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Hi there, it's me, cda, and I would like to talk about classical Chinese poetry in (English) translation. I was going to write that I love Chinese poetry, but the matter of fact is, I've never read any; I've only read English-language translations of Chinese poetry. That said, I do love many of those translations. You may or may not know this, but Chinese writing, and poetry in particular, has been significantly influential in American poetry. In fact, it is probably fair to say that without translations of Chinese* works, much of what we now consider mainstream American poetry and philosophy would have been very different. The period of most significant influence in America lasted from around 1850-1960. That's one hundred years of influence! During that period, Chinese poetry and philosophy in translation made significant impacts on the Transcendentalists (Thoreau in particular) in the 1850s-1870s, the Imagists and High Modernists from 1913-1950, and Beat Generation and Black Mountain poets (1950-1970ish). It should also be noted that the most famous period of Chinese poetry, the Tang, also had an enormous impact on Japanese culture, both directly though its poetry, and through the tradition of Chan Buddhism which developed during this period and spread to Japan in the 13th century where it became Zen Buddhism and had a tremendous impact on the development of Japan's most famous poetic export, haiku. So even the Japanese poetry that is most famous in the West traces its lineage, in part, back through classical Chinese poetry. *Translations of other Eastern writings, particularly Persian, Indian, and Japanese also played a major role, but I think a strong argument can be made for the primacy of Chinese writing, the preoccupations of which (the natural world, the insuffiency of civilization, the presence of spirit in everything) harmonized extremely well with the Transcendentalists. The way that this poetry has shaped American culture is not at all why I like it, but it is an argument for it being important, and it's easier to explain than why I like it. The poems speak for themselves, even more so than most poems do. Really, I guess, I should just post some poems. But before I get here, the rest of this OP is just a short list of important Chinese classical poets and notable translators. The traditional entry-point for people learning about classical Chinese poetry is the dynamic duo, Li Po and Tu Fu, who were (roughly) contemporaries and friends. Between them, they cover the spread of classical Chinese approaches to their subject matter (Li Po -- Taoist, anarchic, Tu-Fu -- Confucian, precise) while both being absolute masters of their very demanding verse forms (more on those later). They were also prolific -- Li Po legendarily so -- which makes it easy to get lost inside the works in a really good way. As far as translations go, Ezra Pound's translations are where most people start; Pound was the first person who was a major poet in his own right to publish translations of Chinese poetry. It is worth noting that Pound's "translations" were not really translations from the Chinese. They were surmises based on the Fenollosa manuscripts, which were themselves not direct translations from the Chinese. They were English translations of Japanese translations of Japanese translations of Chinese poetry, painstakingly written down in entirely literal form, word by word, with no attempt to reconstruct rhythm, sound, or even apprehensible sense. Working with these literal four-times-removed translations, Pound tried to reconstruct the poetic sensibilities and sense of the originals. The remarkable thing is how well he did. He's not my favorite translator by a long shot, but he's unquestionably the most important. Poets T'ao Ch'ien Han Shan Wang Wei Li Po Tu Fu Po Chu-i Su Tung-P'o (Su Shih) Li Ch'ing-Chao Lu Chi (not a poet per se but the author of one of the first and most important Chinese critical texts on poetry) Translators Ernest Fenollosa Arthur Waley Burton Watson Ezra Pound Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough Witter Bynner Kenneth Rexroth Achilles Fang Gary Snyder David Hinton J.P. Seaton cda fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Dec 3, 2017 |
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Dec 3, 2017 23:12
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Here's a poem from Po Chu-i. He's been my fave recently (but they're all my favorite). Long Lines Sent to Ling Hu-Ch'u Before He Comes To Visit My Tumbledown Home No esteem for the stately caps and carriages of consequence, in love with woods and streams, I go out and doze, perhaps drunk beside the pond. I've stopped trying to save the world, just wander herb paths, keep my little fishing boat swept out. Serving the poetry master with writing-brush and inkstone, I'm steadied by music and my friend, the immortality in wine, but for lofty sentiments, I stay close to things themselves: green moss, rock bamboo-shoots, water lilies in white bloom. (David Hinton) ---------------- |
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Dec 3, 2017 23:20
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Here's one from Chia Tao (deep cut, not even on the list) Evening Landscape, Clearing Snow Walking stick in hand, I watch the snow clear. Ten thousand clouds and streams banked up, woodcutters return to their simple homes, and soon a cold sun sets among risky peaks. A wildfire burns among ridgeline grasses. Scraps of mist rise, born of rock and pine. On a road back to a mountain monastery, hear it struck: that bell of evening skies! ---------------- |
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Dec 3, 2017 23:38
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Wow! Thank you for that thoughtfully written and super-informative op! I had no idea how much influence Chinese poetry has on the west. Very interesting and cool, glad I opened thread and read everything, 
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Dec 4, 2017 16:35
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Hugh Malone posted:Wow! You're welcome. Roland Barthes wrote a good book called "Empire of Signs," which is about Japan, but also not at all about Japan. He starts it off saying: Roland Barthes posted:If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it declaratively as a novelistic object, create a new Garabagne, so as to compromise no real country by my fantasy (though it is then a fantasy itself I compromise by the sign of literature). I can also -- though in no way claiming to represent or analyze reality itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse) -- isolate somewhere in the world (faraway a certain number of features (a term employed in linguistics), and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call: Japan. What Pound and Fenollosa did with China was a less self-aware version of what Barthes is describing here. Certain "real" features of classical Chinese poetry, as well as its presence in American Transcendentalist works, provided a dubious, but durable, basis for Pound to articulate the tenets of Imagism that became so important in 20th century poetry. The most famous dicta of Imagism, William's "no ideas but in things" and Pound's "make it new," are just paraphrases of classical Chinese literary criticism. In essence, China was an excuse, but it was an excuse that Pound took increasingly seriously, and treated with increasing respect. Scholars have spent a lot of time trying to untangle Pound's imagined "China" from actual China, and Pound himself came to revise his opinion of the Chinese approach. His early, famous translations in Cathay are extremely direct and plainspoken, with very little ornament. But actual classical Chinese poetry was almost always intended to be sung, and could be extremely complex, employing self-consciously unusual diction for dramatic effect in ways that Pound, in 1913, simply could not appreciate given how little he knew. Because Pound's understanding of the Chinese language was so limited, he thought that the Chinese language itself, as employed in these poems, was deliberately limited. This limitation worked well for him; it coincided with his aesthetic at that time. Later on, as Pound's poetics became more ornate, as in the Cantos, he began to better appreciate the complexities of Chinese verse which he had initially overlooked. I don't have the book with me right now that contains his and Fenollosa's retrospectively goofy take on the Chinese language, but maybe I'll quote some later if I find it because it provides a pretty good example of a smart, egotistical person managing to Dunning-Kreuger his way into something revolutionary. ---------------- |
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Dec 4, 2017 20:28
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this is all extremely cool, thanks for sharing!cda posted:Scholars have spent a lot of time trying to untangle Pound's imagined "China" from actual China, and Pound himself came to revise his opinion of the Chinese approach. His early, famous translations in Cathay are extremely direct and plainspoken, with very little ornament. But actual classical Chinese poetry was almost always intended to be sung, and could be extremely complex, employing self-consciously unusual diction for dramatic effect in ways that Pound, in 1913, simply could not appreciate given how little he knew. Because Pound's understanding of the Chinese language was so limited, he thought that the Chinese language itself, as employed in these poems, was deliberately limited. This limitation worked well for him; it coincided with his aesthetic at that time. Later on, as Pound's poetics became more ornate, as in the Cantos, he began to better appreciate the complexities of Chinese verse which he had initially overlooked. pound, for example, failed to realize that the joke was less about what was put into the coke and more about what was not put into it
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Dec 4, 2017 21:49
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Manifisto posted:this is all extremely cool, thanks for sharing! It wasn't until the minimalism movement that American poets would make the radical suggestion of not even going peepee in your coke, nor making any additions at all to it; and even later that the whole premise was called out as being fairly racist |
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Dec 4, 2017 22:20
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alnilam posted:It wasn't until the minimalism movement that American poets would make the radical suggestion of not even going peepee in your coke, nor making any additions at all to it; and even later that the whole premise was called out as being fairly racist the dadaists, meanwhile, were busy pouring coke into jars of piss |
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Dec 4, 2017 22:49
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cda posted:It should also be noted that the most famous period of Chinese poetry, the Tang, also had an enormous impact on Japanese culture, both directly though its poetry, and through the tradition of Chan Buddhism which developed during this period and spread to Japan in the 13th century where it became Zen Buddhism and had a tremendous impact on the development of Japan's most famous poetic export, haiku. So even the Japanese poetry that is most famous in the West traces its lineage, in part, back through classical Chinese poetry. to briefly divert from loving around, I'm particularly interested in this. have you studied or focused at all on the relationship of ch'an / zen koans to broader chinese poetic traditions? |
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Dec 4, 2017 22:57
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There are innumerable reasons to love BYOB. This thread is one of them.
