yuanming, Meng Jiao, Li He, Li
Yu, Xin Qiji and Nalanxingde. I will conclude with a note bringing these
musings up-to-date and considering their implications among the living.
10
The first, largest and longest running of the projects abovementioned is one in response to that grumpy second-tier late Tang poet, Meng Jiao (751-814). Collaborators Hilda Tam, Amy Wong and myself have been at work on translations and responses to Meng Jiao for more than three years now and have two volumes of poetry now nearing completion (one of translation and one of response.) The procedure we followed was essentially this: we first ‘glossed’ the poems (made rough translations into English with notes) and tried to get to know them with the use of commentaries and specialised dictionaries. I then responded playfully to the poems in English in draft form and encouraged Hilda and Amy to do the same (in English and/or in Chinese). When we had worked through all of the poems in this way, we looked again at all of the responses with a view to dividing them into translations, responses or pieces which might go either way. It was only after getting to this stage, more than a year into the project, we began to think that we might have two separate volumes brewing. Because Meng Jiao’s extant oeuvre consists of more than five hundred pieces we had no trouble getting enough distance from each piece. Pressing on relentlessly through the collection, by the time we got back to any one poem (a second or a third time) we were able to approach it as a fresh meeting.
11
A brief biographical note on our progenitor/interlocutor... Not only was Meng Jiao a self-identified loser in his own lifetime, he is really one of the great complainers of Chinese literature, and has been famously regarded as such by later poets[1]. Working through his oeuvre – apart from general maudlin observations about the cruelty of nature – one might cynically say that the first half of the corpus is dominated by poems about failing examinations and the second half by poems about the deaths of friends and acquaintances. Getting through the extant works became tedious for these reasons but it must also be admitted one never had to wait long for a gem to brighten the work.
12
Let me reproduce for the reader
something of the process with the example of gloss, translation and response for
one short poem.
13
Original poem in Chinese:
喜 與 長 文 上 人 宿 李 秀 才 小 山 池 亭
燈 盡 語 不 盡， 主 人
庭 砌 幽 。
柳 枝 星 影 曙 ， 蘭 葉 露 華 浮 。
塊 嶺
笑 群 岫 ， 片 池
輕 眾 流。
更 聞 清 淨 子， 逸 唱 頗 難 儔 。
卷四 遊適上
14
Gloss stage – notes towards translation:
喜 與 長 文 上 人 宿 李 秀 才 小 山
池 亭
Happy to be with Chang Wen Shang Ren and spend a night at Li Xiu Cai’s pavilion near a lake in a small mountain
(Note: ‘ShangRen’ is a title for a respected person. Literally,
it means ‘high person’. ‘XiuCai’ is a title for
scholars.)
燈 盡 語 不 盡， 主 人 庭 砌 幽。
The oil lamp has died out but our conversations go on,
Li’s pavilion is quiet.
(Note: To talk in a quiet place can make someone feel the place is quieter
than it is.)
柳 枝 星 影 曙 ， 蘭 葉 露 華 浮 。
We can still see the stars in the sky but there are already gleams of the day in
the willows,
There is dew on the orchid leaves.
塊 嶺 笑 群 岫，片 池
輕 眾 流。
The little mountain laughs at the other peaks,
The small lake looks down on the other rivers.
(Note: Although the mountain is not tall and the lake is small, they are
beautiful.)
更 聞 清 淨 子， 逸 唱 頗 難 儔 。
I hear Qing Jing Zi,
He is chanting his poems so happily that I can hardly
chord.
15
Translation:
pavilion by tarn on just a little mountain
lamp dies
but our talk goes on
telling the silence here
still stars in the sky
but first gleams through willows
dew on the orchid’s leaves
little mountain laughs at high peaks
perfect lake looks down on the rivers
and Qing Jing Zi –
he sings so well
I keep silent
I can’t do justice with my strings
16
my response:
aubade
lamp gutters
but our talk
goes on
stars still
but the day unveils willows
shows
orchids in dew
little mountain
laughs at the towering peaks
a new song?
this one for dawn
my companion already
has words
now that I can see the strings
I cannot find the chords
17
Xin Qiji (1140-1207) was a Song
Dynasty poet who wrote in a range of genres and is famous for the more than six
hundred ci poems he composed to one hundred and one different tunes.
