paragraph: "Wang An-shih (A.D. 1021-1086), the great reformer of the
Eleventh Century, observes: 'Li Po's style is swift, yet never careless;
lively, yet never informal. But his intellectual outlook was low and
sordid. In nine poems out of ten he deals with nothing but wine and
women.'" A somewhat splenetic criticism truly, but great reformers have
seldom either the acumen or the sympathy necessary for the judgment of
poetry. Women and wine there are in abundance, but how treated? In no
mean or sordid manner certainly. Li T'ai-po was not a didactic poet, and
we of the Twentieth Century may well thank fortune for that.
Peradventure the Twenty-first will dote again upon the didactic, but we
must follow our particular inclination which is, it must be admitted,
quite counter to anything of the sort. No low or mean attitude indeed,
but a rather restricted one we may, if we please, charge against Li
T'ai-po. He was a sensuous realist, representing the world as he saw it,
with beauty as his guiding star. Conditions to him were static; he
wasted none of his force in speculating on what they should be. A scene
or an emotion _was_, and it was his business to reproduce it, not to
analyze how it had come about or what would best make its recurrence
impossible. Here he is at sharp variance with Tu Fu, who probes to the
roots of events even when he appears to be merely describing them. One
has but to compare the "Songs of the Marches" and "Battle to the South
of the City" with "The Recruiting Officers" and "Crossing the Frontier"
to see the difference.
Tu Fu was born in Tu Ling, in the province of Shensi, in A.D. 713. His
family was extremely poor, but his talent was so marked that at seven
years old he had begun to write poetry; at nine, he could write large
characters; and at fifteen, his essays and poems were the admiration of
his small circle. When he was twenty-four, he went up to Ch'ang An, the
capital, for his first examination--it will be remembered that, in the
T'ang period, all the examinations took place at Ch'ang An. Tu Fu was
perfectly qualified to pass, as every one was very well aware, but the
opinions he expressed in his examination papers were so radical that the
degree was withheld. There was nothing to be done, and Tu Fu took to
wandering about the country, observing and writing, but with little hope
of anything save poverty to come. On one of his journeys, he met Li
T'ai-po on the "Lute Terrace" in Ching Hsien. The two poets, who
sincerely admired each other, became the closest friends. Several poems
in this collection are addressed by one to the other.
When Tu Fu was thirty-six, it happened that the Emperor sent out
invitations to all the scholars in the Empire to come to the capital and
compete in an examination. Tu Fu was, of course, known to the Emperor as
a man who would have been promoted but for the opinions aired in his
papers. Of his learning, there could be no shadow of doubt. So Tu Fu
went to Ch'ang An and waited there as an "expectant official." He waited
for four years, when it occurred to him to offer three _fu_ to the
Emperor. The event justified his temerity, and the poet was given a post
as one of the officials in the Chih Hsien library. This post he held for
four years, when he was appointed to a slightly better one at
Fêng-hsien. But, a year later, the An Lu-shan rebellion broke out, which
put a summary end to Tu Fu's position, whereupon he left Fêng-hsien and
went to live with a relative at the Village of White Waters. He was
still living there when the Emperor Ming Huang abdicated in favour of
his son, Su Tsung. If the old Emperor had given him an office, perhaps
the new one would; at any rate it was worth an attempt, for Tu Fu was in
dire poverty. Having no money to hire any kind of conveyance, he started
to walk to his destination, but fell in with brigands who captured him.
He stayed with these brigands for over a year, but finally escaped, and
at length reached Fêng Chiang, where the Emperor was in residence.
