Great Mavericks of Chinese Poetry

(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 24)

Great Mavericks of Chinese Poetry

The above title for the following piece is, I realize, problematical. It raises questions: to begin with, aren’t all the ‘greats’ of poetry in some sense ‘mavericks’? No, at least not in China. In traditional Chinese culture, there is not this great assumption that the poet or artist must almost by definition be an Outsider. On the contrary, he or she is the model Insider. I have written a short piece on this called ‘On the “Revelations” of Art,’ which can be found in the March 2011 archive on this blog or at

http://lhaftblog.blogspot.nl/2011/03/on-revelations-of-art.html

        But more importantly, it might be normal to assume that the ‘greats’ of Chinese poetry, maverick or otherwise, are Chinese poets themselves. What I actually mean in this case is a couple of Western translators of Chinese poetry whom I consider great, but who for one reason or another are regarded by Western academics as mavericks, eccentrics, gate-crashers, unqualified fellow-travelers, or the like.

        I am referring to Ezra Pound and Johan W. Schotman. Pound (1885-1972) is of course one of the great 20^th-century American poets; he also produced a full translation of the ancient Chinese Shijing 詩經 or Book of Odes.[1] Schotman (1892-1976) is the Dutch translator of Sji Tsjing: Het klassieke Boek der Oden.[2]

        These two outstanding mid-twentieth-century translators have some curious points in common. One: they were both involved with psychiatry. Schotman was a medical doctor who for years practiced psychiatry; Pound was a psychiatric patient and actually wrote his version of the Odes while in a mental institution.

        Two: both produced their translations of the Odes within an almost unbelievably short span of time. More on this below.

        Three, but this is entirely personal: I do not hesitate to say that taken as a whole, the Odes versions of both are better poetry than their original poems, again taken as a whole. I don’t think many Dutch readers of Schotman’s original poetry would argue with me on this point, but it is of course very bold and brash of me to say that Pound’s ‘ancient Chinese’ poems are actually better than his lifework the Cantos.

        Or...is it really? As early as 1961, the critic George P. Elliott published an article evaluating Pound, I think quite fairly, from various points of view.[3] He said Pound had been ‘oversold,’ and that the Cantos could be seen as a ‘large, occasionally splendid, disintegrating bundle of poetry and mutter.’ He recommended reading a radically short selection.

        The thing that originally inspired me to sit down and write about Pound and Schotman was that I found Schotman being treated unduly as a maverick. Not long ago, there appeared an extensive piece in Dutch about the history of Chinese literary studies in The Netherlands. It mentions many translators including myself...but not Schotman. I was sufficiently upset by this to contact the author, politely asking him what had happened to Schotman. The answer was that Schotman was ‘perhaps more of an occasional translator.’ I can only guess that in this case ‘occasional’ means he translated only a single book, albeit one 483 pages long that is the only full Dutch translation of a perennially-quoted classic which the Chinese themselves regard as the fons et origo of their poetic tradition.

        I suspect the real reason is other and more banal. It is that Schotman committed the Twin Sins of (1) not holding an academic degree in Chinese studies and (2) not being affiliated with a university.[4]

        As for Pound, I cannot begin to summarize the wide-ranging factors that enter into any attempt at evaluating him. Like Schotman, he was not academically trained in Chinese. Unlike Schotman, he was already recognized as one of the poetic giants of his generation decades before his work on the Odes. Politically, his standing was and still is debated – he lived in Italy and supported the Axis during World War II.

There is much good background material on Pound. I have at hand the biographies by Noel Stock, Humphrey Carpenter, and A. David Moody, and I particularly hope Moody’s second volume will come out soon. Mary Paterson Cheadle’s Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations is an indispensable study of the specifically Chinese things. Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, though written in a tediously florid style, is also an excellent source of information on Pound and his writings including those based on Chinese sources.

        But confining our attention to Pound’s Confucian Odes when read and approached as poetry, I do not hesitate to say it is ‘great’ and my favorite among the author’s works.[5] It is the only version I have ever seen in English that I can take seriously as poetry. I think the necessity of working to the pre-existing frame of an ancient Chinese poem gave Pound a steadying counterweight to the manic brilliancies of his own mind. In most of his own Cantos there was no such guiding anchor.[6] The result was that the loyal reader – I am one of them – has to find, select, and treasure up limited passages in which the memorable high points are not drowned in what seems almost meaninglessly extended rambling.

Curiously, Carpenter says in his biography[7] that Pound’s version of the Odes was ‘made during 1949,’ which sounds as if the whole text must have been written inside a single year – phenomenally fast, I would say, for such good writing. (Carpenter does not share my enthusiasm for it; on the following page he says that although there are ‘many good passages,’ the ‘collection as a whole’ is ‘not the product of concentrated energy.’ I personally, as I have suggested, would rather apply that criticism to Pound’s original Cantos ‘as a whole.’)

        According to Schotman’s presentation of himself in Het Boek der Oden, the publication of his book in 1969 fulfilled the dream of more than half a lifetime. Proudly referring to his six years of residence in China, he relates how in the 1920s in Beijing he bought the Chinese classics in translations by Legge and Couvreur, resolving at an early stage to produce his own Dutch version of the Odes. He has ‘finally,’ he says, ‘after forty-six years, gotten around to it.’ Reviews in the Dutch media included one titled ‘Chinese “Bible” is Johan Schotman’s Lifework.’ In actual fact, according to a newspaper interview summary reproduced in Huussen’s biography,[8] most of the actual writing was done in a period of only thirteen months when Schotman was long since living in retirement in Holland. Speaking of ‘concentrated energy’! Dividing the total number of odes by the number of days in thirteen months, we arrive at a rough figure of 0.7 odes completed per day...an impressive tempo indeed.

        In any event, both Schotman and Pound initially found top-grade academic publishers for their versions. Schotman’s was published by Kluwer, a venerable house in Deventer, and Pound’s by the Harvard University Press. Schotman’s work was honored with a publication subsidy by the Dutch government Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Work.

