topics: |  poetry | china | translation | anthology

This book caught my attention, quite by accident, on the poetry shelves at the NYC used bookstore, Westenders, where I was browsing in "R" under poetry, looking through the Rumi's.

It was an amazing find. By my "page-fall-open-coefficient" (whether several randomly sampled poems have a spark) - this book has among the highest coefficients ever. A stunning set of poems - more than translations. Perhaps some of the pleasure comes from knowing that the ancient-ness of these thoughts, but I think even if one reads them simply as direct poems, they stand out in their clean, pithy construction, with a small tug at the heart.

I discovered that others agreed with me - Eliot Weinberger has called this book as "possibly his best translation".

In the introduction, he says that he did these translations "solely to please myself. It is offered with no pretense to scholarship or to mastery of [Sinology]."

He is focusing on love poems. He discards the myth that

	the Chinese seldom write love poems. This is not true. From the
	beginning in The Book of Odes, the Shi Ching, there is a great deal
	of Chinese love poetry. True, the Confucian scholar gentry were given
	to the amusing and ingenuous habit of interpreting these poems as
	political allegories, but they obviously are not.

Anonymous folk songs

A large chunk of the poems are anonymous folk songs, which were periodically
anthologized in China.

	Each dynasty has made collections of folk songs, most of them love
	songs, and the literary poets have written imitations of them. A
	large proportion of the poems in this book of mine are song poems and
	many of them are love poems.

The first such anthology is the Shi Ching (Book of Odes), supposedly edited
by Confucius.  Many are attributed to legendary women poets -- Tzu Yeh, T'ao
Yeh, and Maid of Hua Mountain, but perhaps these songs were part of the
harvest festival or a group marriage celebration.

The book contains 112 poems - "a few more for good measure and good luck"
(as in several ancient Chinese "hundred" anthologies).

Translation or Transcreation

Did Rexroth know Chinese, or did he rely on other sources?  In answering
this, Weinberger says:

     in his unreliable An Autobiographical Novel, [Rexroth] claimed that he
     first began learning Chinese as a boy; in 1924, at nineteen, he met
     Witter Bynner in Taos, who spurred his interest in Tu Fu. According to
     his introduction to One Hundred, the poems were derived from the Chinese
     texts, as well as French, German, and academic English translations, but
     the sources hardly matter...

This last sentence shows a somewhat cavalier attitude towards the Chinese
text - would the western critic have said the same of a translation of
Homer perhaps?  One sees similar denigration of non-european texts, as in
Fitzgerald's treatment of Khayyam or Pound's "translations" such as "The
river-merchant's wife: a letter" - all of whom stand very well as poems in
English, but whether the degree of verisimilitude lets us call them a
translation remains very much in doubt.

Quite possibly, Rexroth has injected much of his own into the translation,
as every translator must, but my feeling is that perhaps he has not taken
appropriate care to respect the original text, a problem more common in
translations from the less respectable genres.

At the end of his introduction, Rexroth comments on other translations from
the classical Chinese:

    As poetry, no recent translations can compare with those of Ezra Pound,
    Judith Gautier, Klabund, Witter Bynner or Amy Lowell, none of whom knew
    very much about the subject or understood the language.

But as English poetry, to my mind, these translations hold up with the very
best.

Transliteration of names / pronunciation

Ch' t', k', ts', p', tz' may be pronounced as spelled, but rather sharp
ly. Without apostrophe, ch is pronounced "dj"; k is pronounced "g"; p is
pronounced "b"; t is pronounced "d"; hs is a palatalized "sh"; j is "r." E
before "n" or ng is a mute "u." In tse or tzu the vowel scarcely exists. Lao
Tzu the Chinese philosopher, is pronounced something like "Lowds."

The Chinese Book of Changes, I Ching, some­ times spelled "Yi King", is
pronounced, using American spelling, "ee jing."