His appearance on his arrival was miserable in the extreme. Haggard and
thin, his shoulders sticking out of his coat, his rags literally tied
together, he was indeed a spectacle to inspire pity, and the Emperor at
once appointed him to the post of Censor. But this did not last long. He
had the imprudence to remonstrate with the Emperor anent the sentence of
banishment passed upon the general Tan Kuan. Considering that this
clever and extremely learned soldier had so far relaxed the discipline
of his army during one of the Northern campaigns that, one night, when
his troops were all peacefully sleeping in their chariots, the camp was
surrounded and burnt and his forces utterly routed, the punishment seems
deserved. But Tu Fu thought otherwise, and so unwisely urged his opinion
that the Emperor lost patience and ordered an investigation of Tu Fu's
conduct. His friends, however, rallied to his defence and the
investigation was quashed, but he was deprived of the censorship and
sent to a minor position in Shensi. This he chose to regard as a
punishment, as indeed it was. He proceeded to Shensi, but, on arriving
there, dramatically refused to assume his office; having performed which
act of bravado, he joined his family in Kansu. He found them in the
greatest distress from famine, and although he did his best to keep them
alive by going to the hills and gathering fire-wood to sell, and by
digging up roots and various growing things for them to eat, several of
his children died of starvation.
Another six months of minor officialdom in Hua Chou, and he retired to
Ch'êngtu in Szechwan, where he lived in a grass-roofed house, engaged in
study and the endeavour to make the two ends of nothing meet. At length,
a friend of his arrived in Szechwan as Governor-General, and this friend
appointed him a State Counsellor. But the grass-house was more to his
taste than state councils, and after a year and a half he returned to
it, and the multifarious wanderings which always punctuated his life.
Five years later, when he was fifty-five, he set off on one of his
journeys, but was caught by floods and obliged to take refuge in a
ruined temple at Hu Kuang, where he nearly starved before help could
reach him. After ten days, he was rescued through the efforts of the
local magistrate, but eating again after so long a fast was fatal and he
died within an hour.
Innumerable essays have been written comparing the styles of Li T'ai-po
and Tu Fu. Yüan Chên, a poet of the T'ang period, says that Tu Fu's
poems have perfect balance; that, if he wrote a thousand lines, the last
would have as much vigour as the first and that no one can equal him in
this, his poems make a "perfect circle." He goes on: "In my opinion, the
great living wave of poetry and song in which Li T'ai-po excelled is
surpassed in Tu Fu's work, he is shoulder higher than Li Po." Again:
"The poems of Li T'ai-po are like Spring flowers, those of Tu Fu are
like the pine-trees, they are eternal and fear neither snow nor cold."
Shên Ming-chên says: "Li Po is like the Spring grass, like Autumn waves,
not a person but must love him. Tu Fu is like a great hill, a high peak,
a long river, the broad sea, like fine grass and bright-coloured
flowers, like a pine or an ancient fir, like moving wind and gentle
waves, like heavy hoar-frost, like burning heat--not a quality is
missing."
Hu Yu-ling uses a metaphor referring to casting dice and says that Li
T'ai-po would owe Tu Fu "an ivory"; and Han Yü, speaking of both Li
T'ai-po and Tu Fu, declares that "the flaming light of their essays
would rise ten thousand feet."
Poetic as these criticisms are, it is their penetration which is so
astonishing; but I think the most striking comparison made of Tu Fu's
work is that by Tao Kai-yu: "Tu Fu's poems are like pictures, like the
branches of trees reflected in water--the branches of still trees. Like
a large group of houses seen through clouds or mist, they appear and
disappear."
Sometime ago, in a review of a volume of translations of Chinese poetry
in the London "Times," I came across this remarkable statement: "The
Chinese poet starts talking in the most ordinary language and voices the
most ordinary things, and his poetry seems to happen suddenly out of the
commonplace as if it were some beautiful action happening in the routine
of actual life."
The critic could have had no knowledge of the Chinese language, as
nothing can be farther from the truth than his observation. It is
largely a fact that the Oriental poet finds his themes in the ordinary
affairs of everyday life, but he describes them in a very special,
carefully chosen, medium. The simplest child's primer is written in a
language never used in speaking, while the most highly educated scholar
would never dream of employing the same phrases in conversation which he
would make use of were he writing an essay, a poem, or a state document.
Each language--the spoken, the poetic, the literary, the
documentary--has its own construction, its own class of characters, and
its own symbolism. A translator must therefore make a special study of
whichever he wishes to render.
