book excerptise: a book unexamined is not worth having

Kenneth Rexroth (tr.)

One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese: Love and the Turning Year
Rexroth, Kenneth (tr.);
One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese: Love and the Turning Year
New Directions Publishing, 1970, 140 pages [gbook]
ISBN 0811201791, 9780811201797
topics: | poetry | china | translation | anthology

This book caught my attention, quite by accident, on the poetry shelves at the NYC
used bookstore, Westenders, where I was browsing in "R" under poetry, looking
through the Rumi's.
It was an amazing find. By my "page-fall-open-coefficient" (whether several
randomly sampled poems have a spark) - this book has among the highest
coefficients ever. A stunning set of poems - more than translations. Perhaps some of
the pleasure comes from knowing that the ancient-ness of these thoughts, but I
think even if one reads them simply as direct poems, they stand out in their clean,
pithy construction, with a small tug at the heart.
I discovered that others agreed with me - Eliot Weinberger has called this book as
"possibly his best translation".
In the introduction, he says that he did these translations "solely to please myself. It
is offered with no pretense to scholarship or to mastery of [Sinology]."
He is focusing on love poems. He discards the myth that
the Chinese seldom write love poems. This is not true. From the
beginning in The Book of Odes, the Shi Ching, there is a great deal
of Chinese love poetry. True, the Confucian scholar gentry were given
to the amusing and ingenuous habit of interpreting these poems as
political allegories, but they obviously are not.

Anonymous folk songs

A large chunk of the poems are anonymous folk songs, which were periodically
anthologized in China.

Each dynasty has made collections of folk songs, most of them love
songs, and the literary poets have written imitations of them. A
large proportion of the poems in this book of mine are song poems and
many of them are love poems.

The first such anthology is the Shi Ching (Book of Odes), supposedly edited
by Confucius. Many are attributed to legendary women poets -- Tzu Yeh, T'ao
Yeh, and Maid of Hua Mountain, but perhaps these songs were part of the
harvest festival or a group marriage celebration.

The book contains 112 poems - "a few more for good measure and good luck"
(as in several ancient Chinese "hundred" anthologies).

Translation or Transcreation
Did Rexroth know Chinese, or did he rely on other sources? In answering
this, Weinberger says:

in his unreliable An Autobiographical Novel, [Rexroth] claimed that he

first began learning Chinese as a boy; in 1924, at nineteen, he met
Witter Bynner in Taos, who spurred his interest in Tu Fu. According to
his introduction to One Hundred, the poems were derived from the Chinese

texts, as well as French, German, and academic English translations, but

the sources hardly matter...

This last sentence shows a somewhat cavalier attitude towards the Chinese
text - would the western critic have said the same of a translation of
Homer perhaps? One sees similar denigration of non-european texts, as in
Fitzgerald's treatment of Khayyam or Pound's "translations" such as "The
river-merchant's wife: a letter" - all of whom stand very well as poems in
English, but whether the degree of verisimilitude lets us call them a
translation remains very much in doubt.

Quite possibly, Rexroth has injected much of his own into the translation,
as every translator must, but my feeling is that perhaps he has not taken
appropriate care to respect the original text, a problem more common in
translations from the less respectable genres.

At the end of his introduction, Rexroth comments on other translations from

the classical Chinese:

As poetry, no recent translations can compare with those of Ezra Pound,

Judith Gautier, Klabund, Witter Bynner or Amy Lowell, none of whom knew
very much about the subject or understood the language.

But as English poetry, to my mind, these translations hold up with the very
best.

Transliteration of names / pronunciation

Ch' t', k', ts', p', tz' may be pronounced as spelled, but rather sharp
ly. Without apostrophe, ch is pronounced "dj"; k is pronounced "g"; p is
pronounced "b"; t is pronounced "d"; hs is a palatalized "sh"; j is "r." E
before "n" or ng is a mute "u." In tse or tzu the vowel scarcely exists. Lao
Tzu the Chinese philosopher, is pronounced something like "Lowds."

The Chinese Book of Changes, I Ching, some times spelled "Yi King", is
pronounced, using American spelling, "ee jing."

Excerpts
A PRESENT FROM THE EMPEROR'S NEW CONCUBINE : Lady P'an (I)

I took a piece of the rare cloth of Ch'i,

White silk glowing and pure as frost on snow,
And made you a fan of harmony and joy,
As flawlessly round as the full moon.
Carry it always, nestled in your sleeve.
Wave it and it will make a cooling breeze.
I hope, that when Autumn comes back
And the North wind drives away the heat,
You will not store it away amongst old gifts
and forget it, long before it is worn out.