Excerpts

A PRESENT FROM THE EMPEROR'S NEW CONCUBINE : Lady P'an (I)

I took a piece of the rare cloth of Ch'i,
White silk glowing and pure as frost on snow,
And made you a fan of harmony and joy,
As flawlessly round as the full moon.
Carry it always, nestled in your sleeve.
Wave it and it will make a cooling breeze.
I hope, that when Autumn comes back
And the North wind drives away the heat,
You will not store it away amongst old gifts
and forget it, long before it is worn out.

    	[A favourite concubine of Emperor Ch'eng Ti of Han (32 BC);
	 Discarded by him, she wrote one of the first and best "discarded
	 courtesan" poems, which would be imitated innumerable times in
	 centuries to come.]

AUTUMN WIND : Emperor Wu of Han (II)

The autumn wind blows white clouds
About the sky.  Grass turns brown.
Leaves fall. Wild geese fly south
The last flowers bloom, orchids
And chrysanthemums with their
Bitter perfume.  I dream of
That beautiful face I can
Never forget. I go for
A trip on the river.  The barge
Rides the current and dips with
The white capped waves.  They play flutes
And drums, and the rowers sing.
I am happy for a moment
And then the old sorrow comes back.
I was young only a little while
And now I am growing old.

FROM THE MOST DISTANT TIME : Emperor Wu of Han (III)

	Majestic, from the most distant time,
	The sun rises and sets.
	Time passes and men cannot stop it.
	The four seasons served them,
	But do not belong to them.
	The years flow like water.
	Everything passes away before my eyes.

DRAFTED : Su Wu (IV)

They married us when they put
Up our hair.  We were just twenty
And fifteen.  And ever since,
Our love has never been troubled.
Tonight we have the old joy
In each other, although our
Happiness will soon be over.
I remember the long march
That lies ahead of me, and
Go out and look up at the stars,
To see how the night has worn on.
Betelgeuse and Antares
Have both gone out.  It is time
For me to leave for far off
Battlefields.  No way of knowing
If we will ever see each
other again.  We clutch each
Other and sob, our faces
streaming with tears.  Goodbye, dear.
Protect the Spring flowers of
Your beauty.  Think of the days
When we were happy together.
If I live I will come back.
If I did, remember me always.
   [Su Wu, 2nd c. was a general of the Han emperor Wu Ti]

DEW ON THE YOUNG GARLIC LEAVES : T'ien Hung 7 (V)

	The dew on the garlic
	Is gone soon after sunrise.
	The dew that evaporated this morning
	Will descend again in tomorrow's dawn.
	Man dies and is gone,
	And when has anybody ever come back?

HOME : Anonymous (Han) 9 (VII)

At fifteen I joined the army.
At twenty-five I came home at last.
As I entered the village
I met an old man and asked him,
"Who lives in our house now?"
"Look down the street,
There is your old home."
Pines and cypresses grow like weeds.
Rabbits live in the dog house.
Pigeons nest in the broken tiles.
Wild grass covers the courtyard.
Rambling vines cover the well.
I gather wild mullet and make a pudding
And pick some mallows for soup.
When soup and pudding are done,
There is no one to share them.
I stand by the broken gate,
And wipe the tears from my eyes.

This morning our boat left : Anon (Six Dynasties) 10 (VIII)

	This morning our boat left the
	Orchid bank and went out through
	The tall reeds.  Tonight we will
	Anchor under mulberries
	And elms.  You and me, all day
	Together, gathering rushes.
	Now it is evening, and see,
	We have gathered just one stalk.

THE FISH WEEPS : Anon (Six Dynasties) 11 (IX)

	The fish weeps in the
	Dry riverbed.  Too late he
	Is sorry he flopped
	Across the shallows.  Now he
	Wants to go back and
	Warn all the other fishes.

THE CUCKOO CALLS FROM THE BAMBOO GROVE : Anon (Six Dynasties) 12 (X)

The cuckoo calls from the bamboo grove.
Cherry blossoms litter the path.
A girl walks under the full moon,
Trailing her silk skirts in the grass.

In spring we gather mulberry leaves : Anon (Six Dynasties) 13 (XI)

In spring we gather mulberry leaves.
At the end of Summer we unwind the cocoons.
If a young girl works day and night,
How is she going to find time to get married.

