by Laura K. Secor
Hello my friends,
This month we are taking a wee break from Shantideva. I know, I know, I can hear you begging for more of the Bodhicharyavatara. I feel it too. But we have to balance our chakras, we can’t eat figgy pudding every day of the week. For April, which as we all know is Poetry Month, we are going to look at some Buddhist poets. I’m going to start with one by Jane Hirshfield.
Reading Chinese Poetry Before Dawn
Sleepless again,
I get up.
A cold rain
beats at the windows.
Holding my coffee,
I ponder Tu Fu’s
overturned wine glass.
At his window, snow,
twelve hundred years fallen;
under his hand,
black ink not yet dry.
‘Letters are useless,’ it reads.
The poet is old, alone,
his woodstove is empty.
The fame of centuries
casts off no heat.
In his verse, I know,
is a discipline
lost to translation;
here, only the blizzard remains.
Jane is in dialogue with Tu Fu, a Chinese poet writing around 770 CE. His Buddhism was integrated with the Chinese Taoist religion, and that Ch’an tradition developed into Japanese Zen. Which in turn has influenced both Thich Nhat Hanh and our friend Jane.
For today’s discussion, I want to show you that Jane’s poem comes out of a heritage, a lineage across twelve centuries or more. However, it is not as simple as saying – Jane has been influenced by the poets of the Chinese Classical Era, around 600-800 CE. In order for us to see the connections, we start with Ezra Pound. American poetry was transformed in the 1920s when Pound created radical translations of classical Chinese poetry. He liberated these poems from the pre-existing English language straight-jacket. Here is one of his revolutionary translations:
Separation on the River Kiang
Ko-Jin goes west from Ko-kaku-ro,
The smoke-flowers are blurred over the river.
His lone sail blots the far sky.
And now I see only the river,
The long Kiang, reaching heaven.
In this poem, and a handful of others, Pound echoed the spare language of the Chinese, the parallels and the piling on of one image after another, for the first time in the English language.
Where earlier English and American translations had attempted to make the ancient Ch’an poets sound like 19th century English poets, Pound sought to capture the simplicity, the stark placement of one image in parallel to another, without rhyme or meter. I will give you an example. Here is a 1919 translation of a poem by Wang Wei.
The Form of the Deer
So lone seem the hills; there is no one in sight there.
But whence is the echo of voices I hear?
The rays of the sunset pierce slanting the forest,
And in their reflection green mosses appear.
As you can see, the translator – WJB Fletcher – is taking the nouns and verbs of the original, and fitting them into a English rhyme and meter scheme typical of his time. The result was poetry that did not capture the spare and limpid beauty of the original. All that changed when Pound published “Cathay.”
In twentieth century America, younger poets took up the challenge issued by Pound, each generation dancing its own tango with the ancient Chinese poets. Here is Kenneth Rexroth’s version of the poem we saw translated by Fletcher.
Deep In the Mountain Wilderness
Deep in the mountain wilderness
Where nobody ever comes
Only once in a great while
Something like the sound of a far off voice,
The low rays of the sun
Slip through the dark forest,
And gleam again on the shadowy moss.
Because I don’t read Chinese, I have no idea whether the “feel” of this translation resembles the “feel” of the original, but I do know that it floats in a way that translations before Pound did not.
Now, continuing the tradition of Chinese influence, there are poets writing not translations but original poems in dialogue with the Classical Chinese poets. I wasn’t able to find the Tu Fu poem that Jane was referencing in “Reading Chinese Poetry Before Dawn”, but here is another one of his that could, in another universe, be a response to hers.
Rain on a Spring Night
Congratulations, rain
you know when to fall
coming at night, quiet
walking in the wind
making sure things
get good and wet
the clouds hang dark
over country roads
there’s one light from a boat
coming downriver
in the morning
everything’s dripping
red flowers
everywhere