[A favourite concubine of Emperor Ch'eng Ti of Han (32 BC);

Discarded by him, she wrote one of the first and best "discarded

courtesan" poems, which would be imitated innumerable times in

centuries to come.]

AUTUMN WIND : Emperor Wu of Han (II)

The autumn wind blows white clouds

About the sky. Grass turns brown.
Leaves fall. Wild geese fly south
The last flowers bloom, orchids
And chrysanthemums with their
Bitter perfume. I dream of
That beautiful face I can
Never forget. I go for
A trip on the river. The barge
Rides the current and dips with
The white capped waves. They play flutes
And drums, and the rowers sing.
I am happy for a moment
And then the old sorrow comes back.
I was young only a little while
And now I am growing old.

FROM THE MOST DISTANT TIME : Emperor Wu of Han (III)

Majestic, from the most distant time,

The sun rises and sets.

Time passes and men cannot stop it.

The four seasons served them,
But do not belong to them.
The years flow like water.
Everything passes away before my eyes.

DRAFTED : Su Wu (IV)
They married us when they put
Up our hair. We were just twenty
And fifteen. And ever since,
Our love has never been troubled.
Tonight we have the old joy
In each other, although our
Happiness will soon be over.
I remember the long march
That lies ahead of me, and
Go out and look up at the stars,
To see how the night has worn on.
Betelgeuse and Antares
Have both gone out. It is time
For me to leave for far off
Battlefields. No way of knowing
If we will ever see each
other again. We clutch each
Other and sob, our faces
streaming with tears. Goodbye, dear.

Protect the Spring flowers of

Your beauty. Think of the days
When we were happy together.
If I live I will come back.
If I did, remember me always.
[Su Wu, 2nd c. was a general of the Han emperor Wu Ti]

DEW ON THE YOUNG GARLIC LEAVES : T'ien Hung 7 (V)

The dew on the garlic
Is gone soon after sunrise.
The dew that evaporated this morning
Will descend again in tomorrow's dawn.
Man dies and is gone,
And when has anybody ever come back?

HOME : Anonymous (Han) 9 (VII)

At fifteen I joined the army.
At twenty-five I came home at last.
As I entered the village
I met an old man and asked him,
"Who lives in our house now?"
"Look down the street,
There is your old home."
Pines and cypresses grow like weeds.
Rabbits live in the dog house.
Pigeons nest in the broken tiles.

Wild grass covers the courtyard.

Rambling vines cover the well.
I gather wild mullet and make a pudding
And pick some mallows for soup.
When soup and pudding are done,
There is no one to share them.
I stand by the broken gate,
And wipe the tears from my eyes.

This morning our boat left : Anon (Six Dynasties) 10 (VIII)

This morning our boat left the
Orchid bank and went out through
The tall reeds. Tonight we will
Anchor under mulberries
And elms. You and me, all day
Together, gathering rushes.
Now it is evening, and see,
We have gathered just one stalk.

THE FISH WEEPS : Anon (Six Dynasties) 11 (IX)

The fish weeps in the
Dry riverbed. Too late he
Is sorry he flopped
Across the shallows. Now he
Wants to go back and
Warn all the other fishes.

THE CUCKOO CALLS FROM THE BAMBOO GROVE : Anon (Six Dynasties) 12 (X)

The cuckoo calls from the bamboo grove.

Cherry blossoms litter the path.
A girl walks under the full moon,
Trailing her silk skirts in the grass.

In spring we gather mulberry leaves : Anon (Six Dynasties) 13 (XI)

In spring we gather mulberry leaves.

At the end of Summer we unwind the cocoons.
If a young girl works day and night,
How is she going to find time to get married.

I RETURN TO THE PLACE WHERE I WAS BORN : T'ao Yuan Ming (Tao Chin) 33 (XXVIII)
[365-427 AD]

From my youth up I never liked the city.

I never forgot the mountains where I was born.
The world caught me and harnessed me
And drove me through dust, thirty years away from home.
Migratory birds return to the same tree.
Fish find their way back to the pools where they were hatched.
I have been over the whole country,
And have come back at last to the garden of my childhood.