        But lest anyone think Schotman the ‘maverick’ had finally broken through into mainstream respectability, eventually the very fact that his book had to be reprinted led to what was probably a fall from grace in the eyes of intellectuals. The 1976 reprint was issued not by Kluwer but by Ankh-Hermes, well known as a publisher on esoteric and occult subjects. Their other books included the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Dao De Jing, and the I Ching or Book of Changes, none of which self-respecting academics in those days would have touched with a ten-foot pole.  

        But now, given that both these translators ‘had’ their knowledge of Chinese from unorthodox sources, let us look at an example of their work. Pound’s version of Ode 42 begins:

Lady of azure thought, supple and tall...

goes on to praise her:

...red flower flamed less

than thy delightfulness.

and says in reminiscing:

fair as streamlet did she pass.

In the original, the poem’s beginning makes no reference to ‘azure thought,’ or to any kind of ‘thought.’ The adjective used for the girl, jing 靜, is usually translated in this context as something like ‘demure’ or ‘well-behaved.’ (In other contexts it just means ‘quiet.’) But in Pound’s theory of translation from Chinese, it is legitimate to take visual sub-components of the written characters into consideration as if they were independent characters functioning as notes or supplements to the text. In this case, for example, the character jing 靜 could be dissected into its left and right halves; qing 青 is in itself a word for ‘blue,’ while zheng 爭 means ‘compete or struggle for’...so that together they might seem to be saying ‘blue struggling’ or ‘struggling for blue.’

        Pound himself did read this character this way. In his version of the The Great Digest or Da Xue 大學, one of the basic Confucian moral texts which formerly all Chinese students had to learn by heart, one of the first passages involves jing in the sense of ‘quiet.’ In Chinese, it is 知止, 而后有定, 定, 而后能靜...The classic translation by James Legge, titled The Great Learning, reads this as:[9]

The point where to rest being known, the object of pursuit is then determined; and, that being determined, a calm unperturbedness may be attained to.

In Pound’s version, which pre-dates his Confucian Odes, this passage reads:[10]

Know the point of rest and then have an orderly mode of procedure; having this orderly procedure one can “grasp the azure,” that is, take hold of a clear concept...

In other words, in saying the ‘supple and tall’ girl was possessed ‘of azure thought,’ Pound was simply falling back upon his own understanding of what ‘quiet’ was: it was the attainment of a coveted ‘sky’-clear state.

        As for ‘fair as streamlet did she pass,’ this is an unusually suggestive case of how Pound sometimes threw in something he had seen in a dictionary even if it seemed contextually out of bounds. The original is 洵美而異. Legge[11] reads this as ‘truly elegant and rare,’ adding in a footnote that 洵 is ‘here, as often, an adverb, meaning “truly”.’ Another eminent translation, Bernard Karlgren’s which tries to avoid poetic pretensions and stick closely to the original, has ‘truly beautiful and remarkable.’[12] Both Legge and Karlgren take this phrase as referring not to the girl but to a gift, a reed, which she has given to the speaker who is the lyrical subject of the poem.

        In the Mathews Chinese-English dictionary, which was in standard use internationally in the mid-twentieth century and which Pound had at his disposal while working on the Odes,[13] there are three different definitions of洵. The first is ‘really, truly’; the second is ‘distant, remote’ – and the third is ‘water flowing out from a whirlpool’ or ‘a river in Shensi.’ It seems pretty clear that Pound took up the notion of ‘flowing’ or ‘river’ and applied it to the girl.

Schotman’s Dutch version reads this phrase as ‘fraai en ook heel zeldzaam,’ that is, ‘attractive and very rare as well.’ The words clearly refer to the gift, not the girl. So far so good. But in the passage which Pound made ‘...red flower flamed less/than thy delightfulness,’ Schotman seems to have done some dictionary-inspired emendation of his own. In the original, in 說懌女美 or ‘delighted in the girl’s beauty,’ it is perfectly normal Classical Chinese to read 說 not in its present-day meaning of ‘speak, say, tell’ but as an alternate form of 悅 which means ‘enjoy, take pleasure in.’ This usage, and its relevance to this poem, is clearly mentioned by Mathews, which quotes both the original line and Legge’s ‘I delight in the beauty of the girl.’ But Schotman seems to have overridden this, choosing instead the modern Chinese meaning and expanding the passage into

Ik zei, toen zij me ’t rietje bood

hoe mooi ’k haar vond, hoe ’k hield van haar

which means

I told her, when she gave me the reed,

how beautiful I found her, how I loved her.

In the original as ‘correctly’ or academically read, there is no indication that the lyrical subject ever said anything to the girl. If this had been an examination question for a course in Classical Chinese, the teacher’s red pencil would have been justly wielded. Yet...we must assume Schotman knew what he was doing: in his Boek der Oden he appends a list of existing books against which he claims to have ‘carefully checked’ his translations, and one of them is Karlgren’s massive scholarly tome Glosses on the Book of Odes, which contains an extensive philological discussion of this very passage.

        In other words (I think), it was a case of the poet winning from the pedant. In his preface, Schotman points out that even the expert translations by Waley and Karlgren occasionally disagree, concluding that a translator who has empathetically ‘entered into the atmosphere and the sense’ of one of the Odes may well doubt that either of them has got it right.

        But in another respect, I suspect Schotman of having sided with the pedants of this world. It seems to me ‘remarkable,’ to say the least, that Schotman never so much as mentions Pound although his own book came out fifteen years later than Pound’s and I assume he must have been aware of it. Neither in his preface nor in the list of consulted translations does he offer any comment, positive or negative, on The Confucian Odes.

        Was Schotman, proud of his ‘establishment’ publisher and his subsidy from a government ministry, starting to feel that he had now won Insider status that he must uphold? Did he think it unscholarly or unseemly even to be drawn into discussion of an Outsider version like Pound’s?

