Naar Psalm 119

(1) Naar Psalm 119: alef

Gezegend zou hij zijn

die zijn wandel een weg vond,

die dat kon getuigen

wat heel zijn hart zocht:

die het onheil dat hij bracht

als opdracht ondervond,

als onderhouden van uw nood aan hem.

Ben ik zo gemaakt

dat ik uw spoor zal ontwaren?

Word ik in mijn speuren beschaamd?

Mijn loven is oprecht: en mijn verlangen

uw waarheid ook in mij te ondervinden.

(2) Naar Psalm 119: beth

U zoeken is mijn hart geworden:

is mijn hart vergeefs?

Uw woord erin verborgen:

zal ik niet horen?

Dat ik uw spoor mag volgen

in mijn hart verborgen

en in het tasten van mijn lippen.

Uw sporen zijn mij tot schatten.

Ik zoek in mijn gedachten

uw noden en in mijn aandacht uw weg.

Uw waarheid zij mijn vreugde:

op uw woord zal ik wachten.

(3) Naar Psalm 119: daleth

Bij mij zijn ziel en slijk

nu één: richt mij toch op

zoals u heet te doen.

Voel toch

in mijn speuren naar uw redenen

de werking van uw wil.

Mijn ziel houdt zich niet staande:

richt mij toch op

zoals u heet te doen:

dat ik u niet verloochen,

dat ik uw wegen

dan toch verkies.

Waar mijn hart uiteen ligt

is ruimte: open

voor u.

(4) Naar Psalm 119: vau

Dat mij de weidsheid overkome

waarin uw zwijgen heerst:

zwijgen dat mijn antwoord

zal zijn aan het vele

dat hier vertrouwen vraagt.

Vraag mij niet te vroeg

de waarheid te spreken

want ik hoop nog op u.

Zo blijf ik in uw zwijgende

weidsheid behouden.

Al mijn dwalen is zoeken:

in de tijd uw sporen.

Waar koningen en wijzen

spreken, is uw zwijgen

mijn vreugde.

Ik hef mijn handen

op in uw waarheid,

op in mijn liefde:

u in mij.

(5) Naar Psalm 119: zajin

U heeft mij doen hopen

op u, op het woord.

Waar ik nog van u hoor

leef ik.

Wat de hekelaar ook zegt,

ik blijf bij u:

u denken is mijn troost.

Hoe ver ik ook dwaal

elk spoor voert terug

in het duister gerucht:

van u is de naam

die ruist in mij als adem.

(6) Naar Psalm 119: jod

Moge ik weten dat mijn handen

om u zijn begonnen;

dat zij wijzen.

Laat ik in mijn angst

uw woord voelen

dat wijst.

Moge ik weten dat mijn kwellingen

waarheden zijn

die getuigen van uw waarheid;

dat uw weidsheid

mijn toevlucht mag zijn

waarin er voor mijn leven

plaats is gewezen.

Moge mijn benauwdheid

wijzen: naar uw waarheid een spoor.

(7) Naar Psalm 119: lamed

Bestaat uw woord

buiten de tijd?

Worden wij nog een geslacht

dat u hoort, terwijl de aarde blijft staan?

Uw woord, uw aarde. En ik:

dienaar van beide.

Als er in uw waarheid

niet ook vreugde voorkwam

was ik allang vergaan.

Maar: ik kan niet vergeten

dat ik leef: ook dat

is uw waarheid.

Al hoor ik uw antwoorden niet:

ik zoek ze.

Zoveel is er

om mij te vernielen

maar ik ben op uw sporen bedacht.

Aan alles op aarde

kan ik mijn einde zien:

maar uw waarheid is wijder.

(8) Naar Psalm 119: pé

Met het vreemde van elk uwer sporen

is iets van mijn ziel verkleefd.

Kon uw woord door een smallere poort klinken,

wij zouden samen in licht zingen.

Ik open mijn lippen,

houd mijn adem in:

spreekt daar uw antwoord?