I RETURN TO THE PLACE WHERE I WAS BORN : T'ao Yuan Ming (Tao Chin) 33 (XXVIII)

	    [365-427 AD]

From my youth up I never liked the city.
I never forgot the mountains where I was born.
The world caught me and harnessed me
And drove me through dust, thirty years away from home.
Migratory birds return to the same tree.
Fish find their way back to the pools where they were hatched.
I have been over the whole country,
And have come back at last to the garden of my childhood.
My farm is only ten acres.
The farm house has eight or nine rooms.
Elms and willows shade the back garden.
Peach trees stand by the front door.
The village is out of sight.
You can hear dogs bark in the alleys,
And cocks crow in the mulberry trees.
When you come through the gate into the court
You will find no dust or mess.
Peace and quiet live in every room.
I am content to stay here the rest of my life.
At last I have found myself.

Farewell to Shen Yueh : Fan Yun (XXXII)

Heading East or West, down the
Many years, how often we
Have separated here at
Lo Yang Gate.  Once when I left
The snow flakes seemed like flower
Petals. Now today the petals
Seem like snow.

TEA : Ch'u Ch'uang I p. 54 (XLIX)

	By noon the heat became unbearable.
	The birds stopped flying
	And went to roost exhausted.
	Sit here in the shade of the big tree.
	Take off your hot woolen jacket.
	The few small clouds floating overhead
	Do nothing to cool the heat of the sun.
	I'll put some tea on to boil
	And cook some vegetables.
	It's a good thing you don't live far.
	You can stroll home after sunset.

NIGHT AT ANCHOR BY MAPLE BRIDGE : Chang Chi 62

The moon sets. A crow caws.
Frost fills the sky.
Maple leaves fall on the river.
The fishermen's fires keep me awake.
From beyond Su Chou
The midnight bell on Cold Mountain
Reaches as far as my little boat.

      [8th c., lived under Emperor Hsuan Tsung in the
       great age of the T'ang Dynasty]

THE BAMBOO BY LI CH'E YUN'S WINDOW : Po Chu I 73 (LXVII)

	Don't cut it to make a flute.
	Don't trim it for a fishing
	Pole. When the grass and flowers
	Are all gone, it will be beautiful
	Under the falling snow flakes.

To the tune of "the boat of stars" : Li Ch'ing Chao (poetess) 92 (LXXXVI)

Year after year I have watched
My jade mirror. Now my rouge
And creams sicken me. One more
Year that he has not come back.
My flesh shakes when a letter
Comes from South of the River.
I cannot drink wine since he left.
But the Autumn has drunk up all my tears.‎
I have lost my mind, far off
In the jungle mists of the South.
The gates of Heaven are nearer
Than the body of my beloved.

A weary song to a slow sad tune : Li Ch'ing Chao (poetess) 91 (LXXXIII)

Search. Search. Seek. Seek.
Cold.  Cold. Clear. Clear.
Sorrow.  Sorrow. Pain. Pain.
Hot flashes. Sudden chills.
Stabbing pains. Slow agonies.
I drink two cups, then three bowls
Of clear wine until I can't
Stand up against a gust of wind.
Wild geese fly over head.
They wrench my heart.
They were our friends in the old days.
Gold chrysanthemums litter
The ground, pile up, faded, dead.
This season I could not bear
To pick them. All alone,
Motionless at my window,
I watch the gathering shadows.
Fine rain sifts through the wu t'ung trees,
And drips, drop by drop, through the dusk.
What can I ever do now?
How can I drive off this word
Hopelessness?