        We’ll never know. He passed away in the same year (1976) that Het Boek der Oden was reprinted in the arcane-and-occult sector. And by now, it is liable to be only his fellow occasional translator who studies and admires him.

-- Lloyd Haft

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[1] I will be quoting from the 1959 New Directions reprint The Confucian Odes: The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius; the original publication was Harvard University Press 1954.

[2] Deventer: Kluwer 1969. In what follows I will be referring to it simply as Het Boek der Oden.

[3] ‘Poet of Many Voices,’ originally published in Carleton Miscellany vol. 2, summer 1961. I have read it as included in Ezra Pound: A Critical Anthology, edited by J. P. Sullivan, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1970. The words I quote are on pages 260 and 267 of that edition.

[4] There is an excellent biography of Schotman, and perhaps appropriately, it has its own kind of ‘maverick’ status: privately printed and available only from the author. A. H. Huussen jr., Johan W. Schotman, Oegstgeest 2011.

[5] It defies my imagination why L. S. Dembo, on the first page of his otherwise excellent The Confucian Odes of Ezra Pound (University of California Press 1963) called it a ‘minor work.’

[6] Notable exceptions are the so-called Chinese Cantos (nos. 52 to 61), described in detail by John Driscoll in his The China Cantos of Ezra Pound, Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1983. For some others, see Cheadle, pp. 220-221 and her Chapter 8 in general.

[7] A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound, London/Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988, page 797.

[8] Huussen, sections ‘Voorlopige bibliografie...’ p. 20 and ‘Documenten’ p. 106.

[9] I am quoting from the one-volume bilingual The Four Books published in Hong Kong by Guwen Bianyi She in 1962, page 3.

[10] Quoted from Ezra Pound, Confucius, published by New Directions in 1951, page 29.

[11] in the five-volume bilingual set of his The Chinese Classics published by Hong Kong University Press in 1960: volume 4, ‘The She King’, page 69.

[12] Bernard Karlgren, The Book of Odes, Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1950, page 28.

[13] Cheadle, p. 48, says a copy of it was sent to Pound ‘in late 1946 or early 1947.’

When Is Bamboo Where?

  

Akiko Heilbrunner – this is a poeticized version of her name – was the first person in my life who tried to explain to me how Chinese characters worked. I must have been about seven years old, because we were living in those days in Heim’s Woods, a small wooded area on what was then the edge of Middleton, Wisconsin. Akiko and her husband and toddler son were our neighbors to westward, up the hill toward where the sun set and the highway lay, with nothing beyond but meadows and goldenrods and mountainous masses of clouds. In their house, they had a calligraphy scroll hanging on the wall. I now have no idea what it said, but the very sight of those Chinese characters on display fascinated me, and resonated with what my mother had told me: Akiko’s husband could speak Japanese and even read it. He had said learning Chinese characters was the most difficult thing he had ever tried to do.

        Akiko was not the first Japanese person in my life, but she was the first one whose nationality really impinged on my consciousness. A couple of years before, we had lived in a married students’ barrack town called Badger. Our neighbors were a Japanese-American family from Hawaii, and I remember that although the designation ‘Japanese’ was occasionally used, I did not really see anything all that special in Keith, Jason (I think those were their names) or their parents. True, their skin was darker than ours, but then so was Sandy’s, and she, a black girl, was just a member of our gang like anybody else. None of these people seemed to me nearly as ‘different’ as one sad-faced little boy whose name I have forgotten, whom one occasionally saw walking around the neighborhood with an open can of chocolate syrup, the kind normally used as an ice-cream topping. He would just be walking around the neighborhood all by himself drinking the thick brown syrup straight from the can, and there was a vague rumor that his working mother ‘left him all alone all day,’ and it all seemed, and undoubtedly was, very horrible and pitiable.

        No, my insensitivity to the Japaneseness of our Badger neighbors went so far that even now I am ashamed to think of it. My father had been in the Navy, and I loved to look at one of his books, an album of photographs showing the U. S. Navy in action against Japanese forces in the Pacific War. One day Keith and Jason’s mother came over just when I was looking at the book, and as soon as she walked into the room I gleefully called out: ‘Brenda, look! Here’s how we beat the Japs!’

        Embarrassing as it is, this incident reminds me of another, far more pleasant experience I had in Taiwan in 1983. I had been living for a couple of months in the YWCA Hostel on Qingdao West Road in Taipei. In those days, incredible though it may seem now, it was not easy to find a cup of drinkable coffee in Taipei. I was always on the lookout for Western-style snackbars where I could persuade myself it was coffee I was getting. My fellow Dutch sinologist Klaas Ruitenbeek, who would later produce superb translations from Lu Xun’s fiction, had pointed out a good place not far from where I was living, and before long I was going there several times a week for supper, a snack, or just coffee.

        The owners were extremely friendly, and like many people in their line, they seemed somehow flattered that a ‘long-nose’ would want to patronize their establishment. In their eyes I was a hero for being able to speak Chinese, and often I got free extras. They had charming children – I never quite figured out how many, there were always so many children running around that I never knew how many of them were theirs, but charming they were, except when the boys were off on a Martial Arts binge and kicking and roughing up all the other kids. Maybe at those times they had just been watching the American TV series Kung Fu, which was a favorite in Taiwan.

        There were two children in particular who paid attention to me whenever I came in. One was a girl, unbelievably tiny and pretty. I don’t think she could have been older than three or four. One day when I was sitting on one of the lunch bar stools, she came around and stood behind me and started violently twisting my hair. I asked her, ‘Hey, what are you doing’ – whereupon she leaned around and looked me in the face with a dumbbell-where’ve-you-been-all-these-years look and said: xi tou! Washing your hair! I hoped she wasn’t already preparing for a career in one of the so-called ‘tourist barber shops’ that were another, much more expensive venue where male visitors to Taiwan could get, among other things, coffee.