Komt in mijn gestalte uw zien?

klinkt in mijn stap uw stem?

Laat op mijn gezicht

uw licht stralen

dat uw waarheid

mij dage:

uw antwoord geschreven

in het levende water dat uit mijn ogen stroomt.

(9) Naar Psalm 119: kof

Mijn hart is vol als ik roep;

daarin bewaar ik u.

Dat ik u aanroep

blijft mij tot teken:

dat ik er voor de morgen was

om in mijn hoop uw woord te zoeken.

Langer dan de nacht

zoeken mijn ogen

in hun zoeken uw zin.

Laat in uw weidsheid ook mijn stem

getuigen: en in uw oog mijn leven.

Al wat mij omklemt is mij

een teken van uw waarheid,

al wat ik weet getuigt van u in mij.

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

Naar Psalm 92

Is ‘ik dank u’ ook ‘u helpt mij’?

– mijn hart het instrument dat u beweegt.

Zo diep in mij uw werken

en aan u de gedachte.

U bent hier niet te horen

maar te wachten, als het onkruid

dat opkomt, opent,

leeft als van u de gedachte.

Waar mijn lippen als uw bladeren

opkomen, opengaan –

wil dat zeggen u?

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

Naar Psalm 1

Was het mij beter gegaan

als ik niet had gedacht,

niet had verwacht dat u was?

– niet bij dag en bij nacht?

Had ik u niet moeten missen?

Beter de boom geweest die staat,

niet denkt,

wortels drenkt in water,

niet in hoop als ik?

Wie kan het zeggen,

wie kent hier de grond?

Niet ik bedenk de boom

die om mij ís: uw loof, uw luister.

Uw naam: wind tussen de bladeren

die ís om mij begonnen.

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

If You’re Lucky, For a While You’ll Be Almost As Immortal As The Illustrious Deceased (or, Who Do We Translate For?) – Part Two

(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 6)

Not every translator is as modest as John C. H. Wu. For half a century or so, some of the most widely read translations of Buddhist sutras have been those by Edward Conze. In his little-known memoirs, Conze writes that from childhood on, he was convinced he came from ‘a higher region’ – and also that his profound 'knowledge of the Mahayana’ cannot be explained by intensive study in just this present lifetime: that he must have been ‘sent’ to do educative work among the ‘Western barbarians.’

        Conze’s memoirs came out in a very limited edition, so that it is not easy to tell whether he intended these rather remarkable statements to be seen by all readers of his sutra versions. On the other hand, Arthur Waley, whose name for half a century was practically synonymous with ‘translator of Chinese poetry,’ sometimes gave forthright play to the boastful side of his personality. Probably the most extreme example is the preface to his book The Secret History of the Mongols, in which we read: ‘Despite the fact that in this book I translate from Chinese, Japanese, Ainu, Mongol, and Syriac, I do not want to give the impression that I am a master of many languages.’ Oh no, the reader thinks, of course not! But Waley goes on: ‘Chinese and Japanese I do know rather well; but though I know a good deal of Ainu I have often helped myself out by use of the Japanese versions of the texts...To translate the Hymn of the Soul I learnt a certain amount of Syriac (already knowing some Hebrew, which was a help)...’

        It was one of Waley’s less known books, Japanese Poetry: The Uta dating from 1919, that turned out to be a decisive influence on the American poet and translator Kenneth Rexroth. At the age of 16, Rexroth was enchanted by this book, in which Waley provides an outline grammar and a word list to facilitate ‘study of the Japanese text.’ Waley intimates that this ‘study’ will not be found difficult, considering the ‘simple grammar’ and ‘limited vocabulary’ of Classical Japanese. The young Rexroth came up with a four-line translation of his own which, he later wrote, gave him an unforgettable sense of artistic satisfaction, greater than what he would ever achieve with his original poetry. Decades later, he included that youthful translation in his book One Hundred Poems from the Japanese. This Japanese collection was followed by One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, in which Rexroth translated 35 poems by Du Fu 杜甫 in an unusually modern style and tone. In the introduction Rexroth, then in his fifties, wrote that he had had Du Fu’s poetry by him ‘since adolescence,’ and that he knew Du’s poems better than most of his own. A footnote to one of the poems said it had originally been a Christmas present for the poet Richard Eberhart. That poem contains the telling passage

...We are our own

audience. We appreciate

each other’s literary

merits. Our poems will be handed

down along with great dead poets’...

