Psalm Poems (141)

After Psalm 141

What I have –

accept it.

Accept it when I say I need.

I have no incense,

no fragrant offerings.

What burns of me is a heart

close to your face.

And if my hands are empty,

I offer emptiness.

Hear in the sound of my lips

a searching,

a rehearsing of your name.

Ready for the grave that they were made for

my bones already are.

See how my eyes remain:

open, always on you.

--Lloyd Haft

Psalm Poems (23)

(1) After Psalm 23 [Oegstgeest version]

Who sees, knows me,

feels my failing,

nears in my need.

Through thickets all around me

whispers his peace.

Wherever I walk, the river mirrors him,

clear with his calm.

I see I’m one of his.

Where I walk is all a valley

and it’s deep with death.

But death’s no deeper than you go with me,

know with me.

Whatever is ahead, with you

I’ll know that it is mine.

The heckler that’s with me here

can never turn your face away

from me. And where I go, I’ll go

in light and I’ll be seen.

My going is a dwelling

and I’m in it with Who sees forever.

(2) After Psalm 23 [Neihu version]

Who wants me knows

wherever I am wanting.

I walk beside the water

and it mirrors Whose light.

Wind among the grasses:

Whose whispering.

Who brings me through:

through all the rocks of truth

Who knows my name.

Though the valley all around me here

dies as I pass,

I fear no end:

no end of being known.

Your knowing knows in mine,

goes where I am going.

Wherever I will go

with you it’s home.

The heckler, who is with me too,

can never hinder you:

your hands: they hold my head up

and the cup to my lips.

Surely I will walk in light

and goodness all my days:

for where I live’s the dwelling

of Who wants me and Who knows.

--Lloyd Haft

What’s in a Transcribed Name – Part Four

(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. Even if I had, at that time I probably would not even have glanced at the Li Po volume. Previous English versions of his poems had never given me the feeling that he was an interesting poet, perhaps even a poet at all in the modern Western sense. I had the impression he was at most a blithe versificator, presenting the kind of philosophy that appeals to people who prefer their philosophy in small easy doses. As a veteran reader of T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Rilke, I thought Li Po lacked a certain quality of ‘heaviness’ that every ‘serious’ poet should have. In short, for me personally in those days, he was a perfect example of a poet who is distorted and ruined in a reader’s mind by a prevailing style of translation. (Let me add here that, astounding as it may seem, I always prefer to read classical Chinese poetry in translation. Somehow it only becomes ‘poetry’ for me at the moment when I can somehow imagine it in one of the languages I feel I can ‘really’ understand: English or Dutch. The factors that go into this are so complex that I will defer discussion for the moment. One thing I can say at this point is that reading, say, Tang-dynasty poems through such a phonologically impoverished medium as the modern Mandarin pronunciation of the text – which practically all of us sinologists do – puts the poem just about as far away from me as a translation would...)

        In the summer of 1998, at the bookselling section of a mammoth Oriental studies conference in Holland, I chanced upon Hinton’s Meng Chiao collection, picked it up, and opened it. At that moment, as a Buddhist might say, all Necessary Conditions were ripe and came together, enabling me to undergo a  profound Cognitive Experience. Or in the beautiful words of Wallace Stevens in one of his letters, it was a ‘powerful integration of the imagination.’ I had never imagined that Chinese poetry could sound so much like poetry! (This prejudice was probably what one of my favorite American poets, Robinson Jeffers, meant when he wrote in his poem ‘On an Anthology of Chinese Poems’: ‘Beautiful the hanging cliff and the wind-thrown cedars, but they have no weight.’) I was already familiar with Meng Chiao from Owen’s volume The Poetry of Meng Chiao and Han Yü, which had come out in 1975. But somehow in 1998, reading Meng’s poems as re-spoken by Hinton, I ‘heard’ something that I had not heard before.

        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 have very little use for abstractions, and when poetry, under the influence of the higher education, becomes abstract, it bores them.’

         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 20^th century, in spelling the names of Chinese poets in what was by then the ‘anachronistic’ Wade-Giles transcription?

[to be continued]

---

[1] Arthur Cooper, Li Po and Tu Fu, Penguin 1973, p. 80.

[2] I called it this in my article ‘A New Look at Classical Chinese Poetry in Translation: Thoughts on Form, Structure, and Expression,’ in Translation Quarterly [Hong Kong] No. 20 (2001), pp. 14-76. Quote from p. 33.

Naar Psalm 139

Ziende, u bent mij aangegaan.

Mijn staan en mijn opstaan

worden uw weten,

u gaat mij na:

de straat die ik bega,

de plaats waar ik

zal liggen in uw verte.

De baan van mijn gaan,

kring van mijn komen

sluit in uw openend oog:

al mijn wegen

zult u vatten.

Hoe vreemd ook het woord

dat over mijn lippen wandelt,

het wordt uw zeggen.