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Dec 5, 2017 00:57
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Manifisto posted:to briefly divert from loving around, I'm particularly interested in this. have you studied or focused at all on the relationship of ch'an / zen koans to broader chinese poetic traditions? I haven’t, which is an oversight because that’s a really good and interesting question. However, you can’t learn about Chinese poetry without encountering Ch’an Buddhism all over the place. I also have an interest in Zen Buddhism independently of poetry, and have occasionally thought about the relationship between Haiku and Koans, though not in any very specific way. So let me take a crack at it anyway  I’m going to take a really long runway on this one. An important consideration which I’m going to say more about some other time, for all of the Chinese and Japanese literary forms I’m talking about, is that poets were almost exclusively court officials (up to and including kings and emperors) or monks (or, in the case of the women, the wives and girlfriends of officials and monks). A lot of their lives were spent on legal, quasi-legal, or governmental records. In many cultures a kind of literature develops which you could call “juridical literature” or something like that, and it’s not a surprise that something similar would develop among a group of writers whose day-jobs involved implementing policies, calculating taxes, and developing regulations. (note, the information about African proverbs in the following paragraphs is taken from Ruth Finnegan’s “Oral Literature in Africa,” which is one of the best books of scholarship I’ve ever read, and is available FOR FREE here: http://books.openedition.org/obp/1202?lang=en) A classic example of the juridical literature I’m talking about would be African proverbs, which I am going to say something about partly because I think they’re cool, but also because they demonstrate how and why such juridical literature operates. While there are, of course, important differences, there are also key similarities which I think will be illuminating. In our culture we’re accustomed to thinking of the legal system as something bounded: we have our courts and our judges and our prisons and legislatures and police stations etc. These are the places where law “happens” in highly formalized ways; but in many societies, the boundaries were never so clearly delineated, and informal and ad hoc judgments could be, and were, made by quasi-legal authorities: elders, public speakers, and so forth. In these societies, many people were potential judges and potential lawyers, and the language of the “public record” was deeply entwined with other kinds of public performance; speaking and understanding this language was not merely a matter of understanding the words, but of both understanding the historical precedents for the utterance and having the ability to select a proverb to fit a novel occasion. Proverbs not only pronounce a judgment on a present situation, but call up a rich past of previous judgments rendered through the same proverb and of allusions to other proverbs and stories known to the speaker and his audience. Thus, the proverbs are a highly compressed version of a legal code, so allusive and dependent on unspoken precedent that they take on the character of mystical poetry. The Fulani term mallol, for instance, means “proverb” but it also means an allusion of any kind. The Kamba term ndimo translates literally as “dark saying” or “metaphorical wording.” Part of the “game” of proverbs is their parabolic natures: because they depend so heavily on what the speaker and hearer know, they can mean one thing to the initiated and quite a different one to the uninitiated. In this way, they allow the speakers to pass judgment and remark upon events and people in public without giving up their privacy; a useful tool in society where public, private, and governmental spheres are less distinct. Something similar is going on with Zen koans. The term "koan" is derived from the Chinese gong’an, which literally means “public case,” or “public record;” the term also referred to a magistrate’s desk in which such public records might be kept and on which they might be written (an early form of detective story, which started during the Song dynasty, was known as gong’an fiction and featured magistrates solving mysteries). During the Tang dynasty (also the Golden Age of Chinese classical poetry), stories about Ch’an masters, with commentaries from later masters, were also referred to as gong’an. At this point, they were not yet the gnomic utterances we expect koans to be, but over the 600 years from the beginning of the Tang dynasty (~600 AD) to the end of the Song (~1200), they became a literary form in their own right. This form was, as you suggest, influenced by Chinese poetic practice. The relevant form here is the lien ju or “linked verse” forms which developed during the Qin dynasty (~200 AD) and were well-established by the Tang. The linked verse form was an improvisatory poetic competition/cooperation. Poets would take turns reciting couplets or quatrains. The goal of each stanza was to borrow elements of the previous stanza and turn them in a new direction: poets were expected to have at their disposal the recollection of thousands of stock images and allusions with which to link the poems while adhering to strict compositional rules. Part of the game involved making links which were not always apparent on first hearing. This contributed to a tradition of indirection and unstated metaphor; it is characteristic of Chinese poetry to invite comparison through juxtaposition without ever stating what the basis of that comparison is: discovering a connection without being able to positively confirm it is one of the major pleasures of Chinese classical poetry. The images are held in an open relation to one another by the poem itself. (The Persian ghazal does something similar; the great Persian poet Hafiz describes ghazal couplets as “beads on a necklace,” each independent and beautiful in its own right, but part of a whole). By the end of the Song, the Gong’an was a complete literary form, one which utilized the tools of lien ju. Somewhere around that time, it made the jump to Japan, where lien ju was transliterated as renku, or renga. In Japan, the renga became an immensely popular form, and the “links” between the stanzas got stretched further and further. Whereas lien ju preserved a unity of style and subject matter, renga could leap wildly from subject to subject or style to style, taking only a single image or a tangential allusion as the jumping-off point. Renga, as a result, was open to a much wider range of moods than the more generally comic lien ju. At the same time, the number of rules constraining those leaps grew – only a limited dictionary, the ukatokoba (“standard poetic diction) could be used; later forms had requirements for the exact number of mentions of flowers or of the moon. During some periods the rules were so extensive and systematized that they were almost incomprehensible to people without specialized education. As poets pushed back against the rarification of renga and broadened its vocabulary and potential, they also looked to other ways of freeing its potential: the opening verse of renga, the hokku, became the basis of haiku. A haiku is, in essence, a lonely hokku to which nothing is (and perhaps many things are) linked. Matsuo Basho, the creator of haiku was also a master of comic renga (haikai no renga). The haiku form is in many respects very close to a koan itself. The purpose of a koan is to create doubt and frustrate ordinary logic and perception; the haiku – open-ended, allusive, dependent on a thousand unstated precedents, operating on principles of contingency and context, the first link of a poetic chain that never quite comes into being – does something similar. We can see in the long lineage of the koan, from the linked verse of the Qin dynasty, to Tang-era records of Ch’an religious commentaries, to the flourishing of the literary gong’an during the Song, to its travels to Japan, how each successive transformation further compressed the expression, and extended the range, of the language. I don't know if I've exactly answered your question, per se, but that's what I know. cda fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Dec 5, 2017 ---------------- |
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Dec 5, 2017 04:27
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woah, that is awesome. I have done a bit of zen practice, mostly zazen, but never koan practice. but I'd like to, I'm very interested in the notion of language that is designed to some extent to break down language itself, in the sense of the logical/symbolic aspects of our consciousness. I've always appreciated the buddhist strain of thought that language is useful in describing enlightenment/nirvana but cannot get you all of the way there. so I'm particularly interested when you say, cda posted:The haiku form is in many respects very close to a koan itself. The purpose of a koan is to create doubt and frustrate ordinary logic and perception; the haiku – open-ended, allusive, dependent on a thousand unstated precedents, operating on principles of contingency and context, the first link of a poetic chain that never quite comes into being – does something similar. . . . and that is to some extent my question. is it similar, or is it the opposite? or some much more complicated relationship? the chains of allusion and context you speak of (which really sound interesting) sound, on first blush, like a subtle but powerful extension of rational logic, rather than something designed to undermine rational logic. but, you know, one could point out ways that clever manipulations of formal systems can be used to radically undermine those systems. maybe the easiest illustrations are mathematical--cantor's diagonal slash, godel's incompleteness theorem, russell's paradox. so maybe in a sense the very cleverness of chinese poetics can be used in such a fashion? I really dunno, this is why I ask the question because, being very untutored in this area, I find it fascinating. |