        She was always accompanied by a little boy who seemed to enjoy talking to me. He spoke excellent Mandarin with, to be sure, the usual strong Fukienese accent. One day he started really examining my strange pink hairy hands and arms. Finally he just asked me straight out, ‘Why do you have so much hair on your arms?’ I said, ‘We’re just like that, we foreigners just are that way.’ And at that moment he looked at me with eyes wide as the sky and said: ni shi waiguo ren ma? – are you a foreigner? I don’t know that I have ever been so moved in my life as I was by those words. It had just never occurred to the little guy that a familiar person, somebody who came in every other day and ate and drank and read newspapers and talked to him like anybody else, could be ‘a foreigner.’

        Talking about this reminds me of another incident in which I was ‘adopted’ by the Chinese as one of their own. In April 1984, I was invited to go to Zagreb, Yugoslavia to attend a conference on bilingual literature and authors. The poet Lela Zečković and I, both being in some sense ‘bilingual authors,’ were the two representatives from Holland. We were put up at the most expensive hotel in the city; all bills were paid by, I think, the League of Croatian Writers. I was feeling a bit under the weather and arrived in town hoping to get a bit of rest. Little did I know that my culture-promoting hosts had booked a room for me on the same wing of the same floor where an Italian cinema team was busily engaged in making a movie about the First World War!

        In short, there were some amusing interludes. Zagreb was Lela’s home town, and she put me on to a number of interesting things to see and do. As my modest contribution to the conference, I wrote a paper entitled ‘Poetry is a Form of Translation.’ In those days I undoubtedly thought this was quite an original idea; I had still not discovered the German poet Günter Eich, one of the best translators of the Tang-dynasty Chinese poet Wang Wei, who said in effect that even in writing original poetry, the poet is struggling to ‘translate’ a text whose original is not extant.

        Excerpts from my paper were translated into Croatian and published in the local newspaper. I cannot read Croatian, but thanks to my two years of college Russian and my knowledge of the Russian Orthodox liturgy which is sung in a form of Old Bulgarian, I was able to follow enough of the newspaper version to identify several crucial phrases on which the translator had flubbed, distorting my meaning totally.

        At the conference there was also a Chinese delegation headed by the famous Mongolian writer Malchinhu (Mala Qinfu). Before long we were sitting together at table, talking Chinese to the amazement of the locals. No doubt everybody in sight thought I must be a high-level CIA man – after all, who ever heard of an American, well travelled in the Far East, living in Holland, whose field is Chinese but who also knows Russian?

        The Chinese loved it. They actually started calling me an ‘alternate member’ of the Chinese delegation! We had a good time together during an official outing when we all took a bus trip to Varaždin. This tiny place was proud of its history: during the Huns’ occupation of the surrounding country, Varaždin had resisted all their efforts to conquer it. During our visit, we walked along what were supposed to be surviving fragments of the original walls, and it occurred to me that you could write an interesting ‘occult’ story in which Malchinhu and his Mongolian colleagues had been soldiers in the Huns’ army during a previous incarnation, had died a violent death in the fighting around Varaždin, and were now irresistibly drawn to revisit the scene in order to re-establish the Etheric Link with their past-life Flesh Vehicles so as to end what had been a centuries-long subtle drain on their Supernal Energies. In that story, perhaps I would have been a Slavic-speaking Christian monk who had learned the Huns’ language and served as an interpreter...

        Nationality is a strange, subtle thing. Like not a few young people, I went through long years of laughing at the whole concept of ‘nationality,’ thinking a person’s nationality was nothing but an accident of nature, such things had nothing to do with the Brotherhood of Man etcetera. But as time has gone by, I have been forced to admit that there really is a certain persisting reality in a nationality. Whether we like it or not, I am afraid it is true that our mind somehow ‘classifies’ people according to ‘types,’ of which nationality is one sort. I cannot prove this, of course. What I do know for certain is that various times in my life I have had an impressive dream of a person of a given nationality and then, the following day, been visited very unexpectedly by a different person of that same nationality. This would seem to indicate that on the levels of mind at which coming events are sensed, a given ‘item’ may be perceived as interchangeable with, or translated into, another ‘item’ of the same ‘type.’

        I have often had another kind of experience in consciousness which I think, points to the same conclusion. I am referring to the tendency in memory to confuse persons who were comparable in some particular dimension of possible ‘classification’ but belonged in fact to entirely different periods in my life. When we were living in Heim’s Woods we had no television. As a child I could not, of course, appreciate the many cultural advantages of this situation, and especially on days when a baseball game was to be televised, I was just about ready to jump out of my skin with frustration. Presently, however, a solution presented itself: my mother’s sister, who did have television, came to live in the nearby town of Pheasant Branch. Before long, on baseball days I could be seen hiking through the woods shortly before the lunch hour so as to be in Pheasant Branch on time for the game. On the way, I had to pass a creek which seemed to me, in those days, a veritable river. It ran past the back yard of one of our neighbors, a plumber by profession, who had much skill with carpentry and such things. We all called him The Plumber. He had built a sturdy wooden bridge over the little ravine, and on my Saturday marches to Pheasant Branch I enjoyed trampling over the resounding wooden planks and looking down at the rocks and the churning water. At one end of the bridge there was a curiously attractive little patch of green growing things, with young trees and weeds and wild flowers. Years later, when we were living in Louisiana, one night at supper my father related that a colleague of his from China had told him bamboo grew so quickly that you could sit down near a young bamboo plant and more or less literally watch it grow. In my memory’s eye, that bamboo plant is invariably situated along that little green stretch along the approach to The Plumber’s Bridge in Heim’s Woods near Akiko’s house, and it is my father’s friend Huang Qilun who is telling my father about it.