My farm is only ten acres.

The farm house has eight or nine rooms.
Elms and willows shade the back garden.
Peach trees stand by the front door.
The village is out of sight.
You can hear dogs bark in the alleys,
And cocks crow in the mulberry trees.
When you come through the gate into the court
You will find no dust or mess.
Peace and quiet live in every room.
I am content to stay here the rest of my life.
At last I have found myself.

Farewell to Shen Yueh : Fan Yun (XXXII)

Heading East or West, down the
Many years, how often we
Have separated here at
Lo Yang Gate. Once when I left
The snow flakes seemed like flower
Petals. Now today the petals
Seem like snow.

TEA : Ch'u Ch'uang I p. 54 (XLIX)

By noon the heat became unbearable.
The birds stopped flying
And went to roost exhausted.

Sit here in the shade of the big tree.

Take off your hot woolen jacket.
The few small clouds floating overhead
Do nothing to cool the heat of the sun.
I'll put some tea on to boil
And cook some vegetables.
It's a good thing you don't live far.
You can stroll home after sunset.

NIGHT AT ANCHOR BY MAPLE BRIDGE : Chang Chi 62

The moon sets. A crow caws.
Frost fills the sky.
Maple leaves fall on the river.
The fishermen's fires keep me awake.
From beyond Su Chou
The midnight bell on Cold Mountain
Reaches as far as my little boat.

[8th c., lived under Emperor Hsuan Tsung in the

great age of the T'ang Dynasty]

THE BAMBOO BY LI CH'E YUN'S WINDOW : Po Chu I 73 (LXVII)

Don't cut it to make a flute.
Don't trim it for a fishing
Pole. When the grass and flowers
Are all gone, it will be beautiful

Under the falling snow flakes.

To the tune of "the boat of stars" : Li Ch'ing Chao (poetess) 92 (LXXXVI)

Year after year I have watched

My jade mirror. Now my rouge
And creams sicken me. One more
Year that he has not come back.
My flesh shakes when a letter
Comes from South of the River.
I cannot drink wine since he left.
But the Autumn has drunk up all my tears.
I have lost my mind, far off
In the jungle mists of the South.
The gates of Heaven are nearer
Than the body of my beloved.

A weary song to a slow sad tune : Li Ch'ing Chao (poetess) 91 (LXXXIII)

Search. Search. Seek. Seek.

Cold. Cold. Clear. Clear.
Sorrow. Sorrow. Pain. Pain.
Hot flashes. Sudden chills.
Stabbing pains. Slow agonies.
I drink two cups, then three bowls
Of clear wine until I can't

Stand up against a gust of wind.

Wild geese fly over head.
They wrench my heart.
They were our friends in the old days.
Gold chrysanthemums litter
The ground, pile up, faded, dead.
This season I could not bear
To pick them. All alone,
Motionless at my window,
I watch the gathering shadows.
Fine rain sifts through the wu t'ung trees,
And drips, drop by drop, through the dusk.
What can I ever do now?
How can I drive off this word
Hopelessness?

Rain on the River : Lu Yu 100

contrast the version in this book with his earlier translation, from "the
hundred poems" (from Weinberger):
older version:
We cross the river over dark waves

In the fog we drift hither

Through dense fog and tie up the little boat And yon over the dark waves.
Under the bank to a willow.

At last our little boat finds

I wake up heavy with wine in the middle of

the night.

Shelter under a willow bank.

At midnight I am awake,

The lamp is only a

Heavy with wine. The smoky

Smoky red coal. I lie listening to the

Lamp is still burning. The rain

Hsiao hsiao of the rain on the bamboo roof

Of the cabin.

[1970]

Is still sighing in the bamboo

Thatch of the cabin of the boat.

[1956]

LAZY : Lu Yu p.102 (XCV)

Once we had a knocker

(and this older version:

On the gate.
Now we seldom

Idleness

Open it. I dont want people

Scuffing up the green moss.

I keep the rustic gate closed

The sun grows warm. Spring has really For fear somebody might step
Come at last. Sometimes you

On the green moss. The sun grows

Can hear faintly on the gentle

Warmer. You can tell its Spring.

Breeze the noise of the street.

Once in a while, when the breeze

My wife is reading the classics. Shifts, I can hear the sounds of the
She asks me the meaning

Village. My wife is reading

Of ancient characters.

The classics. Now and then she

My son begs for a sip of wine.