Rain on the River : Lu Yu 100

contrast the version in this book with his earlier translation, from "the
hundred poems" (from Weinberger):
                                               older version:
We cross the river over dark waves             In the fog we drift hither
Through dense fog and tie up the little boat   And yon over the dark waves.
Under the bank to a willow.		       At last our little boat finds
I wake up heavy with wine in the middle of     Shelter under a willow bank.
      the night.			       At midnight I am awake,
The lamp is only a			       Heavy with wine. The smoky
Smoky red coal. I lie listening to the	       Lamp is still burning. The rain
Hsiao hsiao of the rain on the bamboo roof     Is still sighing in the bamboo
Of the cabin.                 [1970]	       Thatch of the cabin of the boat.
					              	      [1956]

LAZY : Lu Yu p.102 (XCV)

Once we had a knocker			(and this older version:
On the gate.
Now we seldom				Idleness
Open it. I don’t want people
Scuffing up the green moss.		I keep the rustic gate closed
The sun grows warm. Spring has really	For fear somebody might step
Come at last. Sometimes you		On the green moss. The sun grows
Can hear faintly on the gentle		Warmer. You can tell it’s Spring.
Breeze the noise of the street.		Once in a while, when the breeze
My wife is reading the classics.	Shifts, I can hear the sounds of the
She asks me the meaning			Village. My wife is reading
Of ancient characters.			The classics. Now and then she
My son begs for a sip of wine.		Asks me the meaning of the word.
He drinks the whole cup before		I call for wine and my son
I can stop him.				Fills my cup till runs over.
Is there anything			I have only a little
Better than an enclosed garden		Garden, but it is planted
With yellow plums and purple plums	With yellow and purple plums.
Planted alternately?			                        [1956]