        But the point is that in objective fact, it could not possibly have been Huang Qilun, because we were not even to meet him until years later, when we moved from Louisiana to Kansas! On the mental level at which memories, dreams, and lasting significances are stitched together, the ‘type’ designations of ‘Chinese’ and ‘friend of Dad’s’ apparently combined to ‘cast’ Huang Qilun in the role of ‘person who can tell you about a plant that resembles what grew nearby The Plumber’s Bridge.’

        As for why the ‘bamboo’ grew, in my mind, beside The Plumber’s Bridge, I can only say that I hope, if I live to be a hundred and twenty, someday to gain some dim understanding of how such mental affinities are threaded. And it was not only the bamboo: the little brook with its spray-spattering stones became the home, for me the mental backdrop, of a whole cluster of associations with China. As children in those days we were, of course, brought up on the idea that Chiang Kai-shek and his wife were Christians. And in the scenery of my mind Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei Ling lived in a wonderfully cozy house that nestled peacefully under the trees just across the water from The Plumber’s House. Kai-shek and Mei Ling had an awe-inspiring room in their house that was entirely devoted to prayer and meditation, and the subtle benevolent energy that arose from that room was somehow associated with the leaves and the water and the green things that could be seen growing. Astounded as ‘the Chiangs’ or ‘the Heilbrunners’ would have been to know how their lives were being arranged or ‘typed’ in a young child’s mind, the fact is that I have never lost that inner image of a paradisiacal Community dwelling in permanent contagious happiness along what we must all, as adults, dutifully describe as merely a fretful rivulet hurrying out of objective sight among split boulders and rusting cans.

        Be that as it may, my visits to Akiko’s house established a lasting ‘type’ or ‘track’ of their own in my consciousness. She became, in computer language, the ‘environment’ of the cluster Kindly-Wise-Woman-Associated-With-The-Orient. I know this because more than a quarter of a century later, while I was reading Pearl Buck’s autobiography, I noticed that in my mind’s eye I was constantly ‘seeing’ Pearl Buck sitting in the room of our Heim’s Woods house that looked out on Akiko’s house. Pearl Buck, like Akiko, was an ‘Oriental’ woman who knew an exotic language, talked out of a vast fund of experience on another continent situated to the West of where we lived, and took a strong interest in children.

        These are obvious connections. Is it conceivable that there is a still deeper level of relevance in the fact that in the traditional Chinese system of ba gua 八卦 divination, the Southwest (i.e., the corner of our house from which I saw Akiko’s house, and in which I ‘saw’ Pearl Buck) is associated with kun 坤, the Feminine, the archetypal Mother? Did Pearl Buck and Akiko become lastingly significant in my life because for me they were personifications, representative focal points, of an underlying Energy transcending individual lifetimes – say, something that was inherent in the way the sunlight fell, those peaceful afternoons toward evening, through the leaves and twigs and branches of a then-unpolluted forest?

        Let’s defer that question, hopefully, for Later. Meanwhile, in my present-day home in Holland, I have a pair of Chinese calligraphy scrolls written by the famous poet Yang Lingye (羊令野, 1923-1994),[1] hanging above the dining table. The text reads:

Since the Han and the Tang, the torch [of learning] has been handed down;

Lloyd is enthralled by the [ancient] poems and texts.

Substituting one character, with no change in pronunciation it would also say:

Since the Han and the Tang, the torch [of learning] has been handed down;

be gladly obsessed with the [ancient] poems and texts.

While sitting at the table, I can also occasionally look out the front picture window and enjoy the sight of a bamboo shrub which grows in the front yard. In other words, like Professor Heilbrunner, I now have difficult ancient characters hanging on my wall, and like my mind’s version of Huang Qilun, I now take my turn representing the ancient tradition of watching bamboos grow.

        Does this mean that after these sixty years – i.e., in Chinese symbolism, a ‘lifetime’ – I am no longer just mentally ‘constituting’ the Plumber’s Bridge Community but actually inhabiting it?

        I don’t know, but I hope to find out Later.

-- Lloyd Haft

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[1] For access to my translations of various poems by Yang Lingye, see the January 2013 and March 2013 archives on this blog.

Two Translators of Li Shangyin 李商隱

  

One corner of my bedroom is occupied by a pair of bookcases which formerly stood in my living room at Oude Singel 112, Leiden, back in the dear days when I was a young student who still believed ‘paper books’ had a future. The shelves still contain much of the American, British, Chinese, Dutch, and German poetry which I bought and devoured in those days, as well as ‘many a quaint volume’ which testifies to the development of my life in later years – a wonderful bound set of Wen Yiduo’s 聞一多 complete works, a copy of Tu Fu: China’s Greatest Poet[1] which formerly belonged to the Dutch poet Willem Hussem, and a copy of the 1909 printing of A. E. Taylor’s Elements of Metaphysics which I bought in Shanghai in 1979, to name but three.

        Does a house, as the Chinese believe a person does, reincarnate from time to time, the accidentalia assuming each time a new configuration while traces of an underlying motif remain? The bookshelves, when I first built them, stood beside a canal in what had once been the residence of the Dutch Idealist philosopher G. J. P. J. Bolland (1854-1922, also called ‘The Dutch Hegel’). Now they stand in an upstairs room on a noise-wracked approach route to Schiphol Airport; but the sun that falls upon them in the afternoon, and the love of poetry that brought them into being, is the same.

        But if my house is the metempsychosis of a former house, the institute where I worked till 2004 was no less a reincarnation of another ambience: the legendary Sinologisch Instituut lodged on the Third Binnenvestgracht in what had formerly been the operating rooms of a hospital. How well I remember, one sunlit afternoon in that upstairs library, searching among the volumes of Chinese poetry to see whether James J. Y. Liu’s The Poetry of Li Shang-yin,[2] long listed as ‘borrowed, overdue’, had been returned! The answer was no; and when I enquired at the desk, I was told the book had been borrowed ‘by somebody at the Jelgersma Clinic,’ and the tone in which the librarian pronounced those words was as if to say: once a book gets into the hands of one of them, you’ll never see it again! (‘The Jelgersma’ is a famous insane asylum; one of its most famous denizens, for a while, was the great twentieth-century Dutch poet Gerrit Achterberg.) I had visions of someone in a straitjacket, perhaps frothing at the mouth, whose one remaining link with reality was ‘Peonies Damaged by Rain at Hui-chung’ in Professor Liu’s translation.