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Dec 5, 2017 05:09
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cda posted:I haven’t, which is an oversight because that’s a really good and interesting question. However, you can’t learn about Chinese poetry without encountering Ch’an Buddhism all over the place. I also have an interest in Zen Buddhism independently of poetry, and have occasionally thought about the relationship between Haiku and Koans, though not in any very specific way. So let me take a crack at it anyway |
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Dec 5, 2017 05:30
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Manifisto posted:woah, that is awesome. I don’t know as much as I would like about these subjects, so anything I say is a guess, but since you asked, here’s my guess: Any highly compressed language will “break” language, in the sense that it will require some outside-the-box thinking to untangle. This “breakage” is not particular to koans – that’s one of the reasons I mentioned African proverbs: to provide another example of radical compression. We’re used to seeing this kind of extreme word-play in avant-garde writing, but it is also typical of formalized systems in which much can be left unsaid because it can be assumed that the audience is bringing a stable and extensive set of contexts to the work. For instance, Christopher Cannon has a wonderful essay, “The Art of Rereading” about how the stability of texts used for literacy training in the Medieval period provided a common ground which allowed authors to utilize quotations not as “a form of knowledge” but rather as a technique that created an “affective difference” in reading (a special set of emotions, a linkage not based on sense but on context). I mention the Cannon article just to emphasize that there’s nothing distinctively un-Western about this process, it’s just that we don’t always recognize it’s happening when we ourselves participate in the formalized system. Koan practices exist in a number of different Buddhist traditions but are most associated with Japanese Rinzai Zen. Rinzai has what you might call a koan curriculum, in which initiates are given koans to ponder in a (relatively) set progression. “Passing” the koan involves demonstrating understanding to a Roshi by correctly answering a series of questions about the koan with ritualized responses and then providing a jakugo, “capping phrase,” which is a Chinese poem expressing the student’s relation to their insight into the koan. While the poem could be a new production, but in practice, it often a quotation from an already-existing classical Chinese poem – there are in fact books full of such capping phrases from which students can choose. Thus, in Rinzai Zen, the koan curriculum is a course of literary study and criticism in Chinese classical poetry. A student who has completed the whole curriculum will inevitably be well versed in classical Chinese poetry. I hope this description indicates that, at least in Rinzai Zen, koans are not considered to “break language;” they are an extension of the particular literary tradition. It so happens that this literary tradition is one which values extreme compression and indirection, but the compressed language can be “unpacked” by a reader who works through the confusion to apprehend the contingency and context that makes the compression possible. This is a major function of koan practice: to enrich and extend the contextual awareness of the student, an awareness which is historical and theological in nature, but which is expressed through literature. The existence of “answers” to these koans belies any claim that gets made about their inscrutability; I suspect that the enigmatic nature of the koans is overstressed in the West because it accords with our long-held stereotypes about the mysterious Orient. Too, they will necessarily be much more enigmatic to people struggling with the language in general, not to mention a tangle of historical referents. Just because the koan does not have a solution doesn’t mean that it is unanswerable. The answer is a context, literally: a text which provides for the contingent existence of the “truth” of the koan, a linked verse. In this understanding, a koan is a text which has not yet been linked; a haiku -- which is the hokku of a renga without the rest of the poem -- is the same. Recall that these linked verse forms were not the work of individual authors. They were group projects in which multiple authors would collaborate. Some well-known koans have been so often repeated that we may roll our eyes at them instead of responding without judgement, but: what is the sound of one hand clapping? A koan. A haiku. ---------------- |
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Dec 5, 2017 20:35
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Fighting South of the Ramparts Li Po Last year we were fighting at the source of the Sang-kan; This year we are fighting on the Onion River road. We have washed our swords in the surf of Parthian seas; We have pastured our horses among the snows of the T'ien Shan, The King's armies have grown grey and old Fighting ten thousand leagues away from home. The Huns have no trade but battle and carnage; They have no fields or ploughlands, But only wastes where white bones lie among yellow sands. Where the House of Ch'in built the great wall that was to keep away the Tartars, There, in its turn, the House of Han lit beacons of war. The beacons are always alight, fighting and marching never stop. Men die in the field, slashing sword to sword; The horses of the conquered neigh piteously to Heaven. Crows and hawks peck for human guts, Carry them in their beaks and hang them on the branches of withered trees. Captains and soldiers are smeared on the bushes and grass; The General schemed in vain. Know therefore that the sword is a cursed thing Which the wise man uses only if he must. (Arthur Waley) ---------------- |
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Dec 5, 2017 20:45
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A Monk at Chi-hsien Temple Asked Me to Name a Hall There Su Shih Past the eye: flourishing, withering, lightning and wind, for longevity what's a match for red blossoms? Where the abbot sits in meditation, he sees the hall, empty, seeing what is, seeing what is empty: is is what is, empty. (J.P. Seaton) ---------------- |
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Dec 5, 2017 20:50
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A Walk in the Country Su Shih The spring wind raises fine dust from the road. Everybody is out, enjoying the new leaves. Strollers are drinking in inns along the way. Cart wheels roll over the young grass. The whole town has gone to the suburbs. Children scamper everywhere and shout to the skies. Songs and drum beats scare the hills And make the leaves tremble on the trees. Picnic baskets and jugs litter the fields And put the crows and kites to flight. Who is that fellow who has gathered a crowd? He says he is a Taoist monk. He is selling charms to passersby. He shouts, waves his hands, rolls his eyes. "If you raise silk, these will Grow cocoons as big as pitchers. If you raise stock, these will Make the sheep as big as elks. Nobody really believes him; It is the spirit of spring in him they are buying. As soon as he has enough money He will go fill himself with wine And fall down drunk, Overcome by the magic of his own charms. (Kenneth Rexroth) ---------------- |
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Dec 5, 2017 20:58
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that's a very good answer!cda posted:Just because the koan does not have a solution doesn’t mean that it is unanswerable. and that's a good point as well. indeed, as best I understand it a key aspect of the koan is that it requires an answer. let me clarify a little bit about what I mean by "breaking language." and I feel a disclaimer is necessary. what I'm about to say is repeating or paraphrasing things I've read and studied primarily in an academic context. however, these were only undergraduate classes; I'm neither a scholar in these matters nor someone with extensive knowledge from practice. more knowledgeable people will almost assuredly find fault with my limited understanding. enlightenment has been described to me, at least in a reductive sense, as a rewiring of the brain, of the cognitive process. in particular, my sense is that it alters the aspects of cognition that deal with symbolic logic, including things like language, and also the part of the brain that gives primacy to the concept of an inherent "self." these things all abstract away from a more primal and unmediated experience of the present, the now. so what I mean is not just an academic exercise in revealing the radical indeterminacy of language. I'm talking about the koan as language designed to bring about a result, a result that is not merely nonlinguistic but to some extent extra-linguistic or even anti-linguistic. that's not to say that people experiencing enlightenment become unable to use language (they use it very well) nor that they find language pointless (in fact they find it very useful, to a point). it's just that language and symbolic thought is toppled from a certain throne. you could make a parallel, I suppose, to the way language is discussed in neal stephenson's "snow crash" - as not only a virus but a kind of code that runs inside the brain, a code that can be hacked. a rather silly way to describe a koan might be as a brain hack. one of my professors, himself a zen monk who claimed to have experienced enlightenment, was particularly fond of an example derived from a koan. one translation of the koan is as follows: quote:Great Master Kyogen Chikan was a Dharma heir of Great Master Isan Reiyu. He once said to his assembly, “Imagine someone climbing up a tree at the edge of a thousand-foot-high cliff. He grabs hold of a branch with his mouth, since he cannot get a hold with his feet and he is unable to pull himself up with his hands. Just at that moment, a man at the bottom of the tree asks him, ‘Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?’ At such a time, were he to open his mouth to answer the man, he would lose his grip and forfeit his life. Were he not to answer, he would make a mistake due to the nature of what was asked. Speak up! What, for goodness sake, should he do at such a time?” my teacher was not using the koan as a spiritual tool but rather as a way to get certain buddhist ideas across to his lay students. as he told it, the "answer," or at least his answer, was essentially "MMMMMMMF", a sound made by someone with a branch between his teeth. so this is language used to depict a situation in which a linguistic response is not only called for but essential, but is also impossible to deliver (without dying, and in general buddhists do not condone suicide). in the telling quoted above, I suppose the master's laughter, a nonlinguistic response, could be usefully compared to the "MMMMMMF". basically, enlightenment is something outside language, because language itself - the process by which it is formed and understood - mediates the reality it is trying to describe, and keeps us apart from it. so I suspect that while your characterization of the rinzai koan practice has a lot of truth to it, and much of the process can usefully be compared to learning a system of literary tradition and symbolism, there is an endgame that is of a different nature. but honestly I'd love to hear a zen scholar who is also an advanced practitioner talk about it. anyway! this is perhaps getting too far afield from the main purpose of your thread. I appreciate your thoughtful responses. |
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Dec 5, 2017 22:56
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Manifisto posted:that's a very good answer! I definitely think that my limitations make this question beyond what I can really answer, but I do want to say that the "endgame" for literary criticism can be awfully complex. I mentioned Christopher Cannon's essay, and I think it does a good job of illustrating this, and perhaps providing some context for your question, if not exactly providing an answer. In brief, Cannon's argument is: 1. Literacy training in antiquity and the Medieval period involved repetitive rereading of a stable canon of excerpted works, which were largely not written for children, but were didactic works for adults (such as a marriage manual etc.). 2. Rereading these texts until they had learned them by heart gave readers a sense of ownership of the texts, while at the same time, their irrelevance to children made the emotional import of the text unrecognizeable to them. 3. This created the conditions for Medieval writers to use quotations from and allusions to those works in a particular way. 4. We are used to understanding quotation as an appeal to authority, both the authority of the person being quoted, and the authority of the person quoting them. Using a quote by a famous author or speaker establishes that quoter's ideas are supported from on high, and at the same time demonstrates the quoter's authority as an educated speaker. This is true even in fiction, where allusions establish the continuity of a work with previous works on similar subjects while showing the writer's facility with literary reference. 5. But this is not the way Medieval writers used references to teaching texts. They understood, as people who had themselves been taught to read and write by repetitive rereading, that the sense of ownership engendered by that practice allowed quotation to function not as authoritative reference but rather as a kind of revealed truth, a different way of knowing in which, rather than knowledge coming into the mind from outside, it was drawn out of the mind from inside. That piece of a marriage manual you memorized when you were 7 might not have meant anything to you then, but when you're 35, it might all of a sudden show a truth, and Cannon notes that this truth was twofold: it was the truth revealed in the quote as it related to your life, but it was also the recognition that this truth had been given to you by teachers who knew that you would one day need it. For this reason it produced an affective difference; a knowledge based not on knowing and authority, but on feeling and reciprocity. Following St. Augustine, Cannon calls this specific feeling "securitas," which is roughly translates as "comfort." There's actually a lot more to the essay, but that's the important part for my purposes here. It is not the case that the "'endgame" of literary study is knowledge; under certain circumstances it can be a feeling. Cannon asserts that the circumstances of Medieval literacy training created the conditions for those trained in literature to experience securitas. I think you could probably make an assertion that the circumstances of Zen literacy training created the conditions for those trained in literature to experience satori. This is a long way of agreeing with you mostly. The place where I'd draw a distinction is that, while I think it makes a lot of sense to focus on the way that readers' brains process the language that they're experiencing (the code analogy), I'm not sure of the value of trying to consider the words outside of the context in which they're presented. What I mean is, a person simply looking at a koan, or haiku, or Chinese poem and trying to understand how they might affect a reader, without considering the context not only in which they were written and read, but learned, is missing a big piece of the puzzle. You're not going to locate the hack in the words themselves, I think. Certain features of poetic language, especially of a highly compressed kind facilitate, but do not create, an "affective difference." (here's a fun thread drinking game: take a shot every time you read "compressed") ---------------- |
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Dec 6, 2017 17:19
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a very interesting take on the subject. I will definitely look up cannon's essay (can't find it for free on the web at the moment; maybe I'll find it in a library or even (gasp) pay for it). it seems like a useful comparison and I'd like to understand it better. one somewhat complex question entailed by this perspective, and perhaps cannon's take on securitas might shed some light on this, has to do with how the canon presumably evolved. the canon of koans did not spring into existence full fledged, and perhaps we can take as a starting point that the historical buddha did not make use of any koans as such in coming to his enlightenment. however he did have (as I understand it) extensive knowledge and training in other spiritual traditions and practices of his day and those undoubtedly shaped what occurred to him. so you could certainly say that his experience was partly based on or at least influenced by prior texts - just not koans. so how then does a pattern or body of work designed to evoke satori come into being? for example, each practitioner that has achieved satori will (I am hypothesizing) have a particular problem or issue they were wrestling with around the time they were enlightened. such a person would be in a position to say, yes this koan was helpful to me, and therefore is useful to pass on to my students; or else to fashion a koan around their own particular enlightenment experience and hope that it would be of assistance to others. a number of koans are, specifically, enlightenment stories, ending with something like "upon hearing this, the monk was enlightened." as the tradition evolves, I can definitely understand how it may not be any koan in particular, but the cumulative impact of the canon, that most reliably leads to satori. but one might also posit that there are many different koans because the ways in which people achieve enlightenment are highly individualized, and what works for one listener may not work for another. one might also posit - which might be complementary to the securitas analogy, I'm not sure - that the literary value of the koan, or perhaps the signifying aspect of the words, is distinctly secondary to the context of practice within which the koan is considered. at the extreme, perhaps any text, even something randomly generated, could be used in koan practice, and it is the process by which the student is forced to consider the "significance," come up with a meaningful answer, and be rebuffed again and again by the teacher until the student is certain of their own response, that creates the conditions for satori. this article provides one description of the process. I cannot attest to the accuracy of the piece, which is the introduction to a book, but it's food for thought. for example: quote:Great doubt is the question of life and death. Koans are a distilled essence of this question—the fuel behind the spiritual quest. Great doubt is described by the Chinese master Wumen as a red-hot fiery ball that’s stuck in your throat. You can’t swallow it and you can’t spit it out. so I have to say that this does dovetail in various ways with your observation that: cda posted:What I mean is, a person simply looking at a koan, or haiku, or Chinese poem and trying to understand how they might affect a reader, without considering the context not only in which they were written and read, but learned, is missing a big piece of the puzzle. You're not going to locate the hack in the words themselves, I think. Certain features of poetic language, especially of a highly compressed kind facilitate, but do not create, an "affective