Collaborator Agnes Vong and I have worked through around a quarter of Xin
Qiji’s surviving oeuvre. The response here is from a m/s of
translations and variations currently in press with VAC in
Chicago.
18
Original poem in Chinese:
清平樂
遶床飢鼠，
蝙蝠翻燈舞。
屋上松風吹急雨，
破紙窗間自語。
平生塞北江南，
歸來華髮蒼顏。
布被秋宵夢覺，
眼前萬裏江山。
19
Translation:
Pure Serene Music
a hungry rat quick past the
bed
a rat dances towards the light
on the roof, a howling wind
and the rain beats down
broken papers on the windows
are
mumbling to themselves
I had a busy life, north to east
now
I’m back with white hair and beard
the bedclothes are too thin,
I’m too cold and wake up
on an autumn night
all I can see
are the same
thousand miles of mountains
20
my variation/response:
rat dreaming
a hungry rat runs
past the bed
rats always run
they’re always hungry
a rat dances towards the light
this is the rodent’s joy
unending night
up on the roof
a howling wind
paper’s torn
rain beats the walls rotten
think of the shutters mumbling insensibly
‘life took me everywhere’
the old rat said
‘now only my
underbelly’s still black
the rest is grey, I’ve snow white
whiskers
once I dreamt I woke a man
I’ve long since slept
that nightmare off’
bedclothes too thin
see how I turn
the autumn gets inside me
for thousands of miles
these mountains the same
still thousands of years
to this night
21
Li Yu (936-978) was last emperor
of the Southern Tang, and by all accounts a much better poet than emperor. A bit
of a lounge lizard, the philosopher cum poet cum painter rarely got out of his
slippers. Deposed, he died a prisoner in someone else’s kingdom but not
before penning quite a few complaints about cruel fate. Below is a sample of my
responses to the collaborative translations I have made with Petra
Seak.
22
first of love’s season
first of
spring
is for pleasure
what floats in a cup of
wine?
petals
unfolding
the flower
let us not
whisper
of withering
it’s spring – let’s drink
to it
you beat the drum
I’ll bring the brush and ink
23
waking for a piss in the early hours
the palace sleeps
I put on a gown
for the moonlight
stood among the chill bamboo
here’s me – miniature landscape
waterfall of my own making
eyes high in the forest of leaves
just so
I seek a star
24
hung over
in the imperial bedroom
cherry blossoms
strew the yard seen
from an ivory bed
cast in moonlight
tears fall
on scant
garments of love
lustreless hair loosed
showsbitter yearning
so many papers to sign
call the next girl
the emperor
wants to resign
25
Also with Petra Seak, I have worked on Tao Yuanming
(365-427) , a poet of the Six Dynasties period (also known as Tao Qian) famous
for his version of the Peach Blossom Spring myth and also for his many drinking
poems, for which I have been writing variations. Tao Yuanming was a great role
model for poets to follow: he is the character who shakes off the bureaucratic
dust of the world in order to retire to the simpler world of poetry, in nature
(with a wee dram on a regular basis just to lighten things up). The fragments of
variation shown immediately below have their source in a number of Tao Yuanming
poems:
26
truth has been lost
for longer than anyone cares to
remember
that’s because the bastards won’t drink –
they’re only interested in reputation
I cherish
life
life can’t last long
but when that bolt comes out of the
blue
it’s best to have under the belt
one or two
*
27
bird lost from its flock
flies on although the sun has
set
back and forth
and deep in the night
yearns for a home in
heaven
but finally comes to a lonely pine
no other trees here
beyond where winds blow
folds wings and settles down to stay
now you see where my hut is anchored
and you know these friends of
mine
nor will it surprise you to learn
in the bird bath
just a
drop of wine
*
28
spring and autumn
fair seasons in
which
to scale far mountains
make fresh verses
passing
open doors
I greet folk
who meet me with jugs brimming
out in the fields
there’s no time for
this
but now
we talk and laugh
the tiredness is
gone
at last step outside
for converse with the
moon
stream of gold
I dedicate in this
meditation
toil of hands
puts food in our mouths
clothes on our backs
nor is it vain now to profit
from
the soil’s beneficence
and give this little
back
29
Li He (791-817) was a Tang
poet of the generation following Meng Jiao’s. A failure as a scholar
bureaucrat, he died young and was out of fashion for the best part of a
millennium, until a recent revival in interest. Famous for his horse poems,
tradition tells us a jealous cousin disposed of much of his oeuvre down
the toilet. The responses below are to collaborative translations made with
Charlie Li.