Rexroth considered translations an integral part of a writer’s own oeuvre, as indicated by a remark of his that may not have made Pearl Buck entirely happy. At the end of his 1956 essay ‘The Chinese Classic Novel in Translation,’ he said her translation of the Chinese novel Shuihu zhuan (水滸傳，in Buck’s version All Men Are Brothers) was ‘of course, her finest work...’ What must she have thought, as a world-famous novelist who had been the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, when she read (if she read it) that it was not her great novel The Good Earth but a translation with which she had created ‘a classic of American prose’! (The reading public evidently did not agree. From its first appearance, the two-volume All Men Are Brothers remained a problem child for its publisher.)

        On the other hand, who knows? Maybe Pearl Buck took it as a compliment. She herself had said The Good Earth, the book which had brought her overnight fame, was actually a sort of translation. The story was set in China, where Buck had grown up as a child of missionary parents, speaking Chinese every day. In her imagination, she claimed, the story had unfolded in Chinese; the English text was actually a transcription of the original.

        As a translator, you can never know whether your work will be read – or if so, by whom and for how long. The enthusiasm of readers, or lack thereof, is no direct measure of the labor and concentration that the translator has expended. The book that instantly won my heart for modern Chinese poetry was Twentieth Century Chinese Poetry by Kai-yu Hsu. Before I met Hsu personally, I always assumed this book must have been painstakingly evolved or ‘fermented’ under ideally quiet and poetic circumstances – perhaps at a monastery in Europe, or in a forest cottage where the translator was spending a sabbatical. Later, when I met him, Hsu told me the whole thing had originated as a way of killing time. He was a professor in California and had to drive a long distance to and from the university every day. He began attaching the text of a Chinese poem to the sun visor above the steering wheel when he got into the car for the daily ride. While driving, he would speak an impromptu oral translation into a recorder which he took along on the front seat. Evenings and weekends, these oral drafts were reworked into the written versions which appeared in 1963 as a book of more than 400 pages.

        My own first sinological translation came out under Hsu’s editorship. It was a good example of how a ‘successful’ translation may originate in a text which the translator doesn’t take quite seriously as a poem. In the late summer of 1978, I had just come home to Holland after three months in Taiwan. The accumulated mountain of mail included a letter from Hsu saying he was just finishing the manuscript of an anthology he was editing, called Literature of the People’s Republic of China. If I had anything suitable lying around, he might still be able to include it – for example, if I had translated any of the poems that Bian Zhilin 卞之琳, about whom I was already planning a dissertation, had written in the 1950s. I had been in Taiwan so long that the deadline was actually past, but I decided to give it a try anyway. Within 24 hours, I dug up five poems by Bian in the library, photocopied them, looked up all the words I still didn’t know (very many!), made and typed draft translations, showed them to colleagues and native Chinese speakers, and typed out my revised versions.

        These were poems that Bian Zhilin had written in 1958 during the construction of the Ming Tombs Reservoir not far from Peking, one of the big projects that the Mao regime was proud of. Writers were encouraged to demonstrate their solidarity with the laboring masses by ‘participating in’ labor at the construction site. In practice, the ‘participation’ often implied not much more than getting one’s picture taken while throwing a spadeful or two of soil onto the pile and then rushing back to the office to write an animated article about the experience.

        Such were the origins of the first poems by a Chinese poet that I published in English translation. My name first became known not as a translator of the contemplative poems, influenced by European Symbolism, which had originally attracted me to study modern Chinese poetry, but of political propaganda poems like ‘View from the Ming Tombs,’ ‘Goggles and Telescopes,’ and ‘A Gift for the Reservoir Project.’