Asks me the meaning of the word.

He drinks the whole cup before

I call for wine and my son

I can stop him.

Fills my cup till runs over.

Is there anything

I have only a little

Better than an enclosed garden

Garden, but it is planted

With yellow plums and purple plums

With yellow and purple plums.

Planted alternately?

[1956]

Contents
Introduction

xv

ANONYMOUS (Han Dynasty)

Home
Life is Long

9
8

ANONYMOUS (Six Dynasties)

All Year Long
Bitter Cold

24
16

I Can No Longer Untangle my Hair

17

In Spring We Gather Mulberry Leaves

13

Kill That Crowing Cock

18

My Lover will Soon be Here

21

Night Without End

14

Nightfall

20

Our Little Sister is Worried

22

The Cuckoo Calls from the Bamboo Grove

The Fish Weeps

12
11

The Girl by Green River

19

The Months Go By

23

This Morning Our Boat Left

10

What is the Matter with Me?

15

CHANG CHI
Night at Anchor by Maple Bridge

64

The Birds from the Mountains

65

CHANG CHI

A Faithful Wife

82

CHIANG CH'U LING

Since You Left

48

CHIANG KUO FAN

On his Thirty-third Birthday

118

THE POETESS CH'EN T'AO

Her Husband Asks her to Buy a Bolt of Silk

105

CH'EN YU Yl
Enlightenment

99

Spring Morning

98

CHIANG CHIEH
To the Tune "The Fair Maid of Yu"

109

CHIANG SHE CH'UAN

Evening Lights on the River

116

Twilight in the River Pavilion

117

CH'IEN CH'I
Mount T'ai P'ing

66

Visit to the Hermit Ts'ui

67

THE CH'IEN WEN OF LIANG (HSIAO KANG )

Flying Petals
Rising in Winter

43
44

CHIIN CH'ANG SIU

Spring Sorrow

60

CHU CHEN PO
Hedgehog
The Rustic Temple is Hidden

84
83

CH'U CH'UANG
A Mountain Spring

51

Country House

53

Evening in the Garden Clear After Rain

Tea

52
54

THE POETESS CHU SHU CHEN

Lost

108

Sorrow

107

FAN YUN
Farewell to Shen Yueh

37

FU HSUAN
Thunder

27

HAN YU
Amongst the Cliffs

69

HO CHIE CHIANG
Homecoming

47

HO HSUN
Spring Breeze
The Traveler

42
41

HSIEH LING YUEN

By T'ing Yang Waterfall

34

HSIEH NGAO
Wind Tossed Dragons

110

HSIN CH'I CHI

To an Old Tune
HUANG T'ING CH'IEN

104

Clear Bright

90

KAO CHI
The Old Cowboy

111

KUAN YUN SHE

Seventh Day Seventh Month

106

THE POETESS LI CH'ING CHAO

A Weary Song to a Slow Sad Tune

91

To the Tune "A Lonely Flute on the Phoenix Terrace" 96

To the Tune "Cutting a Flowering Plum Branch"
To the Tune "Drunk Under Flower Shadows"
To the Tune "Spring at Wu Ling"

94

To the Tune "The Boat of Stars"

92

95

93

LI P'IN
Crossing Han River

88

LI SHANG YIN
Evening Comes

78

Her Beauty is Hidden

79

I Wake Up Alone

76

The Candle Casts Dark Shadows

80

The Old Harem

81

When Will I Be Home?

77

LIU CH'ANG CH'ING

Snow on Lotus Mountain

68

LIU YU HSI
Drinking with Friends Amongst the Blooming Peonies
To the Tune "Glittering Sword Hilts"

72

71

LU CHI
She Thinks of her Beloved

28

Visit to the Monastery of Good Omen

30

LU KUEI MENG
To an Old Tune

85

LU YU
In the Country

101

Insomnia

103

Lazy

102

Rain on the River

100

MENG HAO JAN

Night on the Great River

49

Returning by Night to Lu-men

50

NG SHAO
The New Wife

45

LADY P'AN
A Present from the Emperor's New Concubine

P'AN YUEH ( PIAN YENG JEN )

In Mourning for his Dead Wife

31

PAO YU
Viaticum

35

PO CHU
The Bamboo by Li Ch'e, Yun's Window

73

SHEN YUEH
Farewell to Fan Yun at An Ch'eng
SU TUNG PIO

36

Remembering Min Ch'e (a Letter to his Brother Su Che)