30
I held a sword
I held a sword
I
left my home
I slashed the clouds
to pieces
I was a
gust
the mountains blew down
proud as spring
I came
morning – clean
the sun rose on my blade
by
evening
sunset red
and dark in the night
my sword’s
sweet sleep
my cold love
all these deeds
for you
31
somebody else’s home town
wind
blows
in the lotus
the moon
wears bright
ear
rings
your red dress
fragrant as laurel
this night
must last
until I go
the boats
won’t
bring
it
back
32
Another poet who
died young and stayed pretty (died of a cold at the age of thirty one),
Nalanxingde (1654-1685) was a Manchu nobleman and bodyguard of the emperor
Kangxi. Rather than responding to any poem/s in particular, the response below
borrows imagery from a number of poems by Nalanxingde (these from collaborative
translations made with Lili Han).
33
crossing
blue gossamer scarf
though a thread of tea smoke
winter dusk crowd
of crows arrived
breeze across the vase –
through
plum blossoms
silk quilting the girl’s
pavilion
through those shutters
willows catch every
cliché on wings
incense in the figure of a heart
falls
shapelessly to dust
then back to the dream
and go on with the
dream
nothing to wake up for
34
There are more poets with whom I’ve been working in the
ways outlined above – including some twentieth century authors. Over the
last year some of my
collaborators in these projects have joined with me
and my colleague Dr Yao Jingming (Yao Feng) in a regular Saturday afternoon
poetry workshop, called 1958group. Combined with an on-line e-mail list and
blog, 1958group brings to the living the skills of translation and response
we’ve been practising on dead poets up until now. Let me close then with a
snippet of the kind of conversation that’s commencing. Here’s Yao
Feng’s poem ‘狼來了’, ‘the
wolf’s coming’:
35
狼來了
狼來了
羊們沒有跑
他們停止了吃草
排成整齊的佇列
像一壟壟棉花
狼嚎了一聲：
天氣真他媽熱
所有的羊
都脫下了皮大衣
36
Here’s my translation with Agnes Vong:
the wolf’s coming
the wolf’s coming
the sheep didn’t run
they stopped eating the grass
formed up a queue
like cotton
wool
the wolf howled at the flock
‘it’s hot as hell,
this weather!’
all the sheep
took off their
coats
37
Continuing in fairytale mode, here’s Agnes Vong’s poem ‘lover of fairytales’
lover of fairy tales
evening light
a valley of shadows
secrets between my footsteps and
the tangled bushes
a twig from the first branch
for the ash girl
a red
apple
for the snowy white girl
a magic door
for the nosy
girl
at the end of the valley
my grandmother’s
grave
38
童話愛好者暮色蒼茫
有一個影子的山谷
腳步與灌木叢之間
是一大堆秘密
第一根樹枝上的嫩枝
送給那灰姑娘
一個紅蘋果
送給那白雪公主
一扇魔幻門
送給那多管閒事的女孩
山谷深處
是祖母的墓碑
39
And, from the same conversation, Amy Wong’s poem ‘fairytale’ (Note
that this and the next poem were written in Chinese and English, so –
though each is faithful to the other – neither text can properly be
considered as translation):
fairytale
40
when I was a
girl
I played in a fake forest
the entrance –
a path
with no grass covering
lay beyond the clouds
looking
around
the trees in the box
leaving the homeless
birds
alone in the dark
noise with sudden storm
frightened
the beasts
thunder, roaring –
chorus of nature
mists never shine
but through the mirror
they chant and
whisper
the exit –
full of
flowers
fading
41
黃珏
童話
小時候
曾在一個虛假的森林遊玩
入口
──
一條沒有草的小徑
躺在雲端
環顧四周
盒子裏的樹
遺下失去家園的鳥
獨自留在黑暗中
吵聲伴著突起的風暴而來
嚇怕了野獸
雷聲、吼聲
自然的合唱
霧從不發亮
但透過鏡子
它低吟淺唱
出 口 ──
遍 地 的 鮮 花
褪去容顏
42
In closing I would like to make brief mention of the impact of the projects described on my own work. I commenced with a pedagogic problem but the process of addressing it may have permanently altered my own poetic practice. At least for the time being it has become my habit to read poetry only in the mode of response – that is, with pencil in hand. This way I refuse the poem as ‘just an artefact’; I insist on a conversation.
