Nog op het kerkhof staande (gedicht)

Waar weg is

beweegt het nog,

zie ik voor mij uit:
in wind boven de graven

vlam die flakkert.

Ik die hier nog handen heb

houd nu voor ons beiden vast

de ene kaars,

ene vlam,

eendere als toen wij samen

kwamen,

zagen,

waren.

Nu jij weg bent

houd ik je bij mij bewezen,

ik die mede bewogen

meega in weten:

hier

in de vlam die verteert en vergadert

zag ik je komen,

zie ik je gaan.

--Lloyd Haft

Writing from the Writhe

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) is one of my favorite poets. He is also one of my favorite people, which is of course not at all the same thing.

        Or...is it? In the long run, do I re-read his poems because I am inspired by his person, or do I semi-idolize the person because of what he wrote?

        I admire the man and his poems for the same reason: a particular quality of transcendence which for me is present in both.

        What? (I hear every sophomore saying)...Williams transcendent? Didn’t he write ‘no ideas but in things’?

        Yes, he did. And that notion, badly misunderstood, has been repeated ad nauseam and put poorly into practice by writers of the kind of poems that I call Fact Sheets – the endless, uncontemplative (and I would say not-worth-contemplating) passages of mere description that make so much twentieth-century American poetry so dull.

        But he also wrote:

Only the imagination is real!

        I have declared it

                time without end.

If a man die

        it is because death

has first

possessed his imagination.[1]

Not only the words are transcendent, or are about transcendence. Williams himself while writing them was already ‘transcending’ a series of huge health setbacks of the heart attack-stroke-cerebral hemorrhage kind. Normally we do not expect a survivor of strokes (that’s right, plural) to be still capable of writing poetry at all, let alone writing what many think is his finest and most lasting work. But Williams did it. As I see it, there was something in him that still wanted so badly to write those late poems that even serious paralysis could not deter him. And the result was so successful that scholars ever since have been studying and analyzing the ‘variable foot’ or ‘triadic-line’ form, characterized by very short lines, in which he wrote them.

        Not long ago I ran across what was for me an intriguing added perspective on this. In his very well-thought-out 1973 book William Carlos Williams: The Late Poems,[2] Jerome Mazzaro surmises that it was not despite but because of the strokes that Williams wrote in this form: ‘Since the conscious discovery of the line coincided with a recovery from a cerebral attack, there is some reason to connect the two...the new line may well have been devised to compensate for the physical effects of the strokes which made it difficult for the poet to return his gaze quickly to the left margin of a page. The staggered margins of the triadic line were almost imperative as a corrective...’[3]

        This idea – that the form in which Williams expressed his soaring thoughts, which later attracted all manner of highfalutin scholarly analysis, was in fact due to the mere mechanics of bodily disability – reminds me of a parallel case, again involving one of my very favorite writers.

        John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) has often been called one of the greatest 20^th-century novelists in English, but to me he is one of the all-time great writers of Autobiography in the true sense. What I mean is that he writes real auto-BIO-graphy, i.e. an account of his life, not just the surface living of it. This is exactly what is so lacking in so many books of the ‘autobiography’ or ‘memoirs’ type. I call them Laundry Lists because their authors evidently think they are doing enough simply by screen-dumping an accumulation of facts – ‘and then I went there and then I did that.’[4] Who cares about all the theres and thats if they never turned out to mean something to somebody?

        If I began giving examples of ‘transcendent’ quotes from Powys’ works, the list might never end. There is something in the whole tenor of his writing that somehow lifts you right up out of the workaday chair. But if we must have an example, let it be: ‘...everything which the mind touches is modified and changed by the mind.’[5]

        As for Powys’ writing style, again many things might be said, but the one feature everybody agrees on is his penchant for writing very long sentences. As Brahms is the master of the long phrase in music, Powys is the supreme practitioner of the long sentence in English.

        This feature, like William Carlos Williams’ ‘triadic’ form, has not escaped medical diagnosis by an admiring biographer. One of the most ‘remarkable’ (I’ll just say) books about Powys is the study written in Flemish by Ernst Verbeek, a former professor of psychiatry at Ghent University in Belgium.[6]

        I doubt Verbeek’s book is very well known even in the tiny countries where Dutch or Flemish is read. My own copy was discarded by a major public library two years after its publication in 1989, and it seems not to have been translated into English. For a while Verbeek was investigating epilepsy in relation to psychiatric symptoms, but his work in that field was not uncontroversial. Besides the biography of Powys, he wrote a number of other ‘pathographies’ – studies of writers from a medical and psychiatric angle – on Samuel Johnson, Rimbaud, and Tolstoy among others.