difference." . . . but in the case of the koan, the "learning" context may be even more removed from the words of the text, and even the literary traditions that produced them. I'll have to read the cannon essay to really understand the points he is making, but your example of the "piece of the marriage manual" describes a situation in which the explicit text does ultimately become relevant to the reader, albeit at a time and in a matter that is not fully anticipated on first reading. the introductory essay I quoted above has some interesting things to say about "mind-to-mind" transmission of teaching, citing the example of a student who had an encyclopedic knowledge of buddha's words but did not (initially) receive the essence of his teaching. quote:Why? Why didn’t Ananda get it? Because the mind-to-mind transmission is not based on knowledge or information. so I have to wonder, does cannon's analysis go this far? is securitas something that is "not based on knowledge or information"? however I would also surmise that (some) koans probably need to be approachable enough to a lay person so that they can grasp in a broad sense what kind of thing the koan is meant to illustrate, to provide a good-faith assurance that attempting to answer the koan will not be pointless. just like a shakespeare play or other complex literary work can be appreciated on a superficial level. I suppose that level of "superficial appeal" is less important, however, when the initial usage of the text is simply about teaching literacy, as you describe. again from that introductory essay: quote:Because of the nature of Zen training and its emphasis on direct experience, a book about koan practice is, in a way, a contradiction in terms. Whole volumes on koans could not adequately explain how they work or what they’re about. However, a text on the history and study of koans can act as upaya. One of the factors motivating modern practitioners these days is their intellect. So in order to do good “Zen fishing” and guide students into serious practice—one of the vows of a Zen teacher—it is sometimes useful to bait the hook with beautiful, juicy intellectual worms. Sitting with Koans [the book in which this introduction appears] is one of these worms. . . . and this, perhaps, goes back to the question I was raising initially. is the whole edifice of "poetic literary tradition" into which koans may be placed in a certain sense just a "juicy intellectual worm?" |
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Dec 6, 2017 19:30
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Nice... Probably some of the most serene words out there. My ancestors I'm 98% sure were Chinese poets, and I'm a Chinese poet, but as an American. Cool cda, you're allowed to marry my sister now. |
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Dec 6, 2017 20:04
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Manifisto posted:. . . and this, perhaps, goes back to the question I was raising initially. is the whole edifice of "poetic literary tradition" into which koans may be placed in a certain sense just a "juicy intellectual worm?" I'm probably going to come back to the rest of what you posted because I think it's real interesting, but I think the simple answer to this is: yes. A more complex answer is that the literary techniques support reading practices which involve ways of thinking-and-being-in-the-world that are consistent with Buddhist approaches. One of the very pleasant aspects of this discussion has been the way that it has led me into learning more about these techniques. Here's Robert Hass discussing one of the aspects of the kigo, or seasonal reference, in haiku: Robert Hass posted:From the point of view of poetry, time is the crucial element here. The haikai and haiku anthologies were usually organized seasonally: spring, summer, fall, winter. They were, and still are, magical and ritual accounts of the Japanese year. At the same time -- and this is one of the tensions at the heart of the form -- they are a record of the evanescence of all being. Buson expresses this tension between the comfort of magical, cyclical time, and the self-erasing linear time, which, in Buddhism, is to be transcended, in this poem where, as if often the case, he has it both ways: ---------------- |
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Dec 7, 2017 03:25
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Let's talk about Li Po and T'ao Ch'ien, because he's they're two of the most BYOB Chinese poets, and also probably the most famous and beloved ones.  Pictured: Li Po after dabs and wax Li Po was a giant -- a giant of poetry, yes, but also a very tall man. He was apparently eight feet tall, but the Chinese measured things a bit differently back then, and "eight feet tall" was probably closer to what we'd call six eight. That still makes him an easy shoo-in for Center in any basketball team of poets that you put together. J.P. Seaton calls Li Po the world’s first cultural superstar, and if that’s true, it’s probably because Li Po so relentlessly promoted himself. As David Hinton remarks, “As with most immortals, the facts of Li Po’s existence are nebulous. He was himself the ultimate source for most of the biographical information we have, and with his perpetual self-dramatization, he was a decidedly unreliable source.” So, briefly, here’s what we know about Li Po, as told by Li Po: He may not have been Chinese at all: he was born on the western borderlands, but claimed to be a direct descendant of Lao Tzu. In his youth, he trained in swordsmanship at a Taoist monastery and spent time as a soldier and Robin Hood figure, robbing and killing the rich to give to the poor. He became a court poet and then fell out of favor, was a prisoner of war during the An-Lushan rebellion, did work as a petty official, and (this last is legend, not Li Po’s report) died Jeff-Buckley-style when he got drunk in a boat and drowned trying to embrace the reflection of a moon. How much of that is true is probably never going to be settled, so why not accept all of it; the poems that we have from him certainly would not be out of place coming from a man who had lived the legend. In respect to his subject matter, Li Po was absolutely typical as a Chinese poet. Some of that typicality can be attributed to his influence -- to people later imitating his themes and approaches -- but the mould that Li Po conformed to was set long before he began writing. Almost every poet of the Chinese classical era was an official or a monk, or sometimes both, and the official/monk lifestyle shaped their writing. The poet and environmentalist Gary Snyder, whose translations of Han Shan are, in my opinion, the best in the English language, writes: Gary Snyder posted:Government officials were accustomed to traveling weeks or even months to a new appointment, with their whole family. Buddhist monks and Taoist wanderers had a tradition of freely walking for months or years on end. In times of turmoil whole populations of provinces, and contending armies, might be tangled in frenzied travel on the paths and waterways. It is said, "If a man has his heart set on great things, 10,000 li are his front yard." So the people of the watersheds of the Yang and Huang rivers came to know the shape of their territory. Li Po was among a group of Tang writers who rediscovered the work of T'ao Ch'ien, who has a claim to being the model for all other Chinese poets. J.P Seaton says that T’ao Ch’ien was perhaps the first "modern" Chinese poet, and "after his death [in 427] he was without a doubt the most quoted and alluded to of all traditional poets, for at least a thousand years."  Pictured: T'ao Ch'ien thinking about The Weed rear end Born T’ao Yuan-ming (Yuan-ming: “bright/clear”), he changed his name to T’ao Ch’ien (Ch’ien: “dark/sunken/reclusive”) after the fall of the Eastern Chin Dynasty, in which he had been an official, and during which he had served for a general who would later try and fail to capture the Chin throne. “Going dark” was both an emotional response to disappointment and trauma and a practical response to protect himself from imprisonment as a traitor. As T’ao Ch’ien, he became a Ch’an Buddhist priest and hermit farmer who loved children and wine. His one-page autobiography, translated by David Hinton, says: T’ao Ch’ien posted:No one knows where he came from. His given and literary names are also a mystery. But we know there were five willows growing beside his house, which is why he used the name Master Five-Willows. At peace in idleness, rarely speaking, he had no longing for fame or fortune. He loved to read books, and yet never puzzled over their profound insights. But whenever he came upon some realization, he was so pleased that he forgot to eat. Ch’ien’s style of poetry became known as “fields-and-gardens” poetry (t’ien yuan shih), in contrast to his contemporary Hsien Ling-Yun’s style of “rivers-and-mountains” (shan shih) poetry. The contrast between these styles, according to David Hinton, is that fields-and-gardens poetry “uses the ‘natural world’ as a stage or materials for human concerns,” whereas “rivers-and-mountains” poetry “engages or celebrates wilderness of itself and our integral spiritual relationship to it.” Hinton’s description helps illuminate the Imagist interest in fields-and-gardens poetry. A poetry movement which asserts “no ideas but in things,” is conceptually very close to a poetry movement which uses natural things to reflect human concerns: “where there are things, there are ideas.” Following Ch’ien’s model, Li Po’s major subjects included getting drunk and loving around in the natural world (Tu Fu: “For Li Po, it’s a hundred poems per gallon of wine.” If there is a more vibrant body of drinking poetry than in Chinese classical poetry, I’ve never heard of it). To these subjects, Li Po added concerns appropriate to his life as a soldier, official, and wanderer: war (sensitively and bitterly described from