        It was not till years later that I discovered the borrower of that book had been Hans Faverey (1933-1990), who was not a patient but a therapist at the Jelgersma Clinic in addition to being, of course, one of the great Dutch poets of our time. The time came when thin volumes of Hans’ poetry, signed in his fittingly half-legible hand, appeared in my bookshelves alongside the already-fading, already read-to-pieces paperback copy of A. C. Graham’s Poems of the Late T’ang[3] that I had bought in Oude Singel days and my very own copy of The Poetry of Li Shang-yin: for by then I was teaching Chinese at the university, and although I no longer had the time to read books, I could finally afford to buy them in hardcover.

        That little book by Graham was one of the handful of things that decisively captured my heart for Sinology. Even after the passage of decades, there are lines in Graham’s translation which thrill me all over again each time I read them. And though I am grateful to James Liu for his helpfully detailed explications of the poems, his translations, lucid and admirable as many of them really are, do not speak to my heart. The reason, as I will shortly explain, is to be sought in my character.

        Let us consider some of my favorite lines in Graham, side by side with Liu’s versions. In Graham’s rendering of the first poem of The Walls of Emerald, the final couplet reads:

If the pearl of dawn should shine and never leave its place,

All life long we shall gaze in the crystal dish.

Liu (his title is The Green Jade City) has:

If the morning pearl were not only bright but also fixed,

One would always face the crystal plate all one’s life.

In ‘The Patterned Lute,’ Graham’s final couplet reads:

Did it wait, this mood, to mature with hindsight?

In a trance from the beginning, then as now.

In Liu’s phrasing (the poem’s title is ‘The Ornamented Zither’) this is:

This feeling might have become a thing to be remembered,

Only, at the time you were already bewildered and lost.

What is obvious in both these examples is that because of the verb tenses and moods used, in Graham’s versions the sense of amazement, the fundamentally passive state of mixed wonder and uncertainty, is still actual, still going on, whereas Liu sounds more distant, more in rational control. Liu has stopped wondering whether the ‘bright morning pearl’ might ever turn out to be ‘fixed,’ as clearly shown by his use of the subjunctive or conditional ‘were’ and ‘would.’ And in the second example, evidently he feels in a position to designate what the feeling ‘might have become’: he has already left it behind, and almost as if telling a child there is no Santa Claus, he tells himself: you were bewildered, that’s all!

        In other words, Graham ends each poem on a note of potentially endless uncertainty, but with a hint that in the very uncertainty, something precious is still present. ‘Mature’ and ‘hindsight’ suggest that something has accrued; one’s feeling not only ‘might have’ but actually has become ‘a thing to be remembered.’

        That feeling of uncertainty, paradoxically combined with gratitude for what I can only call the blessedness of my ‘lost’ experience, lies at the very heart of my character, so that it is understandable I prefer the creative irresolution of Graham to the workaday reasonableness of Liu.

        I am aware, of course, that not everybody likes that sort of thing. When Hans Faverey was still alive in this world, once in a while we would get together to drink a bit and talk. One afternoon soon after my book Wijl wij dansen was published,[4] he came to my house to tell me what he thought was strong and weak in it. I was amazed to hear he especially liked the poem ‘Cézanne: pommes,’ which begins:

Door de tijd lijkt de appel

rond, in het onvoltooide.

Scheppen is dus dulden: murwe dingen

murw laten blijken.

I have tried many times to translate these lines into English verse and have never been satisfied with the result. But let’s just say the literal meaning is something like:

In time the apple seems

round: in the unfinished.

So, creation

is toleration –

letting worn-down things

show up worn-down.

But though Hans liked the poem, he very much disliked the word ‘dus,’ meaning ‘so’ or ‘thus,’ and called it an ‘error’ in an otherwise perfect poem. He thought ‘dus,’ implying a conclusion passively drawn, weakened and diluted the third line, which could otherwise have been so emphatic: creation isn’t just thus or so; it is toleration! I remember he said: je moet het wél weten (you have to know).

        I know, Hans. I know This World wants us to know the Answers, and to know them fast. No ‘creative irresolution’ here, create is tolerate, period!

        But that poem was inspired by a long-faded, incurably curling, partly torn Cézanne reproduction which hangs in a different corner of my bedroom from the bookcases. It was written, undoubtedly, during one of the sleepless nights without which I might be somewhat less ‘bewildered and lost’ than I so often am. And you will just not hear me say – sorry here, Hans – that creation is this or is that. The kind of person to whom ‘creation’ (with its aura of muscular deliberateness in action) is a household word, is not going to share my idea that creation, like creations, somehow mysteriously ‘shows up’ in its own time.

        In other words, that little word ‘dus,’ that ‘thus’ or ‘so, evidently’ was my way of translating into my terms what the People of This World say we ‘artists’ or ‘poets’ do when we ‘make’ something. I say we do not actually ‘make’ anything: we just finally bear the full brunt of the rich irreparability of things – perhaps indeed, as the ninth-century Li Shangyin whispers through Graham’s twentieth-century words, after they have ‘matured with hindsight.’

-- Lloyd Haft

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[1] By William Hung. Harvard University Press, 1952.

[2] University of Chicago Press, 1969.

[3] Penguin, 1973 (orig. 1965).

[4] Amsterdam: Querido, 1987.

Astrology: Is Where I Am, Who I Am?