        Verbeek [pp. 147, 208] cites evidence, which I personally find impressive, to show that Powys suffered from a chronic epileptic disturbance. One symptom of this was his ‘long, rambling sentences’. Fortunately, though Verbeek takes a medical view of Powys’ ‘pathology,’ he is anything but denigrating or skeptical of Powys as a writer. On the contrary, the tone of his book is almost adulatory. The result of reading Powys is, he says on the last page, a sense of ‘spiritual cleansing.’

        Let’s be thankful that in this world there are not only Fact Sheets and Laundry Lists preying on our attention and trying to distract us from the very thought of anything better. There are also a few good Pathographies. What we learn from them is that we need not rack our minds trying to figure out exactly how to transcend. Our body itself cries out for transcendence, and in doing so it supplies us with, prompts us to use, whatever for us are the ways and means. For Williams, a shorter verse line which cuts away what was trying unduly to possess us. For Powys, a ‘rambling’ sentence which by its very length inaugurates a new time frame, sets a new stage, lets us see right out beyond the hedges.

--Lloyd Haft

---

[1] From the ‘Coda’ section of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.

[2] Cornell University Press.

[3] p. 79.

[4] A superlative example of the opposite extreme, a hyper-contemplative autobiography in which you really have to work hard to discern what a few of the facts of the life actually were or might have been, is C. G. Jung’s.

[5] from The Complex Vision, London: Village Press 1975, p. xiv.

[6] Ernst Verbeek, De goden verzoeken: John Cowper Powys, zijn persoon en zijn werk [Tempting the Gods: John Cowper Powys, His person and his work], Assen/Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1989.

Sonnets by Zhu Xiang 朱湘十四行詩選譯

(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 25)

Sonnets by Zhu Xiang 朱湘十四行詩選譯

translated by Lloyd Haft

Zhu Xiang 朱湘 (1904-1933) was one of the great pioneers of modern Chinese poetry. In the years after World War I, Chinese poets were struggling to find ways of writing a new poetry that would go beyond the Classical Chinese tradition and do justice to modern developments in both language and thought. It was not easy for them to get an audience for their experiments. The prestige of Classical Chinese poetry, and its prominent social role in a Confucianist culture which exalted the written word in time-honored forms, made Western-style verse seem at first more like an amusement than a legitimate literary form.

        Among a small circle of young enthusiasts, however, Zhu Xiang had admirers. Widely read in both traditional and modern literature, he published his first book of verse in 1925. It might have seemed that he was on his way to a bright literary and academic career. His sensitive and disharmonious character, however, led him to break with one promising environment after another. Originally associated with Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 (1897-1931) as one of the ‘Crescent Moon’ group of poets, he eventually fell out with Xu and published vituperative attacks on him, calling him a ‘fake poet’ who wrote ‘banal’ and ‘nauseating’ verse. He tried going to America for study, but at both Lawrence University and the University of Chicago, he soon found reasons to quit school in protest. Returning to China to become a department head at Anhui University, he soon quit his job in anger. His marriage – ironically, a supremely traditional match which his parents had arranged for him even before he was born – proved disastrous, and at the age of 29, unable to solve the personal and financial problems that dogged him, he committed suicide.[1]

        Zhu Xiang’s strong interest in Western poetic forms is reflected, among other things, in his metrical translations of Shelley’s verse. His posthumously published collection The Stone Gate (石門集) includes 71 original poems in the sonnet form, making him the most productive Chinese sonnetteer of the first half of the twentieth century. Some of the 'sonnets,' like English Sonnet 6, deviate from the normal 14-line form in a way that is reminiscent of the 'curtal sonnets' of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The typography of the originals is rather strange: each sonnet appears as two blocks of seven vertically printed lines without stanza divisions, one block above the other. Symmetrical and neat though this arrangement was, it obscured the precision and intricacy of the stanza structures and rhyme schemes which Zhu Xiang had so carefully observed.[2] In the Chinese versions of the sonnets I have translated below, I have rearranged the typography so as to read horizontally and from left to right. I have done my best to edit the pronunciation, which is not always clearly legible in the original.