SU WU
Drafted

T'AO HUNG CHING ( T'AO T'UNG MING )

Freezing Night

38

T'AO YUAN MING ( TAO CHIN )

I Return to the Place I Was Born

33

T'IEN HUNG
Dew on the Young Garlic Leaves

TS'UI HAO
By the City Gate

63

TU FU
Spring Rain

62

TU MU
View from the Cliffs
We Drink Farewell

74
75

WANG CHANG LING

A Sorrow in the Harem

61

WANG HUNG KUNG

In the Mountain Village

119

WANG SHI CH'ENG ( WANG SHANG )

At Ch'en Ch'u

113

WANG WEI
Autumn

56

Autumn Twilight in the Mountains

55

Bird and Waterfall Music

59

89

Deep in the Mountain Wilderness

58

Twilight Comes

57

WEN T'ING YEN

In the Mountains as Autumn Begins
Passing a Ruined Palace

86
87

THE WU OF HAN
Autumn Wind

From the Most Distant Time

THE WU OF LIANG
The Morning Sun Shines
Water Lilies Bloom

39
40

WU WEI YE
At Yuen Yang Lake

112

THE YANG OF SUI

Spring River Flowers Moon Night

46

YUAN CHI
Deep Night

26

YUAN MEI
Summer Day

114

Winter Night

115

NOTES

121

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

135

Lucas Klein : Kenneth Rexroths Translations of Du Fu and Li Qingzhao

from "Original/Translation: The Aesthetic Context of Kenneth Rexroths

Translations of Du Fu and Li Qingzhao", by Lucas Klein

http://www.bigbridge.org/issue10/original_translation_from_big_bridge.pdf

Stuck in the back of One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese: Love and the
Turning Year, Kenneth Rexroth presents as his last poem, closing a
mini-anthology of three thousand years of the Chinese poetic tradition, his
version of a verse by Wang Hung Kung. Titled In the Mountain Village, it
reads:

Wild flowers and grass grow on

The ancient ceremonial
Stairs. The sun sets between the
Forested mountains. The swallows
Who nested once in the painted
Eaves of the palaces of
The young prince are flying
This evening between the homes
Of woodcutters and quarrymen.
More ancient by far than the stairs
Are the cyclopean walls
Of immense dry laid stones covered
With moss and ferns. If you approach
Quietly and imitate their
Voices, you can converse all day
With the tree frogs who live there.

The poems first stanza presents a negative nostalgia: what was once is now
gone. Ancient ceremonies have been abandoned, leaving the site to be
overgrown. The sun is setting, representing a closing of an age. Even the
swallows, birds ubiquitous in traditional Chinese poetry, are gone, and the
princes have turned into woodcutters and quarrymen.

Within the second stanza, the poem finds a kind of solace within the
decay. Something is still alive amidst the ancient stairs and more ancient
cyclopean walls. The tree frogs, with their mysterious and subtle chirp,
can entertain those who know how to enter their world and mimic their
voices. Not all is lost: the tree frogs quiet singing still resounds. And
though Rexroths note offers no explanation behind the identity of Wang Hung
Kung, calling him only a contemporary poet the only contemporary poet
presented in the volume this poems nostalgia and position at the end of
the book suggest a relevance to the entire tradition of classical Chinese
poetry. The poem seems to put itself in dialogue, as with the tree frogs,
with the ancient Chinese poets, even as the ruins of their monuments have
been covered by weeds and wildflower.

This interpretation makes all the more sense when the real identity of Wang
Hung Kung comes out: Wang Hung Kung was Kenneth Rexroth. The name
seemingly
put together as a translation of Rex, meaning king, wang, and Roth, from
German rot, red, hong, with the classical Chinese sir gong added at
the end may be Chinese, but the poem is pure Rexroth. Realizing this, the
closing lines If you approach / Quietly and imitate their / Voices, you can
converse all day / With the tree frogs who live there take on a more

immediate meaning. The tree frogs are indeed ancient Chinese poets, and
despite the decay of their world, Rexroth is able, through quiet study and
imitation n ot to mention translationto communicate with this classical
tradition.