Is Where I Am, Who I Am?[1]

1. Charts, changes, and changed charts

Even for those of us (like me) who don’t strictly ‘believe in’ it, astrology can be a helpful source of liberating alternative suggestions – possibilities of getting beyond the limiting recursiveness of rationality. ‘Putting on a different pair of glasses,’ as the Dutch idiom puts it. And as the American astrologer Marc Edmund Jones liked to say, sometimes we can learn a lot from make-believe.

        One of the less well-known types of horoscope is the so-called ‘relocation chart.’ This, like our birth horoscope, is calculated for the exact day and time of our birth, but unlike the birth chart, it is geographically anchored not in our birthplace but wherever we want the relocation to refer to. It could be the place where we are now living, a place where we are considering living in the future, or even the place where we will attend an important meeting next week. The idea is that such a chart shows how our inalienable (and unvarying) ‘potential,’ given a new focus in a new setting, may gain a different, perhaps a more favorable ‘manifestation’ or ‘actuality.’[2] We can never re-stage our birthday, nor fundamentally change the physical body that we received as of then – what Wallace Stevens once called ‘the unalterable necessity of being this unalterable animal.’[3] But a change of environment does amount to a new ‘body’ of circumstances, a new em-bodi-ment of the interactive energies that we bring with us. Call it if you will a ‘virtual’ body.

        When I turned sixty – attained, in other words, what the Chinese call the da shou 大壽or Great Longevity – I happened to be not in my country of birth which is the USA, nor in my country of residence which is Holland, but in my dream country which is Taiwan. Musing about the roles played by these various ‘locations’ in my life so far, I sat down and calculated the relevant relocation charts. The results were amazing.

        Even the manner of calculation betrayed me as a Relocator. Unlike American astrologers, I calculate the ‘house’ boundaries by the Ascendant Parallel Circle method, and figure the place of the planets by their so-called Actual Positions (werkelijke plaats), as advocated by a specifically Dutch wing of astrology called the ‘Ram School.’ Theo Ram (1884-1961), whose book Psychologische Astrologie came out in the 1930s and as far as I know has never been translated, is one of the great theorists of 20^th-century astrology. One of the many reasons why I am thankful to have learned Dutch is that otherwise I could never have read Ram, or some relevant works of his friends A. E. Thierens (1875-1941) and Leo Knegt (1882-1957). The studies and discussions of these three resulted in a type of horoscopy that must seem, to practitioners of more traditional systems, a heady brew indeed. These Dutch pioneers, and their latter-day followers, not only routinely work with planets that have ‘not yet’ been discovered by astronomers; you can even download an ephemeris giving the zodiacal positions of these ‘hypothetical’ planets![4] And even the positions of the known planets are not determined in the usual way, which is simply to take the zodiacal longitude as the position. Rather, the ‘actual position’ of each planet is calculated in a complex and time-consuming way (but here again, software can be downloaded) which relates the planetary positions to the individual’s horoscope frame, so that in contrast to the traditional method, not all persons born at the same moment have the same planetary positions. For example, in my own birth horoscope, by traditional reckoning the planet Venus is in Scorpio, but by the Ram School calculations it is in Sagittarius. If I had been born not in Wisconsin but in Holland, it would have been in Scorpio – but I am getting ahead.

        Supposedly our ‘radix’ (i.e., birth chart) is a fixed, unchanging picture of our ‘potential’ (Sun), our ‘being’ or ‘essence’ (Moon), and our ‘actuality’ or ‘manifestation’ (the Ascendant, i.e. the rising sign at the time of birth, which represents the body as the visible focus of our life). Yet the fixity seems difficult to maintain in practice. In interpreting one and the same horoscope, Ram uses both the recognized and the ‘hypothetical’ (what the opponents of this school would call ‘imaginary’) planets. Knegt, whose fanatical mathematical experiments and theorizings – Ram called him ‘the calculator’ – led to the notion of the all-important Actual Positions, ironically enough was never quite satisfied as to what his own Ascendant was, oscillating between the two very different signs Sagittarius and Capricorn.

        Far be it from me to assert that a relocation chart, being essentially a ‘birth chart’ for a birth that never actually happened, should have the same status as a radix. Still, I do believe these charts can shed a surprising and legitimate alternative light.

        Undoubtedly I have an inborn tendency to take just such an attitude. You can see it in my radix. At the time of my birth in America, neither Sun nor Moon was ‘in aspect with’ (i.e., a meaningful number of degrees away from) my Ascendant. In other words, my ‘potential’ and ‘essence’ could only link up indirectly, by mental and imaginative by-ways, with the physical ‘actuality’ around me. Having a radix that lacked concrete attachments to actuality, it was easy for me to conclude that one’s environment is not a stable entity but can always be traded in for a new one.

2. The Netherlands: Standing firm in the mud of Taurus

From the moment I arrived in The Netherlands in the fall of 1968, I was in a whole new ‘chart.’ The biggest obvious difference was that the Moon was now strongly ‘conjunct,’ i.e. together with, the Ascendant. My psyche or soul or ‘being’ was now right alongside my physical body in its interactions with the outer world. The Sun (vitality, spirit) was in aspect with the Moon, as were the planets of thinking and doing: Mercury and Mars. In short: this was a favorable time-and-space setting in which I could undertake things.

        But let’s be clear: much of my ‘undertaking’ remained more a private experience than a public reality. As I took up graduate study, and later teaching, at Leiden University, no one would have mistaken me for a go-getter. True, my Moon was conjunct the Ascendant, but she was in Taurus, sign of the earth and of matter in its heaviest, most unformed state. In describing this configuration, Ram writes: ‘First reactions are slow and mostly negative, so that the first impression made is of inactivity verging on the lazy.’

        In other respects as well, my career as a teacher in Leiden confirmed the words that Ram had written about me eleven years before I was born: ‘Not quite suited to being a professor, as concrete things do not really interest...’ In itself, it helped me that in my Leiden relocation chart both Venus (sense for art) and Neptune (mysticism and the fantastic) were in the sixth, the House of Analysis, so that Chinese poetry and philosophy were natural subjects for me to research. But I could never get excited about the newest book about just how many peasants had died in the so-manieth rebellion during such-and-such dynasty. To me such things were bookish details that were but marginal to the ‘essence.’