        I don’t remember how I reacted when Hans Frankel, professor at Yale and one of the great authorities on Chinese poetry, came to visit Leiden and astounded me by saying he had really enjoyed my translation of ‘View from the Ming Tombs.’ But I have never forgotten a very wise, laughingly-serious remark he made later in the same conversation. We were talking about the word ‘immortal’ as applied to scholarship. ‘Realistically,’ Frankel said, ‘in our field you are immortal if you publish something and ten years later there is still one person somewhere in the world who wants to read it.’

        Nowadays I never get reactions from readers of those Ming Tombs poems, so I have no way of knowing whether I can claim to be thrice ‘immortal’ for those five short translations which appeared some thirty years ago. But note that according to Frankel’s definition, the state of ‘immortality’ depends not just on yourself, but also on a reader or readers. Somewhere out there, there may be a lone individual, a sixteen-year old future Rexroth or Waley or Buck, for whom our rushed contribution to an anthology, to us at the time one incidental assignment among others, will take on the gleam and the aura of a fairy tale, a vision, an entrance to a new world. The spadefuls of sand that we hurriedly empty into the wind, really do in the long run add up to a Reservoir. We are all translating, it turns out, as part of a larger Translation which we hope will never end, and whose name is not to be found in any dictionary. Or perhaps in Lin Yutang’s dictionary – but that I’m not sure of, because even after 38 years of working with it, I still can’t really figure out how to look up some words in it.

--Lloyd Haft (see bibliographic note at the end of Part One)

If You’re Lucky, For a While You’ll Be Almost As Immortal As The Illustrious Deceased (or, Who Do We Translate For?) – Part One[1]

(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 5)

When the world-famous writer and translator Lin Yutang 林語堂 published his Chinese-English dictionary in 1972, he was 77 years old. He said he regarded this 1720-page work as the most important thing he had ever published. At the time – I was a young graduate student in Chinese – I was surprised that Lin, a bilingual novelist, essayist and translator whose works had been published in many languages, should say a dictionary was his most important work. True, in those days we were all anxiously awaiting the coming of a new dictionary of modern Chinese that might prove at least reasonably useful. But wasn’t a dictionary a mere reference book, a useful homely implement rather than the crowning glory of more than half a century of creative effort?

        In a certain sense, making a Chinese dictionary is always a ‘creative effort’: it is in itself a high kind of translation, since (in the words of the preface to the English Amoy Dictionary published by the Maryknoll Fathers in Taichung, Taiwan in 1995) ‘the whole style and character of Chinese thought and expression often is so different from its nearest English equivalent.’ It is not just the language, but the mentality behind the language, that needs to be ‘brought across.’ It is exactly in this respect that I have always found Lin Yutang’s dictionary uniquely useful. My own translations from Chinese would have been unthinkable without his dictionary. Lin’s detailed and – I’ll just say – loving treatment of the vocabulary yields simultaneous insights into language, culture and history. For example, on page 982 we read that janshiar (Lin’s spelling for 沾洽, on spelling see below) means literally ‘soaked,’ figuratively ‘soaked with learning,’ and in older literary language ‘immersed extensively with royal favors.’

        Aside from all the unusual words, or unusual meanings of ordinary words, Lin’s dictionary is often very helpful as to the ordinary meanings of ordinary words. His dictionary indicates in an uncomplicated and straightforward fashion that one of the meanings of the verb hui 會 is ‘will.’ It is remarkable how many other Chinese dictionaries do not mention this meaning; lexicographers seem to have been hypnotized by the other meaning ‘may, might’, so that they seem perversely inclined to hear something tentative or subjunctive in this verb. But the sentence wo xiawu jiu hui qu 我下午就會去simply means ‘I’m going this afternoon,’ and certainly not ‘I might actually go this afternoon, at least if I’m not struck by a meteorite first.’