the soldier’s perspective), saying goodbye, being separated from loved ones, reconnecting with old friends. Here are some fairly typical subjects from Li Po’s vast output of poetry: War is pointless and bad. I’m poor, but that’s okay. I’m poor, but that’s okay, because I’m drunk. I’m getting drunk in nature because I’m lonely. I’m getting drunk in nature because I’m with friends. I’m getting drunk because we’re about to say goodbye. I’m getting drunk because I miss you. I’m getting drunk because I’m celebrating seeing you again. The natural world reminds me of how much I miss you. I’m getting drunk because I like getting drunk. Taoism! Meditating is like getting drunk. Getting drunk is like meditating. It’s cool to do nothing. Many of these subjects make for naturally lovable poetry: wild, passionate, compassionate, human-loving songs, and that, along with his prolificity and the appealing legends about his exploits, may account for some of his stature and position as the most beloved of Chinese poets. Since I don’t know Chinese, I can’t assess him as a poet, but people who can say that, in addition, he was an absolute wizard of a writer. That is, his reputation rests not just on his persona but also on his literary prowess and ability to work within a highly technical system. His poems may be wild in feeling, but they negotiate, in ways that are both playful and careful, with complex structural concerns. The two most important kinds of poetry in the T’ang were lu-shih (“regulated verse”) and chueh-chu the quatrain. As the name implies, regulated verse involved a demanding set of structural rules within an eight-line form. The history and application of this kind of verse is fascinating, but I’m getting tired of writing so I’ll cover it some other time. Chueh-chu was “looser” than lu-shih but by our contemporary standards it was still incredibly rigid, easily as demanding as rhymed iambic pentameter. It was largely within the chueh-chu tradition which Li Po wrote, but he also produced regulated verse, maybe just to show that he could. The point here is, at least as I understand it, Li Po in his original Chinese is less a Bukowski or Kerouac (both of whom were influenced by him, of course), but a drunk, Taoist Shakespeare. In translation, we’re at the mercy of the translator. Li Po had the luck to be translated by Ezra Pound, who was an world-class editor and very accomplished poet in his own regard. Nonetheless, Pound was using Li Po to advance his own ideas of poetry as much as he was translating him faithfully, and the result is that Pound’s translations retain little of the formal or technical brilliance associated with Li Po’s poems in China and Japan. That said, Pound’s translations of Li Po were a literary shot heard ‘round the world, and none more so that his translation of “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.” (Ironically, a poem in neither of the two styles most associated with Li Po). In closing I present three different versions of this poem, for comparison: Pound’s famous translation, and then ones by William Carlos Williams and David Hinton. The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead I played about the front gate, pulling flowers. You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse, You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums. And we went on living in the village of Chokan: Two small people, without dislike or suspicion. At fourteen I married My Lord you. I never laughed, being bashful. Lowering my head, I looked at the wall. Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back. At fifteen I stopped scowling, I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever. Why should I climb the look out? At sixteen you departed, You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies, And you have been gone five months. The monkeys make a sorrowful noise overhead. You dragged your feet when you went out. By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses, Too deep to clear them away! 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. If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang, Please let me know beforehand, And I will come out to meet you As far as Cho-fu-Sa. Long Banister Lane When my hair was first trimmed across my forehead, I played in front of my door, picking flowers. You came riding a bamboo stilt for a horse, Circling around my yard, playing with green plums. Living as neighbors at Long Banister Lane, We had an affection for each other than none were suspicious of. At fourteen I became your wife, With lingering shyness, I never laughed. Lowering my head towards a dark wall, I never turned, though called to a thousand times. At fifteen I began to show my happiness, I desired to have my dust mingled with yours. With a devotion ever unchanging, Why should I look out when I had you? At sixteen you left home For a faraway land of steep pathways and eddies, Which in May were impossible to traverse, And where the monkeys whined sorrowfully towards the sky. The footprints you made when you left the door Have been covered by green moss, New moss too deep to be swept away. The autumn wind came early and the leaves started falling. The butterflies, yellow with age in August, Fluttered in pairs towards the western garden. Looking at the scene, I felt a pang in my heart, And sat lamenting my fading youth. Every day and night I wait for your return, Expecting to receive your letters in advance, So that I will come traveling to greet you As far as Windy Sand. Ch’ang-Kan Village Song These bangs not yet reaching my eyes, I played at our gate, picking flowers, and you came one your horse of bamboo, circling the well, tossing green plums. We lived together here in Ch’ang-kan, two little people without suspicions. At fourteen, when I became your wife, so timid and betrayed I never smiled, I faced wall and shadow, eyes downcast. A thousand pleas: I ignored them all. At fifteen, my scowl began to soften. I wanted us mingled as dust and ash, and you always stood fast here for me, no tower vigils awaiting your return. At sixteen, you sailed far off to distant Yen-yu Rock in Ch’u-t’ang Gorge, fierce June waters impossible, and howling gibbons called out into the heavens. At our gate, where you lingered long, moss buried your tracks one by one, deep green moss I can’t sweep away. And autum’s come early. Leaves fall. It’s September now. Butterflies appear in the west garden. They fly in pairs. and it hurts. I sit heart-stricken at the bloom of youth in my old face. Before you start back from out beyond all those gorges, send a letter home. I’m not saying I’d go far to meet you, no further than Ch’ang-feng Sands. ---------------- |
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Dec 9, 2017 18:14
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And here's a poem, by me, for BYOB, after Li Po. Hills beyond, and trees flinging their leaves, Branches tossing, but the garden here Quiet and softened beneath the first snow. I stand in the middle and touch the Friend Square. ---------------- |
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Dec 9, 2017 18:18
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why do you use wade giles instead of pinyin ? my mandarin 8 so gr8 but the pinyin maps a little closer to how its pronounced, at least to my ears not a big deal but sometimes the way things sound is important i guess poetry is a thing, this is a thread, and i am posting 
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Dec 9, 2017 18:55
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mrbradlymrmartin posted:why do you use wade giles instead of pinyin ? my mandarin 8 so gr8 but the pinyin maps a little closer to how its pronounced, at least to my ears I'm using whatever it is that my sources use. Wade Giles was developed first and prominent names that were first rendered in WG are often retained in WG so that people don't get confused and think a different person is being referred to, so even more contemporary sources refer to, say, Tu Fu rather than Du Fu and Li Po instead of Li Bai. This is also true in the poems themselves. So far as I can tell, pretty much everyone agrees with you that Pinyin is phonetically more accurate. You might, with some justice, say that Li Bai is a Chinese poet, and Li Po is his American cousin. |
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Dec 9, 2017 19:12
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this thread... it's so goodcda posted:
This list kinda made a cool poem of it's own cda posted:And here's a poem, by me, for BYOB, after Li Po. Touching □ Also I liked Hinton's translation best; I guess it's the most recent? As in, it couldn't be what it is without Pound and Williams and the larger body of knowledge available etc.? edit: I like Williams 'third act' portion better than Hinton's tho. Slush Garbo fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Dec 9, 2017 |
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Dec 9, 2017 19:44
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I like Hinton's the best, too. As I understand it, its other virtues aside, it is also the closest to the Chinese in some important ways. Notably, classical Chinese poetry contains almost no enjambment, ever. The couplet format is also accurate to the way the poems were presented. Hinton actually knows Chinese. I doubt his translation is indebted to either of the other two in terms of the meaning of the words or phrases, but from an artistic perspective, you have to wrestle with Pound's translation because it's so seminal. cda fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Dec 9, 2017 |
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Dec 9, 2017 20:02