Contents

    Introduction 	xv
    ANONYMOUS (Han Dynasty)
	Home 						9
	Life is Long 					8
    ANONYMOUS (Six Dynasties)
	All Year Long 				        24
	Bitter Cold 					16
	I Can No Longer Untangle my Hair 		17
	In Spring We Gather Mulberry Leaves 		13
	Kill That Crowing Cock 				18
	My Lover will Soon be Here 			21
	Night Without End 				14
	Nightfall 					20
	Our Little Sister is Worried 			22
	The Cuckoo Calls from the Bamboo Grove 		12
	The Fish Weeps 					11
	The Girl by Green River 			19
	The Months Go By 				23
	This Morning Our Boat Left 			10
	What is the Matter with Me? 			15
    CHANG CHI
	Night at Anchor by Maple Bridge 		64
	The Birds from the Mountains 			65
    CHANG CHI
	A Faithful Wife 				82
    CHIANG CH'U LING
	Since You Left 					48
    CHIANG KUO FAN
	On his Thirty-third Birthday 			118
    THE POETESS CH'EN T'AO
	Her Husband Asks her to Buy a Bolt of Silk 	105
    CH'EN YU Yl
	Enlightenment 					99
	Spring Morning 					98
    CHIANG CHIEH
	To the Tune "The Fair Maid of Yu" 		109
    CHIANG SHE CH'UAN
	Evening Lights on the River 			116
	Twilight in the River Pavilion 			117
    CH'IEN CH'I
	Mount T'ai P'ing 				66
	Visit to the Hermit Ts'ui 			67
    THE CH'IEN WEN OF LIANG (HSIAO KANG )
	Flying Petals 					43
	Rising in Winter 				44
    CHIIN CH'ANG SIU
	Spring Sorrow 					60
    CHU CHEN PO
	Hedgehog 					84
	The Rustic Temple is Hidden 			83
    CH'U CH'UANG
	A Mountain Spring 				51
	Country House 					53
	Evening in the Garden Clear After Rain 		52
	Tea 						54
    THE POETESS CHU SHU CHEN
	Lost 						108
	Sorrow 						107
    FAN YUN
	Farewell to Shen Yueh 				37
    FU HSUAN
	Thunder 					27
    HAN YU
	Amongst the Cliffs 				69
    HO CHIE CHIANG
	Homecoming 					47
    HO HSUN
	Spring Breeze 					42
	The Traveler 					41
    HSIEH LING YUEN
	By T'ing Yang Waterfall 			34
    HSIEH NGAO
	Wind Tossed Dragons 				110
    HSIN CH'I CHI
	To an Old Tune 					104
    HUANG T'ING CH'IEN
	Clear Bright 					90
    KAO CHI
	The Old Cowboy 					111
    KUAN YUN SHE
	Seventh Day Seventh Month 			106
    THE POETESS LI CH'ING CHAO
	A Weary Song to a Slow Sad Tune 		91
	To the Tune "A Lonely Flute on the Phoenix Terrace" 	96
	To the Tune "Cutting a Flowering Plum Branch" 	95
	To the Tune "Drunk Under Flower Shadows" 	93
	To the Tune "Spring at Wu Ling" 		94
	To the Tune "The Boat of Stars" 		92
    LI P'IN
	Crossing Han River 				88
    LI SHANG YIN
	Evening Comes 					78
	Her Beauty is Hidden 				79
	I Wake Up Alone 				76
	The Candle Casts Dark Shadows 			80
	The Old Harem 					81
	When Will I Be Home? 				77
    LIU CH'ANG CH'ING
	Snow on Lotus Mountain 				68
    LIU YU HSI
	Drinking with Friends Amongst the Blooming Peonies 	71
	To the Tune "Glittering Sword Hilts" 		72
    LU CHI
	She Thinks of her Beloved 			28
	Visit to the Monastery of Good Omen 		30
    LU KUEI MENG
	To an Old Tune 					85
    LU YU
	In the Country 					101
	Insomnia 					103
	Lazy 						102
	Rain on the River 				100
    MENG HAO JAN
	Night on the Great River 			49
	Returning by Night to Lu-men 			50
    NG SHAO
	The New Wife 					45
    LADY P'AN
	A Present from the Emperor's New Concubine 	3
    P'AN YUEH ( PIAN YENG JEN )
	In Mourning for his Dead Wife 			31
    PAO YU
	Viaticum 					35
    PO CHU
	The Bamboo by Li Ch'e, Yun's Window 		73
    SHEN YUEH
	Farewell to Fan Yun at An Ch'eng 		36
    SU TUNG PIO
	Remembering Min Ch'e (a Letter to his Brother Su Che) 	89
    SU WU
	Drafted 					6
    T'AO HUNG CHING ( T'AO T'UNG MING )
	Freezing Night 					38
    T'AO YUAN MING ( TAO CHIN )
	I Return to the Place I Was Born 		33
    T'IEN HUNG
	Dew on the Young Garlic Leaves 			7
    TS'UI HAO
	By the City Gate 				63
    TU FU
	Spring Rain 					62
    TU MU
	View from the Cliffs 				74
	We Drink Farewell 				75
    WANG CHANG LING
	A Sorrow in the Harem 				61
    WANG HUNG KUNG
	In the Mountain Village 			119
    WANG SHI CH'ENG ( WANG SHANG )
	At Ch'en Ch'u 					113
    WANG WEI
	Autumn 						56
	Autumn Twilight in the Mountains 		55
	Bird and Waterfall Music 			59
	Deep in the Mountain Wilderness 		58
	Twilight Comes 					57
    WEN T'ING YEN
	In the Mountains as Autumn Begins 		86
	Passing a Ruined Palace 			87
    THE WU OF HAN
	Autumn Wind 					4
	From the Most Distant Time 			5
    THE WU OF LIANG
	The Morning Sun Shines 				39
	Water Lilies Bloom 				40
    WU WEI YE
	At Yuen Yang Lake 				112
    THE YANG OF SUI
	Spring River Flowers Moon Night 		46
    YUAN CHI
	Deep Night 					26
    YUAN MEI
	Summer Day 					114
	Winter Night 					115
    NOTES 						121
    SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 				135

Lucas Klein : Kenneth Rexroth’s Translations of Du Fu and Li Qingzhao

  
from "Original/Translation: The Aesthetic Context of Kenneth Rexroth’s
Translations of Du Fu and Li Qingzhao", by Lucas Klein
	http://www.bigbridge.org/issue10/original_translation_from_big_bridge.pdf

Stuck in the back of One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese: Love and the
Turning Year, Kenneth Rexroth presents as his last poem, closing a
mini-anthology of three thousand years of the Chinese poetic tradition, his
version of a verse by Wang Hung Kung. Titled “In the Mountain Village”, it
reads:

		Wild flowers and grass grow on
		The ancient ceremonial
		Stairs. The sun sets between the
		Forested mountains. The swallows
		Who nested once in the painted
		Eaves of the palaces of
		The young prince are flying
		This evening between the homes
		Of woodcutters and quarrymen.
		More ancient by far than the stairs
		Are the cyclopean walls
		Of immense dry laid stones covered
		With moss and ferns. If you approach
		Quietly and imitate their
		Voices, you can converse all day
		With the tree frogs who live there.

The poem’s first stanza presents a negative nostalgia: what was once is now
gone.  Ancient ceremonies have been abandoned, leaving the site to be
overgrown. The sun is setting, representing a closing of an age. Even the
swallows, birds ubiquitous in traditional Chinese poetry, are gone, and the
princes have turned into woodcutters and quarrymen.

Within the second stanza, the poem finds a kind of solace within the
decay. Something is still alive amidst the ancient stairs and more ancient
“cyclopean walls”. The tree frogs, with their mysterious and subtle chirp,
can entertain those who know how to enter their world and mimic their
voices. Not all is lost: the tree frogs’ quiet singing still resounds.  And
though Rexroth’s note offers no explanation behind the identity of Wang Hung
Kung, calling him only “a contemporary poet” — the only contemporary poet
presented in the volume — this poem’s nostalgia and position at the end of
the book suggest a relevance to the entire tradition of classical Chinese
poetry. The poem seems to put itself in dialogue, as with the tree frogs,
with the ancient Chinese poets, even as the ruins of their monuments have
been covered by weeds and wildflower.

This interpretation makes all the more sense when the real identity of Wang
Hung Kung comes out: Wang Hung Kung was Kenneth Rexroth. The name—seemingly
put together as a translation of Rex, meaning king, ⥟ wang, and Roth, from
German rot, red, ㋙ hong, with the classical Chinese “sir” ݀ gong added at
the end — may be Chinese, but the poem is pure Rexroth. Realizing this, the
closing lines “If you approach / Quietly and imitate their / Voices, you can
converse all day / With the tree frogs who live there” take on a more
immediate meaning. The tree frogs are indeed ancient Chinese poets, and
despite the decay of their world, Rexroth is able, through quiet study and
imitation— n ot to mention translation—to communicate with this classical
tradition. 

---

Perhaps Kenneth Rexroth’s most often quoted, while most unexamined, sentence
is, “Tu Fu has been without question the major influence on my own poetry”. 
[Kenneth Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel, 1966, p.319]
Despite this sentence’s prevalence in Rexroth studies, where it usually
proves Rexroth to be a multiculturalist and wide reader, the extent to which
Rexroth’s poetry was shaped by his reading of Du Fu is generally
underexamined, perhaps because it remains so nebulous a topic. Nevertheless,
significant scholarship has been done on Rexroth’s translations, particularly
of Du Fu. Steve Bradbury, contributing to a special Rexroth section on John
Tranter’s online Jacket Magazine, reads his translations of Du Fu in terms of
the context of Rexroth’s life during the 1940s; Ling Chung, who co-authored
Rexroth’s Women Poets of China and Li Ch’ing-chao: Complete Poems, has also
examined the poet’s translations, interrogating his versions for their
fidelities and liberties.

My paper will present an examination of Rexroth’s imitation of the
two poets Du Fu and Li Qingzhao, working its way towards an understanding of
how Rexroth’s translations of these poets create a context through which
readers can, in turn, better communicate with the whole of Rexroth’s poetry

In Classics Revisited, Rexroth calls Du Fu’s 
	a poetry of reverie, comparable to Leopardi’s “L’Infinito,” which
	might well be a translation from the Chinese, or the better sonnets
	of Wordsworth. This kind of elegiac reverie has become the principal
	form of modern poetry, as poetry has ceased to be a public art and
	has become, as Whitehead said of religion, “What man does with his
	aloneness.”  13

