Translator’s Note

Classical Chinese poetry is written in the context and continuum of China’s actual history, and its translation into English and European languages should take stock of this historical backdrop. Often, classical Chinese verse is rendered ahistorical in English, in a transcendent aesthetics located in orientalist images of Eastern mysticism. This goes together with how the High Tang genre of the “lüshi” (律诗) or “regulated verse form” and its shortened version the “jueju” (绝句) or “cut-off line quatrain” has monopolized what classical Chinese poetry is perceived to be: short, succinct, structured, corresponding coincidentally to images of austere oriental ascetics. This is a monopoly of form at the expense of myriad other modes and methods of prosody: the “ci-fu” (辞赋) rhapsody, the “yuefu” (乐府) folk song, the “gexing” (歌行) song and its shortened version the “duan gexing” (短歌行) short song, and the “ci” (短歌行) musical lyrics, etc. In these translations, I work against such a limited imagination of formal possibilities by presenting a selection of poems in their full historical backdrop and formal diversity.

The Han dynasty eunuch-musician Li Yannian’s song was first performed with music at the court of Liu Che (156-87 BC), Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty. The song epitomized a popular classical Chinese poetic motif concerning the fatal dangers of female beauty, eerily echoing Helen of Troy’s journey through the Western tradition. Not incidentally, I first thought of translating Li Yannian’s Song when reading Christopher Marlowe’s lines in Doctor Faustus: “Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,/ And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” Classical Chinese poets cannot and do not reference Greece, nor probably should they, but they have their own Greece in the form of their own history, and it is precisely in the dynamics of this history that Chinese poetry finds the locus for its formal diversity.

The High Tang (712-755 AD) era  saw the birth of China’s three greatest poets – Wang Wei (699-761 AD), Li Bai (701-762 AD), and Du Fu (712-770 AD). The emperor Li Longji , a poet and musician himself, composed the poem, “Passing Zou and Lu Offering Sacrifices to Confucius and a Eulogy”, among many others. His poem is a testament to this centrality of Confucianism in Chinese culture – even for a dynasty of titularly Daoist emperors.

The major challenge of translating Li Longji’s poem is how to render a classical reference in its third couplet, which if rendered literally reads: “Sighing over (not sighting) a fenghuang bird (you) regret (your) fate’s misfortune,/ Sorrowing over a qilin beast’s capture (you) resent the (righteous) way (the Dao, or the Tao)’s exhaustion.” In a literal English translation, this couplet does not make sense at all, as it directly references a specific cultural source – the life and times of Confucius, as is recorded in two canonical texts of the Confucian tradition: the Analects and Zuo Qiuming’s Commentaries of the Spring and Autumn Annals – which have not been incorporated into the common depository of knowledge and references of the English and European tradition. Usually translated as “phoenix”, a fenghuang bird is a magical animal, nonexistent in reality of course, who cannot however be reborn from fire, a difference frequently overlooked by oriental usages of its imagery to suggest a sense of imagined Chineseness or Chinoiseries aesthetic. Conscious of how different a fenghuang is from a phoenix, I simply cannot render it anyway else than “fenghuang”, yet the alienness of this word in English threatens to weaken the poem’s short and succinct concision, the main aesthetic attribute of its genre.

The texts mentioned above, the Analects and Zuo Qiuming’s Commentaries of the Spring and Autumn Annals, provide various accounts of Confucius’ understanding and engagement with the fenghuang, as well as another mythical beast – the Qilin. It is impossible to translate all the history and meaning provided by these texts into a short couplet simultaneous effective as poetry in English. Therefore I have decided against the analytic, explicative impulse of the academic translator, in favor of the synthetic, evocative instinct of the artistic translator, the translator as creator, by directly transposing the referenced signified of these two lines, instead of their referential signifier, into an English that is sufficiently concise and economic to convey their original lyrical capacity: “No sight of fortune, fate/ Bring but forebodings new.”