U omvangt mij

van voren, van achter,

waar mijn hand raakt

bent u

in wonderlijke kennis

van mij die verder ligt.

Waar zou ik ontkomen

aan ontmoeting? aan 't altoos

wijder vallen van ons aangezicht?

Zou ik de hemel

beklimmen: bent u.

koos ik tot rustplaats

de hel: bent u.

Nam ik de dageraadsvleugels,

huisde ik over de zee:

nog die hand.

Riep ik de duisternis

over mij af,

dan was ook mijn duisternis

uw licht

dat niet schrikt voor duister.

Mijn nieren immers hangen

niet los van uw nagaan,

u was in de buik van mijn moeder

mede verborgen.

Ben ik uit uw vrees, uw

verwondering ontstaan?

mijn ziel onder uw werking

geworden nader wonder,

verst kennende?

't Is u lang niet onbekend

waarom ik eigenaardig

gewrocht werd in ondersten

en breuken uwer aarde.

Mijn botten immers blinken

als u ze ziet:

tekens in uw schrift,

die klinken naar de mate

van uw lezen.

Onschatbaar zijn mij dan ook

uw gedachten naar mij!

Wat zij samen uitmaken.

Naar mijn telling zijn zij

menigte, meer dan het zand der zeeën:

en als wij wakker worden

zijn zij van ons beiden.

--Lloyd Haft (uit De Psalmen in de bewerking van Lloyd Haft, Querido 2003; herdruk Uitgeverij Vesuvius 2011)

Naar Psalm 23

Mij weet de ziende,

kent mijn gebreken.

Door velden van woekering

ritselt zijn vrede;

de stroom die hij meeziet

spiegelt zijn rust.

Langs rotsen als waarheden

leest hij mijn hart aan elkaar:

ik hoor bij hem.

Al ga ik door het dal

dat de dood overschaduwt,

ik vrees geen verwijdering:

want u weet mee;

in uw verlengde weet ik mij.

Bij u wordt dat

wat voor mij ligt

tot maal;

de hekelaar die bij mij is

belet uw aandacht niet; u houdt

mijn hoofd op:

de beker aan mijn lippen.

Waarlijk zal ik gaan

in licht en verbinding alle dagen

want waar ik leef, zal wonen

een ziende in eeuwigheid.

--Lloyd Haft (uit De Psalmen in de bewerking van Lloyd Haft, Querido 2003; herdruk Uitgeverij Vesuvius 2011)

Naar Psalm 10

Heb ik u verwijderd?

Gingen mijn gedachten u te ver?

Werd mijn hart u te warm

waar het brandde, woedde,

altijd u wilde?

Dacht u dat mijn hart

blij was als ik zei:

hij is er niet?

Gedachten had ik genoeg

en tijd om in te denken,

verdenken, vervloeken:

woorden die als kwijl mijn lippen beliepen.

Werd u voor mijn vrees bevreesd?

Maar al mijn gedachten waren

niets, zijn niets, doen niets!

Niet u bent bang maar ik!

ik die denk dat u niet bent!

Laat ik u niet meer denken:

doet nu u.

--Lloyd Haft (uit De Psalmen in de bewerking van Lloyd Haft, Querido 2003; herdruk Uitgeverij Vesuvius 2011)

What’s in a Transcribed Name – Part Three

(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 10)

In 1996, W. W. Norton and Co. published An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911, edited and translated by Stephen Owen. Any sinologist would immediately have recognized ‘1911’ as meaning ‘the beginning of the Republic of China.’ In other words, this is an anthology of the literature of the Chinese Empire. We always tell our students that that Empire was a very study-conscious and book-reading if not book-ridden realm; that the Scholar was considered the ideal type of person, that officials had to pass examinations on the Classics before they could attain to public office, and so on. Whether or not all those things are completely realistic, it is true that in traditional China, just as in present-day China, the government kept an eye on what people were reading. The ‘canon’ of literature was considered a repository of sources from which readers would learn virtues which would help them to be, in my own forefathers’ phrase, responsible members of society.

        The idea that there was more or less a ‘canon’ was part of this – a body of recognized, approved texts which an ‘educated person’ could be expected to have read. Some of the things which very many educated and uneducated people actually did read, including the most famous novels, did not belong to this ‘canon.’ In Owen’s introduction, he says the selection he has made does not correspond to a traditional notion of ‘canon,’ but neither is it intended as a ‘counter-canon’ of previously suppressed or ignored texts. It is, he says with all due caution, ‘a version of a tradition.’ (I will get back in a following installment to the importance of selection as such in our ‘transcription,’ literally our ‘over-writing’ of Chinese things.)