Although several great sinologues have written on the subject of Chinese
poetry, none, so far as I am aware, has devoted his exclusive attention
to the poetic style, nor has any translator availed himself of the
assistance, so essential to success, of a poet--that is, one trained in
the art of seizing the poetic values in fine shades of meaning. Without
this power, which amounts to an instinct, no one can hope to reproduce
any poetry in another tongue, and how much truer this is of Chinese
poetry can only be realized by those who have some knowledge of the
language. Such poets, on the other hand, as have been moved to make
beautiful renditions of Chinese originals have been hampered by
inadequate translations. It is impossible to expect that even a scholar
thoroughly versed in the philological aspects of Chinese literature can,
at the same time, be endowed with enough of the poetic _flair_ to
convey, uninjured, the thoughts of one poet to another. A second
personality obtrudes between poet and poet, and the contact, which must
be established between the two minds if any adequate translation is to
result, is broken. How Miss Lowell and I have endeavoured to obviate
this rupture of the poetic current, I shall explain presently. But, to
understand it, another factor in the case must first be understood.
It cannot be too firmly insisted upon that the Chinese character itself
plays a considerable part in Chinese poetic composition. Calligraphy and
poetry are mixed up together in the Chinese mind. How close this
intermingling may be, will appear when we come to speak of the "Written
Pictures," but even without following the interdependence of these arts
to the point where they merge into one, it must not be forgotten that
Chinese is an ideographic, or picture, language. These marvellous
collections of brushstrokes which we call Chinese characters are really
separate pictographic representations of complete thoughts. Complex
characters are not spontaneously composed, but are built up of simple
characters, each having its own peculiar meaning and usage; these, when
used in combination, each play their part in modifying either the sense
or the sound of the complex. Now it must not be thought that these
separate entities make an over-loud noise in the harmony of the whole
character. They are each subdued to the total result, the final meaning,
but they do produce a qualifying effect upon the word itself. Since
Chinese characters are complete ideas, it is convenient to be able to
express the various degrees of these ideas by special characters which
shall have those exact meanings; it is, therefore, clear that to grasp a
poet's full intention in a poem there must be a knowledge of the
analysis of characters.
This might seem bizarre, were it not for a striking proof to the
contrary. It is a fact that many of the Chinese characters have become
greatly altered during the centuries since they were invented. So long
ago as A.D. 200, a scholar named Hsü Shih, realizing that this
alteration was taking place, wrote the dictionary known as "Shuo Wên
Chieh Tzŭ," or "Speech and Writing: Characters Untied," containing about
ten thousand characters in their primitive and final forms. This work is
on the desk of every scholar in the Far East and is studied with the
greatest reverence. Many editions have appeared since it was written,
and by its aid one can trace the genealogy of characters in the most
complete manner. Other volumes of the same kind have followed in its
wake, showing the importance of the subject in Chinese estimation. While
translators are apt to ignore this matter of character genealogy, it is
ever present to the mind of the Chinese poet or scholar who is familiar
with the original forms; indeed, he may be said to find his overtones in
the actual composition of the character he is using.
All words have their connotations, but this is connotation and more; it
is a pictorial representation of something implied, and, lacking which,
an effect would be lost. It may be objected that poems were heard as
well as read, and that, when heard, the composition of the character
must be lost. But I think this is to misunderstand the situation.
Recollect, for a moment, the literary examinations, and consider that
educated men had these characters literally ground into them. Merely to
pronounce a word must be, in such a case, to see it and realize,
half-unconsciously perhaps, its various parts. Even if half-unconscious,
the _nuances_ of meaning conveyed by them must have hung about the
spoken word and given it a distinct flavour which, without them, would
be absent.
Now what is a translator to do? Shall he render the word in the flat,
dictionary sense, or shall he permit himself to add to it what it
conveys to an educated Chinese? Clearly neither the one nor the other in
all cases; but one _or_ the other, which the context must determine. In
description, for instance, where it is evident that the Chinese poet
used every means at his command to achieve a vivid representation, I
believe the original poem is more nearly reproduced by availing one's
self of a minimum of these "split-ups"; where, on the other hand, the
original carefully confines itself to simple and direct expression, the
word as it is, without overtones, must certainly be preferred. The
"split-ups" in these translations are few, but could our readers compare
the original Chinese with Miss Lowell's rendition of it, in these
instances, I think they would feel with me that in no other way could
the translation have been made really "literal," could the poem be
"brought over" in its entirety. If a translation of a poem is not poetry
in its new tongue, the original has been shorn of its chief reason for
being. Something is always lost in a translation, but that something had
better be the trappings than the essence.