Juxtaposed with the emperor’s Confucian eulogy, I offer the translation of two very different poems by two major poets: Li Bai and Du Fu, the two most central names in China’s literary canon. In the original of these two poems, the form differs and diverges so much from the neatly regulated form of the emperor’s eulogy that it opens up immediately to the reader an imagination landscape far richer than what orthodox style can possibly prescribe. Of the two poems, one is a short “duan gexing” song by Li Bai, concerning the popular theme of time, mortality, and “carpe diem” philosophy, the other is a medium-length “gexing” song by Du Fu, concerning the traumatic aftermath of the An Lushan rebellion, the horrendous civil war that ended Li Longji’s flourishing reign and sent the Tang dynasty into permanent decline. Written in a style of antique simplicity – the “gexing” genre has its origins in Han dynasty singsong embodied by Li Yannian’s song – these poems freely eschew the strictures of metrical harmony and logographic parallelism, aiming for the illusion of a primeval affective power located in their imitation of an “antique aesthetic” (for Li Bai and Du Fu, the Han dynasty was antiquity). The poems show us how the masters of classical Chinese poetry frequently (and predominantly) wrote in forms that did not belong to the formal “mainstream” of their time. In translating the two poems, therefore, I have chosen to convey this sense of diversity and divergence in form by seeking to transpose them into an array of regular and irregular forms in English.

Li Bai’s “Song of Briefness” is not his best work, neither his most known – I chose to translated it nonetheless, as I believe it to be his best piece in terms of translatability: the quality of an original to force its foreignness as a transformative artistic influence into the target language of its translation (Benjamin 1923).  This poem invokes a rich array of classical Chinese cosmological and mythological references through its short, succinct, and supple text, to support its ideas about the transience of the temporal, and the all too human desire to live and thrive against time.  Li Bai seemingly eschews the specificity of history and of the historical, in basing his rich string of references not upon the many recorded moments of China’s real past, but instead in the transcendent, transtemporal, transhistorical theogony and cosmology of Daoism. This style of writing constitutes a feverous act of desire for the transcendent that, nonetheless, nevertheless, rests historically upon the historical moment of the poet’s writing: the High Tang age, the height of the Chinese empire.         In a literal translation, the poem references in its third couplet the Daoist deity Ma Gu, the goddess of immortal youth and longevity. “Ma” is the Chinese word for “hemp”, suggesting the black hair of youth, although in this case it is actually a surname. “Gu” is one of many Chinese words for “woman”, today it suggests an aunt, back in the past it referred to a maiden. “Ma Gu” can thus, considering its connotations, be “the Ma maiden”, “Ms. Ma”, or “Lady Ma”, each choice evidently conveying a different emphasis in meaning. In the couplet, Ma Gu lets the hair at her temples loose, and in their act of descendance, her hair ages, the locks turning white, half of them already becoming frostlike, in a complete contradiction to Ma Gu’s immortality and longevity.  What does this mean? This image of the immediate aging of an immortal succeeds the first and second couplets, where the speaker sighs over the brevity of day, the bitter transience of a century, the vastness of the skies, and aeon-upon-aeon long temporal width of the universe (one cannot help wonder if Li Bai had intuited space-time a thousand years before modern physics). In the context of a complaint over the inevitability of time intersected with the infinity of space, Li Bai gives us the image of an immortal goddess aging in a span of seconds. To convey this highly imaginative hyperbolic sense of time, I have chosen to render “Ma Gu” figuratively as “a black-haired fairy”, eschewing the specific for the universal, with “black-haired” connoting youth, and “fairy” connoting immortality. In the same capacity, I chose to cluster the “Tian Gong” (literally “Celestial Lord”) and “Yu Nü” (literally “Jade Lady”) who meet in the fourth couplet to “laugh out loud for a hundred billion scenes”, into the short and succinct “celestial gods”, whose play emits laugher echoing for “a hundred million epochs”. In contrast to the evanescence of Ma Gu’s immortal youth and longevity, the joy the Celestial Lord shares with the Jade Lady is to last, hyperbolically, for the longest length of time imaginable or unimaginable. In conveying this sense of elaborate and expansive time and space (or space-time), I believe it is unnecessary to stick to the strictures of a word-for-word translation. The speed and power of Li Bai’s poem cannot be sufficiently captured or conveyed in a mechanical transliteration of the culturally context-dependent words like “Ma Gu”, “Tian Gong”, or “Yu Nü”. The transcendence of Li Bai’s verse itself calls for a transcendent translation.