English Sonnet 6

If there had been no quake, there would remain

no precious ruins, records of Pompeii.

Columbus was a pirate: greed for gain

that gave us a bigger map, where more land lay.

The same Bible held millennia civilized

they almost murdered Galileo by.

Science fermented: hell grew authorized.

Saturn seen, disasters drop from the sky.

Hard to discern the cycle of man’s lot...

Growth from wreck, evil in good begot.

沒有地震，那滂佩伊故墟

便無從留下珍貴的文獻。

科倫布是海盜；他的貪慾

卻拏新版圖加上了地面。

「聖經」 撐起有千年的文化，

幾幾乎拿蓋里留給殺害—

科學釀成了地獄的批發，

都是土星見了，降下天災。

人事的循環太難於捉摸……

建設來自破壞，善產生惡。

English Sonnet 16

A single sickle moon bringing a couple of stars.

Cool. Unbound. The marketplace, on the night set:

a dog barks in the distance. Through the street’s heart, cars

rush but rarely; dimmed is care, quiet is fret.

Suddenly the breast is awash, an ancient longing swells.

And all around, an ancient scene, seeming sight

of wilds, frogs, willows, elms where the tiller dwells

and rivers unfold from foothills, out of the dew of night.

The mountain spirit whispers: there’s a stream about.

As if forever. Pine, pagoda. Cypress, shrine:

they welcome not the traveler, nor cast him out.

If he has come, let him sit on the stone incline

and gaze on the always far and ancient – I’m imagining,

facing a couple of stars and a single sickle shining.

只是一鐮刀的月亮，帶兩顆星，

清涼，灑脫，在市廛定下來的夜；

遠方有犬吠，車輛奔走過街心，

寥落的；擾攘與喧囂已經安歇。

古老的情思驀然潮起在胸頭，

以及古老的意境。仿佛有群蛙

搏動在原野內，榆柳，田舍河流

展開在夜露之中，在山麓之下。

山靈的喉舌微語著，一條山溪。

仿佛是終古的，松柏，寶塔，寺廟；

它們並不迎迓遊客，也不嫌棄，

要是他來了，坐在石磴上，閑眺。

總是這麼古老，悠遠的，我幻想，

對了兩顆星，與一鐮刀的月亮。

Italian Sonnet 2

I’d lay aside all wide of sky or sea

if you’d leave me but one small tenement,

the way a seed in the fruit’s core is pent,

to hide me from the outer world’s cruelty

and the true road of living let me see:

emerge reborn as pine cone’s subtle scent,

almond smooth, walnut rich but prudent.

Some go feeding the common gluttony,

some in spring sun overfly the peaks

and only then set roots and petal, slow,

after a hundred years reach out, clawed

(what their deep cry by day and night bespeaks)

to clench green, that ripened it not go:

and harden with that, while the four winds maraud.

我情願拿海闊天空扔掉。

只要你肯給我一間小房—

像仁子蹲在果核的中央，

讓我來躲避外界的強暴；

讓我來領悟這生之大道，

脫胎換骨，變成松子清香。

核桃內豐外嗇杏仁潤涼……

有的去給世人越吃越要；

有的，趁陽春飛越過山嶺

那時候，生根著葉起來，慢，

很慢的……百年後他伸手爪

[ 他高呼，低喚在黑夜，白天 ]

要抓住那青，成年不變換，

與那硬，任風在四邊騷擾。

Italian Sonnet 16

In curious dream’s arena I caught sight,

in body’s shell evolved, of two of me:

the left a singing, innocent beauty,

the right a sword dancer, robed in light.

Radiance on all sides guarded them with white

nor granted a single sorrow-splash entry,

yet sorrow added watering waves, musically,

to measure grander, mood more rich and right.

Of this frame’s remnants I’ll not deign to reck

– distinguish as ye may the ‘life,’ the ‘wreck’ –

for the eternal mates you’ve never found the word:

separate east and west their journeys seem.

Only in sky will song accord, in dream,

with the rise and falling of the shadow sword.