Here is Rexroth’s “I Pass the night at General Headquarters”, poem XXVI in One
Hundred Poems:

	A clear night in harvest time.
	In the courtyard at headquarters
	The wu-tung trees grow cold.
	In the city by the river
	I wake alone by a guttering
	Candle. All night long bugle
	Calls disturb my thoughts. The splendor
	Of the moonlight floods the sky.
	Who bothers to look at it?
	Whirlwinds of dust, I cannot write.
	The frontier pass is unguarded.
	It is dangerous to travel.
	Ten years of wandering, sick at heart.
	I perch here like a bird on a
	Twig, thankful for a moment’s peace.

An affecting poem, it creates a storm between the warm front of the natural
world and the cold front of the mind’s interior. Never settled, the natural
world switches from the “clear night in harvest time” to the cold wutong
[paulownia] trees, from the “splendor / of the moonlight” to the “Whirlwinds
of dust”. The agitation in nature exacerbates the speaker’s anxiety, though
another tension exists in the lack of clear cause-and-effect
relationships. “I wake alone by a guttering / Candle”, he says, not revealing
if the candle’s flicker woke him. And though he complains, “Whirlwinds of
dust, I cannot write”, the reader cannot be sure if the dust storm keeps him
from writing, or if they are merely coincident. In the end, the poem offers
an uneasy respite: “a moment’s peace” made unstable by the verb perch and the
breakable noun twig.

“I Pass the night at General Headquarters” follows nearly every move that Du
Fu’s original makes. Nonetheless, a closer look at the original will reveal
much about Rexroth’s task as a translator. I quote Du Fu’s original, with my
word-by-word meaning below:

			reside tent
	clear autumn army tents well paulownia cold
	alone reside river city candle dwindle
	whole night horn sound tragic self language
	mid- sky moon color good who see
	wind dust delay voice letter end
	border posts desolate to move road difficult
	already endure wander ten year stuff
	force mobile perch one branch to settle
	already endure wander ten year stuff
	force mobile perch one branch to settle

The basic movement of Du Fu’s original poem is replicated in Rexroth’s
translation, but his deviations are obvious and significant. Du Fu’s line
begins with a simple “clear autumn”, which becomes “A clear night in
harvest time” in Rexroth’s version. The speaker of Rexroth’s poem wakes
besides a “guttering candle”, which is a poetic overstatement compared to Du
Fu’s more austere “the candles have gotten shorter”, with no mention of
waking. And rather than “disturbing my thoughts”, the bugle calls of Du Fu’s
poem talk to themselves—or, conversely, the persona talks to himself amidst
bugle calls—emphasizing the inner/outer tension I mentioned above. Rexroth
gets furthest from Du Fu’s original in the next couplet, where what in
American verse becomes a grandiose “The splendor / Of the moonlight floods
the sky. / Who bothers to look at it?” out of a simple—even weak -
“In the middle of the sky the moon is nice, but who’s looking?” Du Fu’s plain
adjective ད “nice” or “fair” is not accidental; instead, it proves the point
of its language, namely, that no one is bothering to look up at the moon long
enough to be moved to describe it well. If Du Fu had wanted to write about
“the splendor of the moonlight flooding the sky”, he could have. Instead, he
picked one of the most powerless words in Chinese, as if to demonstrate that
the moon, too, is powerless.

The next line, which Rexroth makes “Whirlwinds of dust, I cannot write”, also
indulges in misinterpretation. The winds and dust of Du Fu’s poem—here
associated with the battle—are responsible for cutting off the speaker’s
contact with the rest of the world. In Rexroth’s version, however, not only
is the cause-and-effect relationship downplayed, but the act of writing is
different, too. Du Fu talks of “news and mail”; Rexroth talks of being
unable to write, implying poetry more than a letter home. His translation
extends beyond the reach of Du Fu’s Chinese, taking words that indicate nouns
and making words that indicate concepts. In Du Fu’s next two lines Rexroth
turns “difficult” into “dangerous”, then invents “sick at heart” out of ᖡ
“endure”, likely because of an interpretation of the character being composed
of a blade ߗ on top of a heart ᖗ.