        But if I had to say what Lin Yutang’s ‘real’ masterpiece as a translator was...what would it be? A number of texts could be considered, each of which would have been the life work of a lesser translator. Lin’s translation of the Dao De Jing has perhaps been neglected because there are already so many other translations, rewritings, or imitations of this text, or because Lin did not publish it as a separate volume but as one section of a book in which he also translated extensive selections from Zhuangzi.

        My own favorite would be the text Lin calls Six Chapters of a Floating Life: in other words, Fusheng liuji 浮生六記 by the 18^th- and 19^th-century prose writer Shen Fu 沈復. The intrinsic charm of this autobiographical story (which, by Chinese standards, goes into much personal detail on the personal relationship between husband and wife), in combination with Lin’s memorably intimate-sounding choice of words, makes this a text that I love to re-read. Was Lin Yutang too much the traditional Chinese scholar to want to regard a private and personal document, a text which amused but did not deliberately edify, as his paramount translation? (As far as that goes, be advised: his preface to the Six Chapters definitely does give it a philosophical cast.) Maybe it was a question of proportions: the Six Chapters comprise no more than 80 pages.

       I think Lin Yutang valued his dictionary more than a ‘creative’ translation because of his age when he finished it. At 77, he was in a position to have a mercilessly realistic insight into the relativity of all our vaunted literary publications. Whether the physical collapse that he soon thereafter suffered was due, as his biographers claim, to hard work on the dictionary, or was just a sign of his approaching demise (he had less than four more years to live) – is unclear. But he must have reached an age or a perspective from which the important thing was not the exact fate of this or that thing that he had published in the past, but just that it should all keep going on - that he should be a contributor to the Great Ongoing. With his dictionary, he had helped enable a younger generation to carry on, to take further, a line of work into which he had poured his spirit and his love.

        He could not have known that his dictionary would soon be overshadowed by others which were felt to be more user-friendly, nor that within a few years the coming of computers and word-processors would make it impossible for even the most brilliant scholar to do again what he had done – to compile a whole dictionary using nothing but his own erudition and a room full of index cards. In that sense, Lin Yutang’s dictionary remains a unique creative achievement, whether or not its value for users is ‘permanent’ (I think it is).

        The ironical thing is that it was exactly what Lin perceived as the most individually creative aspects of his dictionary – that prevented it from being universally welcomed. Both for the sequential arrangement of the characters and for the alphabetic transcription in which he spelled their pronunciation, he used complicated systems which he himself had invented and which, to my knowledge, were never before or afterward used in any other book! We will never know how many potential buyers, browsing in the bookstore, were hopelessly discouraged by the sight of the table in the front of Lin’s dictionary, indicating what they would have to master in order to look up characters in it: a ‘Chinese alphabet’ comprising ten overall geometric forms with variants, thirty-three ‘letters’ in all – in addition to an all-new array of ‘fifty radicals’ in place of the 214 radicals used in traditional dictionaries.

        It was not the first time that a translator had proudly presented his Spiritual Progeny to the world only to find that the times were hopelessly against it. During the Second World War, John C. H. Wu 吳經熊, one of the most famous Chinese converts to Catholicism and translator, among other things, of what I think is a superb version of the Dao De Jing, made a full translation of the Book of Psalms into Classical Chinese (also known as ‘literary Chinese’ or wenyan 文言). He later stated that this thin volume was the most beautiful thing he had ever produced in Chinese. Within a couple of years, he had also gone on to do the whole New Testament in the same Classical Chinese idiom. For a while the Psalms version was a best-seller, but nowadays you will be hard put to find a second-hand (or tenth-hand) copy of either the Psalms or the New Testament in Wu’s version. The classical language into which he translated had still been a ‘prestige language,’ a sign of good education, when Wu was young, but during his lifetime it was studied less and less by the upcoming generation. By the end of the twentieth century, the accepted view was that ‘young readers nowadays’ could not be expected to understand the style and idiom of Wu’s versions dating from the 1940s. (Is this just another case of the patronizing underestimation of young people’s intelligence which is, I am afraid, almost epidemic among editors and publishers?) I wonder to what extent Wu was secretly disappointed by the eventual limbo into which his translations fell. I have heard native speakers say, very recently, that his New Testament is written in the most ‘Chinese-sounding Chinese’ of any Bible version they have seen – not surprisingly, if we compare it with the so-called Union Version, undoubtedly the most widely read, which is a perfect example of a text obviously written in ‘translationese,’ which managed to become well-established because of the overall prestige and cultural influence of the original. In any case, in the autobiography Wu published in 1951 (while his Psalms were still popular), he modestly stated that his only aim had been to get Chinese readers interested in the Holy Scriptures.[2]