The Tang dynasty’s imperial desire, and dream, of transcending the temporality of history would be shattered in the cruelest way imaginable towards the end of Li Bai’s life, and right in the middle of Du Fu’s journey through life, in the year 755 AD. In his middle-age masterpiece “Recall the Glorious Past”,  Du Fu recalls the height of Emperor Li Longji’s reign, its imperial splendors, and turns briskly to the An Lushan Rebellion – the massive 8-year civil war that brough history back in the most brutal manner – with one of the most canonically sublime couplets in the Chinese poetic tradition, worth quoting in its original: “洛阳宫殿烧焚尽，宗庙新除狐兔穴。” In a literal translation, this couplet reads “Luoyang palaces burnt away, ancestral temples newly removed of fox and rabbit dens”, an awkward, bulky, clumsy sentence, incapable of capturing and conveying any of its original’s historically contextualized sense of brutality, possessing no poetry in a formalistic fashion. The power of the original coheres in its evocation of a Chinese sense of history: Luoyang, one of the two capitals of the Tang empire, had served as China’s capital since the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties, and was made one of the two capitals of the Zhou dynasty in the 11th century.  As the center of Chinese civilization, he destruction of Luoyang, serves as an image of the destruction of civilization itself, functioning as an allegory for the brutal effacing power of history. How to translate such a specific and impactful image conveyed in a single word? In the end, I settled upon an adequately satisfactory simplification: “Capital palaces burnt to dust,/ Temples now home to wild hare and fox.” My hope is that, the reader can find the additional sense of this couplet outside of it, by reading this line and its poem in the wider context of Chinese history.

Beyond this canonically important couplet, Du Fu’s poem is mostly written in the pre-Tang form of the “gexing” or “singsong” genre, a genre that has its origins in folksong, but had since the Han dynasty (202 BC - 220 AD) been appropriated by learned poets to their own ends. In imitating and wholesale appropriating this singsong genre to their own writings,  poets of the pre-Tang and early Tang era (618-712 AD) managed to reinvent the style of Chinese poetry of their times into a simple, straightforward, direct and powerful aesthetic of “xiongjian” (“雄健”, literally “masculinity and health” or “masculine health”) that eschewed too much rhetorical flourish. This was the poetry of a rising people, a youthful and vigorous nation thirsty for the hard work of empire. Fancy formal regulations such as metrical harmony and syntactical parallelism had no place here. Ironically, however, Du Fu re-appropriates this reimagined style of antique simplicity to narrate and muse upon the complex, convoluted, confusing event that is the fall of empire and the end of “masculinity and health” – the An Lushan Rebellion. China would go into a thousand-year long stage of inward-looking contraction, first reorganizing itself into the peaceful and placid Song dynasty, a dynasty more focused on business and culture instead of military glory, then being conquered, either in part or in whole, successively by the Khitans, the Jurchens, the Mongols, and the Manchus.

Concluding this selection is a “five-character jueju” by Yuan Zhen, a poet born after the An Lushan Rebellion, in the long century of slow decline known as the “Middle Tang”, an era where the inevitability of decay and effacement became popular themes. Yuan Zhen’s short, succinct “Travel Palace” addresses the ruins of one of Emperor Xuanzong’s palace with the polished compactness and evocative poetics of the standard regulated verse form, conforming to an orthodox aesthetics prizing concision over elaboration. Yet the poem diverges subtly from this paradigm by directly invoking the particulars of history in its last line: “White-haired maids alive,/ Idly talk of Xuanzong”. The image here is one of aged palace handmaids, assumably retired, sitting idly by the ruins of a palace they had once worked in, discussing anecdotes of a past emperor now long dead. Such a scene presents the ultimate challenge to a translator: how to translate the historical, across different cultural traditions? An average Western reader would be confused, if not outright bored, by the opaque reference in which this poem explicitly grounds its poetics of the historical. Only a Chinese reader – any well-educated Chinese reader, really – would immediately find this last line to be intensely moving. The compactness of the regulated verse form exacerbates this transcultural challenge. My solution is simple: I give the historical context by situating the poem in the context of its history – by placing Li Longji, Li Bai, and Du Fu’s poems in precedence that of Yuan Zhen’s, I allow them to form, together in their formal diversity, a contextualized continuum of the historical.