        Besides, in the relocation chart my House of Analysis was below the Horizon, remaining mostly invisible. The results of my research seldom reached the Mid-Heaven or Medium Coeli, the top of the chart as drawn on the page, which represents the socially most prominent and visible aspect of each ‘native.’ What I published or gave out during my classes was never the full barrel but at most something on the order of a shot glass. (In my own defense, I might add that in those days in Holland we had still not imported the American publish-or-perish mania.) In the bureaucratic ranking system that governed university life, I never rose above the lowest of the three tenured levels. I did make it onto a list of teachers who were recommended for advancement to the second tier, called Chief Docent – but before my promotion could go through, the Queen announced a nationwide freeze on university promotions. The endless downward spiral of retrenchment had set in.

        There was no reason for me to be surprised. After all, Saturn, ruler of formal hierarchies and Lord of my House of Fame, was trapped in a backwater of my Leiden chart, far down at the bottom, the farthest down of all the planets. He was shut away in the fourth House, aka the ‘Shed,’which devours all forms. With me, cognition (or as Thierens would have put it, ‘becoming conscious’) always took precedence over outward sharing. And so, I thought, it would always remain.

3. ‘Het Eylant Formosa’: Taurus at the top

In Leiden I did, of course, succeed in managing my other-worldly ‘potential’ well enough to make something worthwhile out of my world. But before the world itself could really make something out of me, I had to wait till my fifties, when I started to spend long periods of time in Taiwan. In the relocation chart for Taiwan, my horoscope turned out to have undergone a quarter-circle turn. The Moon was no longer at the Ascendant point near the eastern horizon, but all the way up at the southern Mid-Heaven, standing there as the highest of all the planets,[5] ready to advance through the House of Fame. The smooth connection with physical reality was not diminished: the Moon, as well as Venus this time, was in aspect with the Ascendant. During this period, my Dutch free-verse version of the Psalms, which I had written out of a personal and private sense of being ‘in a clinch with God,’ was published. It won a prize, and I received invitations to go on television with it. A second printing was soon followed by a third. Selections from it began to appear in Dutch death notices and obituaries – surely the ultimate proof that my spirit had put down roots in the deep Taurus soil of Holland.

        At the same time, I again took up Tai Chi, the slow and seemingly effortless traditional Chinese exercises that I had first learned thirty years previously from the legendary Phoa Yan Tiong in Amsterdam. (Given the role of Taurus in my horoscope – in Ram’s words ‘immovable till the next incarnation’ – it was natural that I should be most attracted to a non-strenous form of exercise!) At first it seemed this was again just a matter of my own study and inner enrichment. My teacher Lin Mingchang, though one of the most respected in Taiwan, has never published books or DVDs, never founded a school. He has never told me the name of his own teacher. In my Taiwan chart, the planet that represents the Teacher is in the twelfth House, the one Thierens calls ‘the House of Hidden Work.’

        But here again, I could not long succeed in keeping the results for myself. Via my student Alvin Dahn, whose representative planet was strongly in aspect with my Mid-Heaven, I came into contact with the television hostess Wenyuan ‘Dodo’ Lee, whose cultural programs were avidly viewed not only in Taiwan but in other areas of the Chinese-speaking world. Before long she signed me on for a show called ‘Tai Chi and Poetry.’

        In these and other ways, in my Taiwan epoch, things that I had originally done ‘for myself’ were picked up and propagated by the larger world around me. They were such personal things that in a way, it was myself being disseminated. I was no longer trying to find ways of focusing on reality; I myself had become a reality that other people focused on. The world brought out sides of myself that I would not have thought could be so relevant to other people.

        But so...has it all been growth, all advancement? Has it all fitted together to form a unity in which past and present contribute to each other? Sitting in the ‘actuality’ of a recording studio with Dodo Lee, talking about my experiences with Tai Chi...would I need to bring something of my American ‘potential’ and my Dutch ‘being’ into our conversation? Wear an American baseball cap and occasionally lapse into Dutch idiom while we are on the Taiwanese air? Of course not. There is no need to repeat past happiness in the present. It remains where it always was.

And now, looking back on my three ‘actualities,’ my three births or three lives so far – should I try to evaluate, to compare? Should I wonder which of the three ‘charts’ was the best, the most fitting, the most truly ‘mine’? Impossible. How to judge, how to know what a life is about? Maybe the hours, the days that seem to us less important are exactly those in which we are most irreplaceable to someone else.

        In the self-made prayer that I say on getting up each morning (and yes, I do this in American English), one of the first phrases is: ‘I thank Thee for this day of my life, and for all the days of my life.’ Not: thanks, now let’s see here, for two percent of my life; the other ninety-eight percent that was not consciously ecstatic is well forgotten. And not: tonight, after I’ve seen how this coming day turned out, I’ll tell Thee whether I think it was worth being thankful for. No, it’s ‘for all the days of my life’ or it’s nothing. Thankful is thankful.

--Lloyd Haft

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[1] This is a revised adaptation of an article originally published in Dutch: ‘Welke verjaardag noem ik de mijne?’ Tirade 421 (2007 no. 5, dec. 2007), pp. 48-53.

[2] I am using ‘potential/being or essence/actuality or manifestation’ to translate the recurrent Dutch trio ‘aanleg/wezen/werkzaamheid,’ which presumably has its origin somewhere in Schelling’s or Hegel’s philosophy and subsequently came down through writers like Ram and Thierens who were much influenced by Theosophy.

[3] From his poem Esthétique du Mal, section 13.

[4] See the website http://www.wva-astrologie.nl/, under ‘publicaties.’

[5] In astrology, the sun and moon are both called ‘planets.’