I must, however, make it quite clear how seldom these "split-ups" occur
in the principal parts of the book; in the "Written Pictures," where the
poems were not, most of them, classics, we felt justified in making a
fuller use of these analytical suggestions; but I believe I am correct
in saying that no translations from the Chinese that I have read are so
near to the originals as these. Bear in mind, then, that there are not,
I suppose, more than a baker's dozen of these "split-ups" throughout the
book, and the way they were managed can be seen by this literal
translation of a line in "The Terraced Road of the Two-Edged Sword
Mountains." The Chinese words are on the left, the English words on the
right, the analyses of the characters enclosed in brackets:
_Shang_ Above
_Tsê_ Then
_Sung_ Pines
_Fêng_ Wind
_Hsiao_ Whistling wind (Grass--meaning the sound of
wind through grass, to whistle; and in awe of,
or to venerate.)
_Sê_ Gusts of wind (Wind; and to stand.)
_Sê_ A psaltery (Two strings of jade-stones which
are sonorous.)
_Yü_ Wind in a gale (Wind; and to speak.)
Miss Lowell's rendering of the line was:
"On their heights, the wind whistles awesomely in the pines; it
booms in great, long gusts; it clashes like the strings of a
jade-stone psaltery; it shouts on the clearness of a gale."
Can any one doubt that this was just the effect that the Chinese poet
wished to achieve, and did achieve by means of the overtones given in
his characters?
Another, simpler, example is in a case where the Chinese poet speaks of
a rising sun. There are many characters which denote sunrise, and each
has some shade of difference from every other. In one, the analysis is
the sunrise light seen from a boat through mist; in another, it is the
sun just above the horizon; still another is made up of a period of time
and a mortar, meaning that it is dawn, when people begin to work. But
the poet chose none of these; instead, he chose a character which
analyzes into the sun at the height of a helmeted man, and so Miss
Lowell speaks of the sun as "head-high," and we have the very picture
the poet wanted us to see.
Miss Lowell has told in the Preface the manner in which we worked. The
papers sent to Miss Lowell were in exactly the form of the above, and
with them I also sent a paraphrase, and notes such as those at the end
of this book. Far from making the slightest attempt at literary form in
these paraphrases, I deliberately made them as bald as possible, and
strove to keep my personality from intruding between Miss Lowell and the
Chinese poet with whose mood she must be in perfect sympathy. Her
remarkable gift for entering into the feeling of the poet she is
translating was first shown in "Six French Poets," but there she
approached her authors at first hand. It was my object to enable her to
approach these Chinese authors as nearly at first hand as I could. That
my method has been justified by the event, the book shows; not merely
are these translations extraordinarily exact, they are poetry, and would
be so though no Chinese poet had conceived them fourteen hundred years
ago. It is as if I had handed her the warp and the woof, the silver
threads and the gold, and from these she has woven a brocade as nearly
alike in pattern to that designed by the Chinese poet as the differences
in the looms permit. I believe that this is the first time that English
translations of Chinese poetry have been made by a student of Chinese
and a poet working together. Our experience of the partnership has
taught us both much; if we are pioneers in such a collaboration, we only
hope that others will follow our lead.
The second section of the book, "Written Pictures," consists of
illustrations, or half illustrations, of an art which the Chinese
consider the most perfect medium in which a man can express himself.
These _Tzŭ Hua_, "Hanging-on-the-Wall Poems," are less known and
understood than any other form of Oriental art. A beautiful thought
perpetuated in beautiful handwriting and hung upon the wall to suggest a
mental picture--that is what it amounts to.