43
Allow me to situate this personal change. I have long been committed to what I now call the peripatetic mode – in other words, to poetry as journey cum conversation. Seen one way, the journey is primarily with oneself. ‘Collecting’, I walk and take notes. (In fact I stop to scribble, so as to keep from falling over. I go on.) I’m not hoping to be a spectacle but must acknowledge I sometimes am. Eyes over the shoulder keep me in motion. In China it’s easy to gather a crowd this way. So one can never pause for long. But like the ghost or the criminal I return to the scene. Gathering again, I forget what I found before, how I found it, what it was for. I lose my way. These ways become habits – I try to forget, I try to lose my way. The longer I stay the harder this gets. The more I am of the place the less able I am to disturb its assumptions, but the more I have to say.
44
Notes for the place proliferate in these paradoxical ways and once I judge I have enough distance (or as much as I’m going to get) I return to them and sift. I do this in some adequately homely place. I begin to try for a poem once there are sufficient observations, strophes, image sets for the different encounters to be themselves a kind of conversation – between subjectivities, temporalities – these mediated by separate engagements of a single place. I call this place-based poetics.
45
The procedure here is a version of what Stephen Spender named the Beethoven method – composing from fragments. More specifically, the journey I’ve in mind is that of the bricoleur – whose direction is an indirection – that is the journey of one who cannot know beforehand the uses of what s/he picks up along the way. Now this might seem an elaborate hedging purposed to avoid engagement or commitment. But here as elsewhere the analysed life is indicated. Not knowing where one is going, only by stages discovering where one comes from – one needs to have one’s wits about. The uneasy and important thing here is the way one goes ... the exercise of rights and responsibilities of a traveler cum scavenger.
46
Being in another culture is exemplary for the poet who is always trying to find that kind of relation to his/her own home and idiom. The betweenness of language is the critical space for poetries, the ‘way’ is indirection; being between cultures while one is working makes the needful lost-ness easier.
47
So much for the conversation with oneself via poetry. What does it mean to draw others (the living and the dead) into this kind of strategy? The idea of a poetry of response to the classics poses some questions concerning position of enunciation – or more specifically, what might be thought issues of disguise. What does it mean to hide behind the masks of the already canonised? Or for that matter, of the long obscure? What kinds of cultural capital are at stake in the making of such choices? With what presumption does one engage in ‘a conversation’ with those who, given the choice, might not deign to speak with us?
48
For all the dangers of vanity via reflected glory, conversation is more sustaining than dreams of immortality. So why not avail oneself of the best possible interlocutors? Why not have the best conversation available? One doesn’t need a foreign language to do it. One only needs sufficient distance from one’s own words. For me, the best thing about all of this is the privilege afforded of never having to start. There’s no blank page in the poetry of response. Or rather there’s always having to start with where and who you are, with words already given (and whether you understand them or not). Being ‘in conversation’ thus means there’s nothing to finish and there’s nowhere and no need ever to begin.
[1] For instance the Song poet Su Shi wrote two poems ‘On Reading Meng Jiao’s Poetry’ and writes ‘I hate Meng Jiao’s poems’ and that they sound to him like ‘a cold cicada wail’ (Barnstone and Ping, 152).
Barnstone, Tony and Ping, Chou. The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry. New York: Anchor Books. 2005.
Koch, Kenneth. Rose where did you get that red? Teaching great poetry to children. New York: Vintage. 1990.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. (tr. Alphonso Lingus) The Hague: Martinus Hijhoff. 1969.
Paz, Octavio. The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry (tr. Helen Lane). NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1991.
Yeh, Michelle. Modern Chinese Poetry: Theory and Practice Since 1917. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 1991.
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