(to be continued)

---

[1] A Dutch version of this article appeared as 'Als het lukt, ben je voorlopig bijna zo onsterfelijk als een dode, of: voor wie vertalen wij?' Het trage vuur nr. 24 (dec. 2003), pp. 68-73.

[2] For more on Wu’s Bible translations, see Lloyd Haft, 'Perspectives on John C. H. Wu's Translation of the New Testament,' in Chloe Starr (ed.), Reading Christian Scriptures in China, London/New York: T. and T. Clark, 2008, pp. 189-206; or
'De Dao als Logos in een Chinese vertaling van het Nieuwe Testament,' in Gerd van Riel en Bart Raymaekers (eds.), Taoisme, Een weg van oost naar west? Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2008, pp. 73-91.

uit Brandende lisdodden 1 (gedichten)

 

(1)     De schaatsers

--Peking 1979

Al wat schaatsen draagt

noemt zich ik, kiest zich één baan

onder de banen,

met de kringen mee

langs zoveel grijze jassen

geen twee dezelfde.

(2)     Diapositief

Vanuit een gevoel

dat eens in je buik leefde

vind je paarden mooi.

Achter een wit hek

in het zonlicht lijken ze

wit, onvoorbedacht.

Het veld waarop ze

lopen ziet helemaal wit

van madeliefjes –

paarden die lopen

zoals kinderen domweg

bloemen weggaven.

(3)     Gemeentewerken

Wie hier de Beuk geveld heeft

laat tanden in de aarde na –

de mijne. En klauwen. En ’t Zware

dat zaaide, dat botte tot de tafel

kraakte van zoet –

woelt, woedt,

wortelt van verweer. Háár kaakbeen

klinkt in het mijne. Geen aardse spade

houdt haar hout van m’n ader.

Noem het tevergeefs: ik noem,

ik geef te kennen liefde

in verlies gekend –

en langs eenzelfde snelweg

één U minder.

--Lloyd Haft (uit Brandende lisdodden, Querido 1984)

Psalm Poems (139)

After Psalm 139

You’ve taken me on.

I wake, and my rising

stands in your knowing.

You follow my going

onto my streets and over,

out into your distances.

Where will my walk,

my circle end

except in your opening eye?

Wide enough’s your Eye

for all my ways.

Be ever so strange

the word that tries my lips:

you’ll be the sayer.

You wait me all around,

ahead, behind –

where do my fingers reach

but into deeper knowing

that is yours of me?

Where could I go

that wouldn’t bring together?

Ever our face is wider, meets

opener. If I could climb your heavens,

so would you.

If I preferred your hell

you’d wait in hell.

If I took the wings of morning,

flew the ocean – when I landed

it would be into your hand.

If I called down all your darkness

all my darkness

would be light to you:

my dark you never feared.

My innards hang within me

and within your knowing;

down in my mother’s belly

you began with me.

Was fear, was wonder yours

before it settled in my soul?

You’re implicated in my very under.

Deep within your earth the faults

become with me.

Gleaming in my bones

they are my lines and characters,

your mind’s to lighten them,

to see how you shall read them.

How can I tell you what they mean

to me – your thoughts by me?

I feel them all around me, more

than sands around the sea.

And when we both awaken

they’ll be there for us.

--Lloyd Haft