        Owen’s fascinating anthology goes all the way back to ancient texts, but in transcribing Chinese words and names, he uses the state-of-the-art pinyin transcription. On the other hand...does he really? The oldest poems he translates are from the Classic of Poetry (i.e. the Shijing 詩經, which an earlier generation of translators called the Book of Odes). The first line of the first poem in that Classic, Owen translates as

The fishhawks sing gwan gwan

Here, gwan gwan is supposed to represent the sound made by the birds. In other words, it is a meaningless representation of sound. But it is not the only spelling that could have been used to represent that sound. In the Chinese text, this expression is written 關關, a reduplication of the word meaning ‘to shut’ or ‘to close,’ which in pinyin is written guan.

        Did Owen in this case deliberately deviate from what would have been the normal pinyin spelling in order to avoid any suggestion of a ‘semantic’ meaning in this expression? I don’t know, but it would have been a reasonable move to make, considering that many other translators and interpreters have been only too eager to get ‘sense out of sound’ in this line. The great Nestor and Patriarch of American translators from Chinese poetry, Ezra Pound, translated this line

‘Hid! Hid!’ the fish-hawk saith,

For years and decades, I assumed this ‘hid’ was supposed to be onomatopoeic: just sound, folks, no sense. (I am not enough of a bird-watcher to know whether ‘hid’ is plausible as a rendering of the sound those birds make, but in the school of aesthetics I was brought up in, that makes no difference: we are dealing here with poetry, and poetry is not obligated to be ‘realistic.’) About a year ago now, I was surprised to read in Akiko Miyake’s Ezra Pound and the Mysteries of Love that Pound undoubtedly chose ‘hid’ exactly because it is a past participle of the verb ‘hide’: for Pound, there was something of supreme value ‘hid’ (i.e. guan: ‘shut away’) in the waters of the river.[1] This would fit in with Pound’s tendency, in Miyake’s words (p. 54), to ‘read Chinese nature poems as contemplative literature.’

        Getting back to Owen’s anthology, and skipping from the most ancient texts to the Tang Dynasty (618-906), we naturally turn to his translations of one of the very most famous Chinese poets, whose name is...but wait! How shall we write his name?

        Needless to say, I am talking about 李白. In English, there is a long tradition of writing his name (in Wade-Giles) as Li Po. In pinyin – and this is how Owen writes it – it appears as Li Bo. This is impeccable pinyin. But, at least in my experience, no real live native Chinese speaker ever pronounces it that way. What we actually hear is always Li Bai. True enough, in older dictionaries we read that the character 白, though it is normally pronounced ‘bai,’ has a ‘Classical’ or ‘reading’ pronunciation which is ‘bo.’ Evidently a schoolmasters’ tradition got started way-back-when, of thinking a famous poet like Li, however lowbrow his poems, was too venerable to have a normally pronounceable name.

        Personally, I think the spelling ‘Li Bo’ is, as an earlier generation of British writers might have said, ‘fish nor fowl.’ In a transcription purporting to be the most present-day one, it does not actually represent anybody’s present-day pronunciation. Yet it also cannot claim to approximate the way the name must have sounded back in the Tang Dynasty, which I believe must have been something like ‘Lee Buck.’ (I write it that way to avoid having to type the transcription of ‘the language of Ch’ang-an around 600 A.D.’ as reconstructed in Karlgren’s Grammata Serica Recensa, which in this case would be Lji: B’ɒk.)[2] In other words, ‘Li Bo’ has about the same status as gwan gwan: it is an attempt to use our twenty-six letters to represent an imaginary sound that falls, almost as far as the cry of a water-bird, outside the normal scope of human vocables as such.[3]

        But couldn’t ‘Li Bo’ still be justified on the grounds that it is only a slight modernizing adjustment of ‘our’ traditional ‘Li Po’? Sorry, no! ‘Li Po’ in itself is a deviation, at least from what I regard as the true ‘canon.’ Since Ezra Pound worked on Li’s poems in a Japanese-flavored context, he himself wrote the poet’s name not as Li Bo, not as Li Po, not as Lji: B’ɒk, not as Lee Buck, but as...Rihaku.

        Nevertheless, the ‘Li Po’ lineage has been carried on, and carried on very well and memorably, by another translator, David Hinton.

[to be continued]

---

[1] Akiko Miyake, Ezra Pound and the Mysteries of Love: A Plan for the Cantos, Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. For this poem see page 218. Link: http://books.google.com/books?id=B7r7gL_YGTUC&pg=PA218&lpg=PA218&dq=fish-hawk+saith+isle&source=bl&ots=fncFqj-ep2&sig=I-za2qsOyP_AbJDrSoqNGKpt-LM&hl=zh-TW&ei=Oe-8TcSTI8KZOr_TiNUF&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=fish-hawk%20saith%20isle&f=false

[2] Bernhard Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1964. And yes, I am fully aware that Karlgren’s reconstructions are not the most up-to-date.

[3] Nothing in this paragraph or this essay should be construed as meaning that I believe, have ever for even three seconds in my life believed, or hope someday to believe that written language is, should be, can be, could be, ever has been, or ever shall be a mere ‘reflection’ of spoken.