And yet Rexroth’s most interesting piece of poetic creation comes in his last
two lines, in which Du Fu’s ᔋ⿏Ệᙃϔᵱᅝ “Forced to move, I perch, settling on
one branch” inspires him to “I perch here like a bird on a / Twig, thankful
for a moment’s peace.” As is evident, “like a bird” and “thankful” are
Rexroth’s efforts alone, owing little to Du Fu.  The phrases clarify the
image, where “perch” alone might not be strong enough to give the English
reader the jittery quality of the poem’s conclusion, and where “thankful”
sounds an ironic note, pointing to the desperation of the situation. But the
most telling of Rexroth’s decisions is to translate the last word ᅝ as
“peace”. To be sure, ᅝ does mean peace. But depending on context, it can
also mean “where” or, most aptly in this poem, “to settle”, or even “to dwell
in”. Here Rexroth doesn’t change the meaning so much as he changes the
emphasis. The main point of Du Fu’s line is intact, but the subtleties have
changed with the weight of Rexroth’s “peace”.

The result is a poem written by a poet whose persona is shaped by Rexroth’s.
Rather than Du Fu whole, we get Du Fu by Rexroth. The result is, for all
Rexroth’s own multitudes, somewhat expurgated. For instance, when Stephen
Owen, America’s pre-eminent scholar of Tang poetry, describes Du Fu, he is
enthusiastic:

     Tu Fu was the master stylist of regulated verse, the poet of social
     protest, the confessional poet, the playful and casual wit, the
     panegyricist of the imperial order, the poet of everyday life, the poet
     of the visionary imagination. He was the poet who used colloquial and
     informal expressions with greater freedom than any of his
     contemporaries; he was the poet who experimented most boldly with
     densely artificial poetic diction; he was the most learned poet in
     recondite allusion and a sense of the historicity of language.


Compare this with Rexroth’s Du Fu:

     His poetry is saturated with the exile’s nostalgia and the abiding sense
     of the pathos of glory and power. In addition, he shares with Baudelaire
     and Sappho, his only competitors in the West, an exceptionally
     exacerbated sensibility, acute past belief. You feel that Tu Fu brings
     to each poetic situation, each experienced complex of sensations and
     values, a completely open nervous system. Out of this comes the choice
     of imagery—so poignant, so startling, and yet seemingly so
     ordinary. Later generations of Chinese poets would turn these piercing,
     uncanny commonplaces into formulas, but in Tu Fu they are entirely
     fresh, newborn equations of the conscience, and they survive all but the
     most vulgar translations.  16 Rexroth’s translations are anything b

Rexroth’s translations are anything but vulgar, but they do present Du Fu the
way he later writes Du Fu to be: the focus is less on Owen’s breadth of
styles but rather on a unity of sensibility, as individual style is what
often gets lost in translation—particularly Rexroth’s translations—and
sensibility can lead Rexroth to say “He has made me a better man, a more
sensitive perceiving organism, as well as, I hope, a better poet”.

Rexroth’s use of Du Fu for his own ends, however, is not incongruous with the
way Du Fu was used by later Chinese poets, as Stephen Owen helps us
understand: Tu Fu assimilated all that preceded him and, in doing so, changed
his sources irrevocably. The variety of Tu Fu’s work became a quarry from
which later poets drew isolated aspects and developed them in contradictory
directions. Indeed,

	one of the commonplaces of Tu Fu criticism was to list which famous
	later poet developed his own style out of which aspect of Tu Fu’s
	work. Each age found in Tu Fu’s poetry what they were seeking: an
	unrivalled mastery of stylistic invention, an authentic personal
	“history” of a period, the free exercise of the creative imagination,
	the voice of the moral man exposing social injustice.

In the end, Rexroth may in fact be interacting with the tradition of
classical Chinese poetry just as much as his persona speaks to the tree frogs
in Wang Hung Kung’s “In the Mountain Village”