---

Perhaps Kenneth Rexroths most often quoted, while most unexamined, sentence
is, Tu Fu has been without question the major influence on my own poetry.
[Kenneth Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel, 1966, p.319]
Despite this sentences prevalence in Rexroth studies, where it usually
proves Rexroth to be a multiculturalist and wide reader, the extent to which
Rexroths poetry was shaped by his reading of Du Fu is generally
underexamined, perhaps because it remains so nebulous a topic. Nevertheless,
significant scholarship has been done on Rexroths translations, particularly
of Du Fu. Steve Bradbury, contributing to a special Rexroth section on John
Tranters online Jacket Magazine, reads his translations of Du Fu in terms of
the context of Rexroths life during the 1940s; Ling Chung, who co-authored
Rexroths Women Poets of China and Li Ching-chao: Complete Poems, has also
examined the poets translations, interrogating his versions for their
fidelities and liberties.

My paper will present an examination of Rexroths imitation of the

two poets Du Fu and Li Qingzhao, working its way towards an understanding of
how Rexroths translations of these poets create a context through which
readers can, in turn, better communicate with the whole of Rexroths poetry

In Classics Revisited, Rexroth calls Du Fus

a poetry of reverie, comparable to Leopardis LInfinito, which
might well be a translation from the Chinese, or the better sonnets
of Wordsworth. This kind of elegiac reverie has become the principal
form of modern poetry, as poetry has ceased to be a public art and
has become, as Whitehead said of religion, What man does with his
aloneness. 13

Here is Rexroths I Pass the night at General Headquarters, poem XXVI in One
Hundred Poems:

A clear night in harvest time.

In the courtyard at headquarters
The wu-tung trees grow cold.
In the city by the river
I wake alone by a guttering
Candle. All night long bugle
Calls disturb my thoughts. The splendor
Of the moonlight floods the sky.
Who bothers to look at it?
Whirlwinds of dust, I cannot write.
The frontier pass is unguarded.
It is dangerous to travel.
Ten years of wandering, sick at heart.
I perch here like a bird on a

Twig, thankful for a moments peace.

An affecting poem, it creates a storm between the warm front of the natural
world and the cold front of the minds interior. Never settled, the natural
world switches from the clear night in harvest time to the cold wutong
[paulownia] trees, from the splendor / of the moonlight to the Whirlwinds
of dust. The agitation in nature exacerbates the speakers anxiety, though
another tension exists in the lack of clear cause-and-effect
relationships. I wake alone by a guttering / Candle, he says, not revealing
if the candles flicker woke him. And though he complains, Whirlwinds of
dust, I cannot write, the reader cannot be sure if the dust storm keeps him
from writing, or if they are merely coincident. In the end, the poem offers
an uneasy respite: a moments peace made unstable by the verb perch and the
breakable noun twig.

I Pass the night at General Headquarters follows nearly every move that Du
Fus original makes. Nonetheless, a closer look at the original will reveal
much about Rexroths task as a translator. I quote Du Fus original, with my
word-by-word meaning below:

reside tent
clear autumn army tents well paulownia cold
alone reside river city candle dwindle
whole night horn sound tragic self language
mid- sky moon color good who see
wind dust delay voice letter end

border posts desolate to move road difficult

already endure wander ten year stuff
force mobile perch one branch to settle
already endure wander ten year stuff
force mobile perch one branch to settle

The basic movement of Du Fus original poem is replicated in Rexroths

translation, but his deviations are obvious and significant. Du Fus line
begins with a simple clear autumn, which becomes A clear night in
harvest time in Rexroths version. The speaker of Rexroths poem wakes
besides a guttering candle, which is a poetic overstatement compared to Du
Fus more austere the candles have gotten shorter, with no mention of
waking. And rather than disturbing my thoughts, the bugle calls of Du Fus
poem talk to themselvesor, conversely, the persona talks to himself amidst
bugle callsemphasizing the inner/outer tension I mentioned above. Rexroth
gets furthest from Du Fus original in the next couplet, where what in
American verse becomes a grandiose The splendor / Of the moonlight floods
the sky. / Who bothers to look at it? out of a simpleeven weak In the middle of the sky the moon is nice, but whos looking? Du Fus plain
adjective

nice or fair is not accidental; instead, it proves the point

of its language, namely, that no one is bothering to look up at the moon long
enough to be moved to describe it well. If Du Fu had wanted to write about
the splendor of the moonlight flooding the sky, he could have. Instead, he
picked one of the most powerless words in Chinese, as if to demonstrate that
the moon, too, is powerless.