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I really like the juxtaposition of the three translations because taken together they highlight subtleties that seem obscured in each translation standing alone. and in fact it's easier for me to grasp an overall conceptual / metaphorical architecture in the poem when the ambiguities are called into focus. uh, not that I feel confident I could really understand a poem by a master of a tradition I haven't studied in a matter of minutes. for example, the third translation's choice in the final stanza of "no further than" rather than the other poems' selection of "as far as" really seems to make a difference. I have to wonder how someone versed in the tradition reading the original chinese would be inclined to read the words, in the sense of their ordinary connotations as well as their ambiguities. "no further than" might itself be too harsh, in that it seems to express a certain overall negativity or self-imposed limitation, but without that potential connotation I"m not sure you get the full picture of a tension between "I'm willing to go this far," perhaps a sign of growth, and "but no further," perhaps a sign of lingering limitations analogous to the narrator's staring at walls in the first year of her marriage. or perhaps no such tension is found in the original, if the hinton translation is simply attempting to convey an easily-apprehended use of irony (i.e. "there's no need to go any further because there's nowhere further one can go; I can no more enter your wilderness than you can enter my gate."). and all this seems very central to the poem: is it a poem about growth, or about the lack of growth, or about the ambiguities inherent in the dualism? I'm also struck by the way williams translates the childhood feelings as an "affection for each other than none were suspicious of," whereas hinton says "two little people without suspicions". whose "suspicions" (well, non-suspicions) are being referred to? it this meant to be ambiguous, or instead implicit but unambigous? I am reminded of a very big project I worked on in which a number of written communications in japanese became very significant. I don't know japanese but I dealt over a course of years with many people who did, and over time became appreciative of the difficulties caused by what I guess may be called null-subject language. particularly where clarity of meaning becomes critically important (as in my particular project), it's quite daunting to have to fall back on an assertion like "well it's not explicit anywhere, but an ordinary reader in that culture would understand it from context." from the outside, that doesn't sound all that convincing, especially in the U.S. where various (often damaging) strains of "literalism" are embraced with gusto. I take this to be partly your point, that where a poem in one language is already full of highly compressed meaning, it's hard enough to simply "uncompress" the literal and allusive meanings of the original, but if you are then going to try to "re-compress" these implications into poetry in a new language it's vastly more difficult. anyway, I like the poem, thanks for sharing it
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Dec 9, 2017 21:08
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Manifisto posted:for example, the third translation's choice in the final stanza of "no further than" rather than the other poems' selection of "as far as" really seems to make a difference. I have to wonder how someone versed in the tradition reading the original chinese would be inclined to read the words, in the sense of their ordinary connotations as well as their ambiguities. "no further than" might itself be too harsh, in that it seems to express a certain overall negativity or self-imposed limitation, but without that potential connotation I"m not sure you get the full picture of a tension between "I'm willing to go this far," perhaps a sign of growth, and "but no further," I had to look this up, because I noticed the stark differences between the endings too. As it turns out, the distance between the village and the Ch’ang-feng Sands is about 200 miles. That's a very large distance for a wife to travel at the time. As a result, I think that it's basically saying the equivalent of "I wouldn't go far to see you again . . . only to the end of the earth." Of course, I know nothing about any of this except what I've read here, so I could be completely wrong. Robot Made of Meat fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Dec 9, 2017
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Dec 9, 2017 21:17
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Those poems and poststs are real goodcda posted:Ezra Pound, who was an world-class editor Looks like you could use one 
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Dec 9, 2017 21:36
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cda posted:Hills beyond, and trees flinging their leaves, and also, this is good |
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Dec 9, 2017 21:48
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On a second reading, i notice the speaker of the poem never says that he/she is "no longer touching," leaving the intriguing idea of some kind of unendinging connection, an eternal friendship with all who read the poem through which the poet is, in a way, immortal |
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Dec 9, 2017 21:51
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Manifisto posted:for example, the third translation's choice in the final stanza of "no further than" rather than the other poems' selection of "as far as" really seems to make a difference. I have to wonder how someone versed in the tradition reading the original chinese would be inclined to read the words, in the sense of their ordinary connotations as well as their ambiguities. "no further than" might itself be too harsh, in that it seems to express a certain overall negativity or self-imposed limitation, but without that potential connotation I"m not sure you get the full picture of a tension between "I'm willing to go this far," perhaps a sign of growth, and "but no further," perhaps a sign of lingering limitations analogous to the narrator's staring at walls in the first year of her marriage. or perhaps no such tension is found in the original, if the hinton translation is simply attempting to convey an easily-apprehended use of irony (i.e. "there's no need to go any further because there's nowhere further one can go; I can no more enter your wilderness than you can enter my gate."). and all this seems very central to the poem: is it a poem about growth, or about the lack of growth, or about the ambiguities inherent in the dualism? yeah, that's really interesting. FWIW, here's Arthur Waley's translation: Soon after I wore my hair covering my forehead I was plucking flowers and playing in front of the gate, When you came by, walking on bamboo-stilts Along the trellis, playing with the green plums. We both lived in the village of Ch’ang-kan, Two children, without hate or suspicion. At fourteen I became your wife; I was shame-faced and never dared smile. I sank my head against the dark wall; Called to a thousand times, I did not turn. At fifteen I stopped wrinkling my brow And desired my ashes to be mingled with your dust. I thought you were like the man who clung to the bridge: Not guessing I should climb the Look-for-Husband Terrace, But next year you went far away, To Ch’ü-t’ang and the Whirling Water Rocks. In the fifth month “one should not venture there” Where wailing monkeys cluster in the cliffs above. In front of the door, the tracks you once made One by one have been covered by green moss— Moss so thick that I cannot sweep it away, And leaves are falling in the early autumn wind. Yellow with August the pairing butterflies In the western garden flit from grass to grass. The sight of these wounds my heart with pain; As I sit and sorrow, my red cheeks fade. Send me a letter and let me know in time When your boat will be going through the three gorges of Pa. I will come to meet you as far as ever you please, Even to the dangerous sands of Ch’ang-fēng. "As far as ever you please" seems even farther from "no further than," than "as far as." The problem with trying to resolve this by committee, though, is the familiarity that the poets had with each other. Of Pound, Williams, and Waley, Waley was the only one who knew classical Chinese. He also knew Pound, and Pound was instrumental in getting Waley's translations published (even though he did not think very highly of Waley as a poet -- nor, to be fair, did Waley consider himself a poet first). And Williams obviously knew Pound as well. My point here is that translation of a doubtable phrase can easily be influenced by previous translations. And again FWIW, here's Witter Bynner and Kang Kiang-Hu's version: A Song of Ch'ang-kan (A Song of Changgan) Li Po (Li Bai) Translated by Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-Hu. Reprinted from The Jade Mountain, Knopf 1929. My hair had hardly covered my forehead. I was picking flowers, playing by my door, When you, my lover, on a bamboo horse, Came trotting in circles and throwing green plums. We lived near together on a lane in Ch'ang-kan, Both of us young and happy-hearted. ...At fourteen I became your wife, So bashful that I dared not smile, And I lowered my head toward a dark corner And would not turn to your thousand calls; But at fifteen I straightened my brows and laughed, Learning that no dust could ever seal our love, That even unto death I would await you by my post And would never lose heart in the tower of silent watching. ...Then when I was sixteen, you left on a long journey Through the Gorges of Ch'u-t'ang, of rock and whirling water. And then came the Fifth-month, more than I could bear, And I tried to hear the monkeys in your lofty far-off sky. Your footprints by our door, where I had watched you go, Were hidden, every one of them, under green moss, Hidden under moss too deep to sweep away. And the first autumn wind added fallen leaves. And now, in the Eighth-month, yellowing butterflies Hover, two by two, in our west-garden grasses And, because