在一場奇特的夢裏，我瞧見

軀殼中化出來了一雙自我—

美麗，天真，左邊的她正唱歌；

右邊的，光芒繞體，他舞寶劍。

那護身的白光關照到四面，

不容煩惱灑的水絲毫透過，

同時，煩惱澆上音樂的波，

那情調更豐富，節律更莊嚴。

這一架的殘剩我毫不關懷；

儘由你們去分了，「人生，」「破敗!」

你們抓不住那永恆的一雙……

雖說他們的途徑各自東西，

唯有在天空上，唯有在夢裏，

歌聲才叫得應那劍影低昂。

Italian Sonnet 22

Proffering its sixty rings of jade, the soul

pays its respects at the shrine of life, where true

and false – the variously carved blossoms – through

circling months and years are threaded whole.

The modest temple plays its earnest role:

all beings’ offerings are accepted, yet there do

remain but precious few, each strung onto

a necklace, or hung from a pavilion pole.

More than the sands in the Ganges, for all time

jade rings will be (be praised!), in fragrance,

in splendor and peace, in the reverence of descendants:

and even the souls be decked in lanterns green

while they gaze on old toils borne, old dreams seen –

till the whole body sinks in sweat and grime.

捧著六十塊圓璧，魂靈呈獻

有人生的龕上：有真也有假；

有精也有粗，那雕鏤成的花

盤繞過小周的月，大周的年。

並非無量大的，這廟宇莊嚴……

衆生的敬奉雖是全部收下，

存留的卻並不多；它們懸掛

在楹柱上，或是佩戴在胸前。

不作恆河的沙，長此有圓璧

〔這是多麼可欽！〕陪侍著芬芳，

光采，恬靜；長此供後人瞻仰；

魂魄也能燃著碧色的燈籠，

常來眺望往昔的辛勤，幻夢，

一直到全身頹圮入了汗泥。

Italian Sonnet 34

He shouldn’t have been born, the writer of verse.

I’ve duly undergone my share of shame,

swallowed the bitters of the human game –

compared to certain others, I’m the worse:

the Muse’s retinue. I’m not averse

to falling short of an Average Man’s name.

Whatever this heaven-given tongue exclaim,

it’s never of my own. The words are Hers.

Far be it from me to hope for more

as long as why one here endures this span

– that it was all for Her – the Muse infers.

Nor shall I be disturbed if man curse,

call me a beggar. For a goddess one can

never force; one only can implore.

作詩的原不該生下，

應分的我受盡羞辱，

又吃世間各種的苦—

比起有些人來，還差。

詩神的侍從，我不怕

遠離了作一個凡夫；

這天賜的舌頭說出，

並非我的，是她的話。

旁的我並不敢希望，

只要這番堅忍，詩神

能以知道，是爲了她。

我也不理會人唾罵

爲一個乞丐：向神靈

只好去求，不能勉強。

Italian Sonnet 52: “Homer”

Blind prophet! You who saw the light

in darkness – inseparable: two and one;

seeing the two-faced god: and seeing the prone

worshippers’ toning voice and shadowed sight

born of a single sound, a sound so slight.

You sang the riddle revealed by the god of the sun,

told of the expedition’s exultation

and how bitter returning wisdom’s plight,

told how life begins in a beautiful grapple –

and another kind of beauty when it’s done.

Between are storms and slaughters, mire and rest.

So it is, at the honored gods’ behest.

And when it’s finished?...Blind man, I mean their fun.

You’ve no idea. That’s another apple.

啊，盲目的先知者，看見光明

在黑暗之中，分不開，二而一；

又看見那一身兩面的神祇，

與頂禮膜拜者的聲調，形影。

一個聲音生的，便只是聲音—

你歌唱出日神所宣示的謎：

說遠征的「熱烈」是如何快意。

「智慧」的歸家又是多麼艱辛；

說人生開始於美麗的攘奪，

說人生終結在另一種美麗，

中間是風浪，屠宰，溷濁，鬆弛……..

如此，遵照了神祇們的意旨，

它完了……至於他們的那遊戲，

盲人，你並不知道怎樣結果。

---

[1] See the chapter on Zhu Xiang in my The Chinese Sonnet: Meanings of a Form, published in Leiden by the Research School of Asian, African, and American Studies, 2000.

[2] The edition I have used was published in Shanghai by the Commercial Press in 1935. My translations, used here with permission, have appeared earlier in The Chinese Sonnet: Meanings of a Form.

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.