The next line, which Rexroth makes Whirlwinds of dust, I cannot write, also
indulges in misinterpretation. The winds and dust of Du Fus poemhere
associated with the battleare responsible for cutting off the speakers
contact with the rest of the world. In Rexroths version, however, not only
is the cause-and-effect relationship downplayed, but the act of writing is
different, too. Du Fu talks of news and mail; Rexroth talks of being
unable to write, implying poetry more than a letter home. His translation
extends beyond the reach of Du Fus Chinese, taking words that indicate nouns
and making words that indicate concepts. In Du Fus next two lines Rexroth
turns difficult into dangerous, then invents sick at heart out of
endure, likely because of an interpretation of the character being composed
of a blade on top of a heart .

And yet Rexroths most interesting piece of poetic creation comes in his last
two lines, in which Du Fus Forced to move, I perch, settling on
one branch inspires him to I perch here like a bird on a / Twig, thankful
for a moments peace. As is evident, like a bird and thankful are
Rexroths efforts alone, owing little to Du Fu. The phrases clarify the
image, where perch alone might not be strong enough to give the English
reader the jittery quality of the poems conclusion, and where thankful
sounds an ironic note, pointing to the desperation of the situation. But the
most telling of Rexroths decisions is to translate the last word as
peace. To be sure, does mean peace. But depending on context, it can
also mean where or, most aptly in this poem, to settle, or even to dwell
in. Here Rexroth doesnt change the meaning so much as he changes the
emphasis. The main point of Du Fus line is intact, but the subtleties have

changed with the weight of Rexroths peace.

The result is a poem written by a poet whose persona is shaped by Rexroths.

Rather than Du Fu whole, we get Du Fu by Rexroth. The result is, for all
Rexroths own multitudes, somewhat expurgated. For instance, when Stephen
Owen, Americas pre-eminent scholar of Tang poetry, describes Du Fu, he is
enthusiastic:

Tu Fu was the master stylist of regulated verse, the poet of social

protest, the confessional poet, the playful and casual wit, the
panegyricist of the imperial order, the poet of everyday life, the poet
of the visionary imagination. He was the poet who used colloquial and
informal expressions with greater freedom than any of his
contemporaries; he was the poet who experimented most boldly with
densely artificial poetic diction; he was the most learned poet in
recondite allusion and a sense of the historicity of language.

Compare this with Rexroths Du Fu:

His poetry is saturated with the exiles nostalgia and the abiding sense
of the pathos of glory and power. In addition, he shares with Baudelaire
and Sappho, his only competitors in the West, an exceptionally
exacerbated sensibility, acute past belief. You feel that Tu Fu brings
to each poetic situation, each experienced complex of sensations and
values, a completely open nervous system. Out of this comes the choice

of imageryso poignant, so startling, and yet seemingly so

ordinary. Later generations of Chinese poets would turn these piercing,
uncanny commonplaces into formulas, but in Tu Fu they are entirely
fresh, newborn equations of the conscience, and they survive all but the
most vulgar translations. 16 Rexroths translations are anything b

Rexroths translations are anything but vulgar, but they do present Du Fu the
way he later writes Du Fu to be: the focus is less on Owens breadth of
styles but rather on a unity of sensibility, as individual style is what
often gets lost in translationparticularly Rexroths translationsand
sensibility can lead Rexroth to say He has made me a better man, a more
sensitive perceiving organism, as well as, I hope, a better poet.

Rexroths use of Du Fu for his own ends, however, is not incongruous with the
way Du Fu was used by later Chinese poets, as Stephen Owen helps us
understand: Tu Fu assimilated all that preceded him and, in doing so, changed
his sources irrevocably. The variety of Tu Fus work became a quarry from
which later poets drew isolated aspects and developed them in contradictory
directions. Indeed,

one of the commonplaces of Tu Fu criticism was to list which famous

later poet developed his own style out of which aspect of Tu Fus
work. Each age found in Tu Fus poetry what they were seeking: an
unrivalled mastery of stylistic invention, an authentic personal
history of a period, the free exercise of the creative imagination,
the voice of the moral man exposing social injustice.

In the end, Rexroth may in fact be interacting with the tradition of

classical Chinese poetry just as much as his persona speaks to the tree frogs
in Wang Hung Kungs In the Mountain Village

amitabha mukerjee (mukerjee [at-symbol] gmail.com) 2011 Jun 05

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