of all this, my heart is breaking And I fear for my bright cheeks, lest they fade. ...Oh, at last, when you return through the three Pa districts, Send me a message home ahead! And I will come and meet you and will never mind the distance, All the way to Chang-feng Sha. Kiang Kang-Hu was Chinese (and a real interesting guy, as important for his political theories as his translations -- his works were a major influence on Mao) and supplied the literal translations to Bynner, who tried to turn them back into poetry again. "Never mind the distance" seems fairly unequivocal too. Hinton's translation is the clear outlier (that doesn't mean it's wrong! Of all of these translators he's the only one with an academic education in classical Chinese; Waley was self-taught. Kang obviously also knew Chinese but we don't actually know what he communicated to Bynner). However, in terms of the story told by the poem, I like Hinton's best. It suggests that the narrator has returned, at least partially, to the reticence of her early marriage, and that seems more emotionally authentic to me. She allowed herself to fall in love and got burned. Reading between the lines, it's not clear to me that she's convinced his silence is just due to distance. The fact that he hasn't sent any letters could mean any number of things, many of them bad. I like the complexity of the characterization that Hinton's translation brings to this moment more than the (admittedly touchingly pathetic) simple desire of the other versions. Robot Made of Meat posted:I had to look this up, because I noticed the stark differences between the endings too. As it turns out, the distance between the village and the Ch’ang-feng Sands is about 200 miles. That's a very large distance for a wife to travel at the time. As a result, I think that it's basically saying the equivalent of "I wouldn't go far to see you again . . . only to the end of the earth." Of course, I know nothing about any of this except what I've read here, so I could be completely wrong. That's super-cool research, and supports Waley/Bynner/Williams/Pound. ---------------- |
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Dec 9, 2017 22:35
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BTW, Manifisto: searching to see if I could find any further context for Hinton's translation, I ran across an interview with him that mentioned the null-subject thing and also pertains to your question about "breaking language." "David Hinton posted:In the English language, we use the pronoun I , but the Chinese don’t — or they can, but their grammar doesn’t require it the same way ours does. Here’s an example: There’s a poem that, in the English translation, ends with “I heard the monastery bell.” Note the “I,” a spirit-center that stands apart from the rest of the world. In classical Chinese you’d say, “Hear temple bell.” The poem is about a silence that is broken by this sudden noise. Think about the actual moment when the tolling of a bell cuts through the quiet to reach your ears: You’re on a mountain trail. It’s dusk. You’re alone. The clouds are moving. It’s chilly. And then — gong! There’s no “you” in that moment. There’s no captain at the bridge of the ship. There’s just immediate perception. In that moment, the self vanishes. The grammar of classical Chinese conveys that. ---------------- |
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Dec 9, 2017 22:38
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Found something (screenshot because I don't want to gently caress around with Chinese characters):
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Dec 9, 2017 22:43
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And just in case you get the impression that everyone loved Li Po, Arthur Waley writes: Arthur Waley posted:The poet Yüan Chēn (779-831) wrote a famous essay comparing Li Po with Tu Fu. But I think he's being a dumbass. ---------------- |
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Dec 9, 2017 22:55
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a durrrrr durrrrr this guy only writes about getting drunk and women, i dont get how he could be popular
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Dec 9, 2017 22:56
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cda posted:However, in terms of the story told by the poem, I like Hinton's best. It suggests that the narrator has returned, at least partially, to the reticence of her early marriage, and that seems more emotionally authentic to me. She allowed herself to fall in love and got burned. Reading between the lines, it's not clear to me that she's convinced his silence is just due to distance. The fact that he hasn't sent any letters could mean any number of things, many of them bad. I like the complexity of the characterization that Hinton's translation brings to this moment more than the (admittedly touchingly pathetic) simple desire of the other versions. your post in general is fascinating, and each new translation seems to add something and take something away (in terms of how I view the poem). as to what the poem may suggest: I agree it's not at all clear that the narrator has really progressed. I guess my current speculations center around a broad theme of self-and-other. it is in the context of a marriage, but it doesn't even necessarily have to be "about" marriage or romance; it could as easily be "about" relationships between, say, individual and authority, or inner vs. external truth, or something like that. the narrator is feminine but that may just be a metaphor for the "feminine principle," the yin, that can be found everywhere, in men as well as women. basically, in most of the poem, the narrator is waiting for the other (the yang principle) to enter her gate, to come within her walls. he meets at the threshold; once they are married he calls to her, but she will not come out of her enclosure. later, in the fifteenth year, she gains a somewhat different conception of a union, but it is a union-in-death, in what seems a deliberate contrast to a union in life. she still will not take the effort to come out of her enclosure, to "look for" her husband in the "look-for-husband terrace" (a nice way of putting it). as time proceeds and she is starting to feel her age, and observing what seem to be happy unions elsewhere (the butterflies* that flitter in pairs), she is still waiting. her husband seems further away than ever, because he is no longer on her doorstep, and the signs of his being there have become obscured by moss (the passage of time). [*I am dimly aware that "butterflies" have a certain amount of specific taoist significance, as in the parable of the emperor and the butterfly, so that might reinforce looking for specifically taoist themes?] I am particularly focused on the final stanza of the poem because it really seems to potentially cut in two ways. in one sense, she seems finally ready to leave her enclosure and meet her husband at least partway. or perhaps "as far as ever you please," I agree that the preponderance of the translations suggest she is saying she's willing to go a great distance (and thanks robot made of meat!). but the other thing that strikes me is that she is still waiting. she asks for her husband to send a letter, and only then will she be willing to travel to the ends of the earth. she is still within her enclosure and apparently does not realize that it is an affirmative step on her part that is required. if she demands certainty before she ventures out of herself she will never take that step over the threshold, and that is the only thing that is going to lead to the unity she craves. but that may be too harsh. maybe she is not demanding certainty; maybe she has matured enough to say that she really requires very little more than a simple sign of good faith, however remote. so I am tempted to see in it a very spiritual metaphor, in the sense that religious or spiritual progress requires an inner confidence and determination to do what is necessary, to step outwards to meet the truth, instead of waiting for the truth to send an unambiguous message inward. but it could also be affirming the notion that spiritual progress requires putting your own house in order. the less you require in terms of a sign from the outside, the more likely you are to rush out to meet it when it comes. so perhaps the narrator has not made "no progress" but has indeed made "great progress" and is potentially on the verge of a breakthrough. that point about hinton is excellent. there is a real concordance between buddhist and taoist conceptions of dualism and unity, one of the reasons I think that buddhism managed to take hold in chinese culture despite its foreign (indian) origins. (another, according to a professor, was that the chinese were super into meditation and breathing exercises already, and they really dug the meditation aspects and teachings of buddhism.) it also seems very much in line with your points about linguistic traditions creating fertile grounds for literary works like poems or koans inspiring non-linguistic emotions or feelings or results in the reader. language that permits you to omit the "I" seems inherently more conducive to an experience of non-self. e: indeed, one interesting possible take is that the narrator is a standin for the poet himself, and in a very frank self-assessment the poet is saying "although in many ways I feel I have grown ready to meet the truth and go as far as is required, there is still something holding me back." Manifisto fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Dec 9, 2017
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Dec 9, 2017 23:38
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 18:40 |
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gently caress, quote is not edit first time that's actually happened to me |
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Dec 9, 2017 23:47
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