In China, the arts of poetry and calligraphy are united in the
ideographs which form the written language. There are several different
styles in which these ideographs, or characters, may be written. The
earliest are pictograms known as the "ancient pictorial script," they
were superseded in the Eighth Century B.C. by the "great seal"
characters and later by the "lesser seal." These, which had been
executed with the "knife pen," were practically given up when the
invention of the writing-brush, which is usually translated as "pencil,"
revolutionized calligraphy (_circa_ 215 B.C.). Their place was taken by
a type of character known as "_li_" or "official script," a simplified
form of the "seal," and this, being an improvement upon all previous
styles, soon became popular. It created almost a new character in which
the pictorial element had largely disappeared, and, with certain
modifications, holds good to-day. The "model hand," the "running hand,"
and the famous "grass hand," so popular with poets and painters, are
merely adaptations of the _li_; all three of these, together with the
_li_ itself, are used in the composition of written pictures.
The written pictures here translated were formerly in the possession of
a Chinese gentleman of keenly æsthetic taste, and are excellent examples
of the art. A photograph of one of the originals will be found opposite
the translation made from it on page 170. The names which follow the
poems are not those of the authors, but of the calligraphists. In the
case of two poems, the authors' names are also given. These written
pictures had no titles, those given here were added simply for
convenience; but the titles to the poems in the body of the book are
those of the poets themselves, except in one or two instances where the
Chinese title conveyed so little to an Occidental mind that its meaning
had to be paraphrased.
The Notes at the end of the book are intended for the general reader.
For which reason, I have purposely excluded the type of note which
consists in cataloguing literary cross-allusions. To know that certain
lines in a poem are quoted from some earlier author, is one of a class
of facts which deeply interest scholars, but are of no importance
whatever to the rest of the world.
A word as to the title of this book: There lived at Ch'êng-tu, the
capital of Szechwan, early in the Ninth Century, a courtesan named Hsieh
T'ao, who was famous for her wit and verse-writing. Hsieh T'ao made a
paper of ten colours, which she dipped in a stream, and on it wrote her
poems. Now, some years before, a woman had taken the stole of a Buddhist
priest to this stream in order to wash it. No sooner had the stole
touched the water than the stream became filled with flowers. In an old
Chinese book, "The Treasury of Pleasant Records," it is told that, later
in life, Hsieh T'ao gave up the "fir-flower tablets" and made paper of a
smaller size. Presumably this fir-flower paper was the paper of ten
colours. The mountain stream which ran near Hsieh T'ao's house is called
the "Hundred Flower Stream."
I cannot close this Introduction without expressing my gratitude to my
teacher, Mr. Nung Chu. It is his unflagging interest and never-failing
patience that have kept me spurred on to my task. Speaking no word of
English, Mr. Nung must often have found my explanations of what would,
and what would not, be comprehensible to Occidental readers very
difficult to understand, and my only regret is that he cannot read the
book now that it is done.
FIR-FLOWER TABLETS
SONGS OF THE MARCHES
BY LI T'AI-PO
I
It is the Fifth Month,
But still the Heaven-high hills
Shine with snow.
There are no flowers
For the heart of the earth is yet too chilly.
From the centre of the camp
Comes the sound of a flute
Playing "The Snapped Willow."
No colour mists the trees,
Not yet have their leaves broken.
At dawn, there is the shock and shouting of battle,
Following the drums and the loud metal gongs.
At night, the soldiers sleep, clasping the pommels of their
jade-ornamented saddles.
They sleep lightly,
With their two-edged swords girt below their loins,
So that they may be able in an instant to rush upon the Barbarians
And destroy them.
II
Horses!
Horses!
Swift as the three dogs' wind!
Whips stinging the clear air like the sharp calling of birds,
They ride across the camel-back bridge
Over the river Wei.
They bend the bows,
Curving them away from the moon which shines behind them
Over their own country of Han.
They fasten feathers on their arrows
To destroy the immense arrogance of the foe.
Now the regiments are divided
And scattered like the five-pointed stars,
Sea mist envelops the deserted camp,
The task is accomplished,
And the portrait of Ho P'iao Yao
Hangs magnificently in the Lin Pavilion.
III