(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 11)
In the same year as Owen’s anthology (1996), two books of translated Chinese poems appeared with David Hinton as translator: The Selected Poems of Li Po and The Late Poems of Meng Chiao. Owing to the vagaries of the transatlantic book market, I did not immediately see either of them at our institute in Leiden
In the summer of 1998, at the bookselling section of a mammoth Oriental studies conference in Holland
Why? There can be many reasons for such a sudden re-appreciation of something supposedly already known. For one thing, the sheer passage of twenty years makes, or should make, a vast difference in the ‘settings’ of one’s consciousness. And in my own case, since Chinese poetry was my ‘field’ professionally, in those twenty years I had been constantly confronting additional examples, perhaps also learning to adjust my own expectations so that I knew I was not going to suddenly discover a Chinese Rilke or a Chinese Wallace Stevens. Another thing was that in 1998 in my personal life I had been going through ‘a bad patch’ for some time and was perhaps especially receptive to poetry that was the literary equivalent of an adagio by Shostakovich.
In any case, Meng spoke to me through Hinton and I heard him. I checked out the originals from our library and started doing some comparing. Although I perceived Hinton’s overall sound as unusual and fresh – his diction and syntax were more charged, more intense than the rather ‘flat’ sound which so many translations had had since the days of Arthur Waley – it turned out that he did not achieve this more ‘electrified’ tone by wildly abandoning the original and letting his own mind run free. If he had been a student in one of my courses, I certainly would not have told him there was anything ‘invalid’ about the meanings he saw, or heard, or brought out, in the Chinese texts. He was not sinning against philology. He was simply refusing to follow one particular tradition – namely, the tradition that we as English readers had been conditioned into, of thinking that Chinese poems, if translated well, must sound ‘easier’ and less sophisticated than our own.
Arthur Waley himself had not been averse to encouraging that view. In the introduction which he wrote for the new edition (1962) of his One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, he recalled how his book, originally published in 1918, had continued to find readers over many decades and had been reprinted many times. He sought the reason for this in the way his translations appealed to ‘people who do not ordinarily read poetry.’ He pointed out that people like ‘young girl typists and clerks’ had often asked him to sign their copies; they often said that before reading his book, they had always supposed poetry was something ‘special and difficult.’ They found his Chinese poems a great relief, since they were mostly about ‘the concrete and particular.’ He went on to say that ‘ordinary people in England
Waley’s basic technique was to translate Chinese verse into rhythmically structured prose. This prose-like or prosaic quality gave Waley’s texts what I have called a ‘flat’ sound; another famous translator, Arthur Cooper, said it amounted to ‘spilling away much of the energy in the Chinese lines...in the spirit of “quietism” which was the special attraction of the Chinese mind to him, but very much in his own personal notion of it.’[1]
I was especially glad to read that Cooper’s reaction to Waley’s translations was similar to my own because Cooper was a ‘real’ Englishman, a native speaker of what Continental Europeans call ‘English’ and I would call ‘British English.’ Otherwise I would have been haunted by a remark I once read somewhere in a letter by Raymond Chandler: that Americans [like me – L.H.] often perceive British writing as rhythmically insipid because they cannot imagine how it would sound if read aloud by a British speaker. (Recall the modern reader of ‘standard’ Mandarin, who cannot imagine how Lee Buck’s verses would have sounded back in the Tang Dynasty!)
In any event, I was immediately fascinated by Hinton’s ‘frenetic, tense phrasing,’[2] though I wondered if it would be suitable to poetry more in the mainstream than Meng Chiao’s. How, for example, would he handle a poet like Arthur Waley’s favorite Po Chü-i (in pinyin Bo Juyi or, as I prefer, Bai Juyi), whose poems had always sounded ‘flat’ to me in any translation at all, and who was supposed to have submitted his texts to an uneducated old woman (the equivalent of Waley’s ‘young girl typists’?) and revised any passages she could not immediately understand?
A few years later I got the answer. Soon after it came out (1999), I bought a copy of Hinton’s The Selected Poems of Po Chü-i. Hinton had not changed his technique or his aesthetic. He had not, so to say, turned himself down from 440 volts to 110 so as not to offend any of those ‘people who do not ordinarily read poetry.’ What he had done was simply to make an unusual selection from Bai Juyi’s poems. Where the prevailing image of ‘Po’ was certainly prosaic to say the least – and I suppose in many readers’ minds this was supposed to be something desirable, keeping us all safely away from anything that might be ‘special and difficult’ – Hinton deliberately selected a small percentage that could be so read as to have sophisticated overtones. In his introduction to the volume, Hinton frankly stated that on the whole, Po’s poetics ‘reverses the normal criterion for poetry, making poems that are simple and unaccomplished valued above those that push to extremes in shaping experience...Surprising insight comes to some of his poems and not to others, and...Po doesn’t choose among them. So there is a body of poems...plain and yet surprising and insightful. Even though there is a risk of misrepresenting Po Chü-i, it is primarily these poems that are presented in this book.’
In other words, he had evaded the problem of Po’s translatability (for him) by evading the main body of Po ’s poetry. (In this he had been less radical than one of my other favorite translators, A. C. Graham, whose Poems of the Late T’ang includes none of Po ’s poems at all.) But if Hinton was so innovative in many ways...then why did he persist, at the very end of the 20th century, in spelling the names of Chinese poets in what was by then the ‘anachronistic’ Wade-Giles transcription?
[to be continued]
