book excerptise:   a book unexamined is not worth having

One hundred poems from the Chinese

Kenneth Rexroth (tr.)

Rexroth, Kenneth (tr.);

One hundred poems from the Chinese

New Directions Publishing, c1956 / 1971, 147 pages  [gbook]

ISBN 0811201805

topics: |  poetry | china | translation | anthology


The first part has 35 poems by Du Fu (d.770), considered among
the greatest of Chinese poets;  and the second
part has 70 poems from the Sung dynasty (AD 960-1280).

Excerpts

Night Thoughts While Travelling: Du Fu


compare these two masterly translations.  to me, rexroth's version captures
a poetic mood, but it is perhaps not quite du fu; the "flat fields" become
"vast desert of waters", the "no fame from literature" is reversed; the
desire for a official position is lost.  consequently, much of the pathos
is gone - but then, it really can't be reproduced so easily at this
cultural divide.  yet something stirs - as a poem in english it works...

seth is trying to follow the eight-line style, and is quite honest to
the original.  "stars lean" is a nice touch, but the overall impact is not
there - "too old to obtain / drifting what am I like" - feels too
straitjacketed and cryptic. 

---

A light breeze rustles the reeds          Thoughts While Travelling at Night
Along the river banks. The                       
Mast of my lonely boat soars              Light breeze on the fine grass.
Into the night. Stars blossom             I stand alone at the mast.
Over the vast desert of                         Stars lean on the vast wild plain.
Waters. Moonlight flows on the                  Moon bobs in the Great River’s spate.
Surging river. My poems have              Letters have brought no fame.
Made me famous but I grow                 Office? Too old to obtain.
Old, ill and tired, blown hither                Drifting, what am I like?
And yon; I am like a gull                 A gull between earth and sky.
Lost between heaven and earth.				 [tr. Vikram Seth]

and the original: 

  旅夜書懷              lǚ yè shū huái                    
 
  細草微風岸            xì cǎo wēi fēng àn,           Gently grass soft wind shore     
  危檣獨夜舟            wēi qiáng dú yè zhōu.         Tall mast alone night boat       
  星垂平野闊            xīng chuí píng yě kuò,        Stars fall flat fields broad     
  月湧大江流            yuè yǒng dà jiāng liú.        Moon rises great river flows     
  名豈文章著            míng qǐ wén zhāng zhù,        Name not literary works mark     
  官應老病休            guān yīng lǎo bìng xiū.       Official should old sick stop    
  飄飄何所似            piāo piāo hé suǒ sì,          Flutter flutter what place seem  
  天地一沙鷗            tiān dì yī shā ōu.            Heaven earth one sand gull     
			      	      	     		  (literal by Mark Alexander)

see http://homepages.ecs.vuw.ac.nz/~ray/ChineseEssays/LvYeShuHuai.htm
for 43 translations of this poem with links to the original sites. 

Visitors : Tu Fu p.19 xviii

I have had asthma for a
Long time. It seems to improve
Here in this house by the river.
It is quiet too.  No crowds
Bother me. I am brighter
And more rested. I am happy here.

[alternate:
   Long time past have suffered difficult breathing;
   New house built looking down upon river.
   Noise is slight; a place to escape the vulgar;
   Relaxed, senses sharpened, am a very happy man.
		(Ayscough, II, 83)

I remember the Blue River : Mei Yao Ch'en p.44 (XLIV)


The moon has a halo, there will be wind.
The boatmen talk together in the night.
Dawn, a brisk wind fills our sail.
We leave the bank and speed over the white waves.
It is no use for me to be here in the land of Wu.
My dream and my desire are back in Ch'ou.
I dreamt only that one day she would come with me
On a trip like this, and now she is only dust.

Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072)

	    (Wade-Giles: Ou-yang Hsiu)
  http://web.whittier.edu/academic/english/Chinese/Ouyangxiu.htm, see
  index at http://web.whittier.edu/academic/english/Chinese/pinyin_name.htm

  Ouyang Xiu is considered to be a prime example of the Chinese ideal
  of the multifaceted scholar official, equivalent to the Western ideal
  of the Renaissance man. He was raised by his widowed mother in great
  poverty in an isolated region of what is today Hubei. He studied on
  his own and with the help of his mother for the Imperial
  Examinations, which were important credentials for government
  service, a road that was opened to him by the rise of printing early
  in the Song dynasty. While studying, he was strongly influenced by
  the works of Han Yu, whose works had been largely forgotten by this
  time. He passed the Imperial Examinations in 1030 and embarked on a
  lifelong and quite successful career as an official in Luoyang
  (though he found himself twice exiled during his career). He is the
  author of a famous history, The New History of the Tang, and the
  compiler of The New History of the Five Dynasties, and he wrote an
  influential set of commentaries on historical inscriptions titled
  Postscripts to Collected Ancient Inscriptions. He is also the author
  of a set of commentaries on poetics titled Mr. One six's Talks on
  Poetics. (Mr. One six was a pen name of his that referred to his
  desire to be always in the presence of his wine, chess set, library,
  zither, and archaeological collection; thus, the five things he
  enjoyed plus himself---one old man among them---made six "ones.")
  This compilation was the first treatise in the aphoristic shi hua
  form. Ouyang Xiu is esteemed as a prose master whose essays have
  clean and simple language and fluid argumentation; he helped lead a
  movement away from ornamental prose styles to a simpler style of
  "ancient prose," a traditionalist movement that had as its aim a
  Confucian moral regeneration.

  His poetry is also marvelous, and he was instrumental in raising
  the lyric (ci) form of poetry (poems written to fit popular songs)
  into a widespread and important Song poetic style. His plain style
  and use of colloquial expressions made his poetry accessible to
  larger audiences and helped preserve its freshness for audiences
  today. Like Andrew Marvell, he was a sensualist who is known for
  his carpe diem poems. Even just before his death, he wrote a poem
  about how "Just before the frost comes, the flowers / facing the
  high pavilion seem so bright." Late in life he gave himself the
  title "The Old Drunkard." He was also an individualist, both in his
  approach to writing and in his interpretations of the classics;
  sinologist J. P. Seaton sees this individualism as an outgrowth of
  his self education. As a politician, he was known for his Confucian
  ethics. A man with many talents, he is not easily summed up in a
  brief headnote.

Mei Yaochen (1002-1060)


Mei Yaochen was an official scholar of the early Song dynasty whose poems
helped initiate a new realism in the poetry of his age. He was a life long
friend of the poet Ouyang Xiu, but he never attained the career success of
his famous companion. He did not pass the Imperial Examinations until he was
forty nine, and his career was marked by assignments in the provinces,
alternating with periods in the capital. Twenty eight hundred of his poems
survive in an edition that Ouyang Xiu edited. His early poems often are
marked by social criticism based on a Neo Confucianism that sought to reform
the military and civil services; these poems tended to be written in the "old
style" form of verse (gu shi). He was also a distinctly personal poet, who
wrote about the loss of his first wife and baby son in 1044 and about the
death of a baby daughter a few years later. His poems are colloquial and
confessional and strive for a simplicity of speech that suggests meanings
beyond the words themselves; as he writes in one poem: "Today as in ancient
times/it's hard to write a simple poem."

Contents


  Introduction 	xi

  TU FU Du Fu (712-770)
	Banquet at the Tso Family Manor 		3
	Written on the Wall at Chang's Hermitage 	4
	Winter Dawn 					5
	Snow Storm 					6
	Visiting Ts'an, Abbot of Ta-Yun 		7
	Moon Festival 					8
	Jade Flower Palace 				9
	Travelling Northward 				10
	Waiting for Audience on a Spring Night 		10
	To Wei Pa, a Retired Scholar 			11
	By the Winding River I 				13
	By the Winding River II 			14
	To Pi Ssu Yao 					15
	Loneliness 					16
	Clear After Rain 				16
	New Moon 					17
	Overlooking the Desert 				18
	Visitors 					19
	Country Cottage 				20
	The Willow 					21
	Sunset 						21
	A Restless Night in Camp 			23
	South Wind 					24
	Another Spring 					24
	I Pass the Night at General Headquarters 	25
	Far up the River 				26
	Clear Evening after Rain 			27
	Full Moon 					28
	Night in the House by the River 		29
	Dawn Over the Mountains 			30
	Homecoming -- Late at Night 			31
	Stars and Moon on the River 			32
	Night Thoughts While Travelling 		33
	Brimming Water 					34

   MEI YAO CHIEN Mei Yaochen (1002-1060)
	An Excuse for Not Returning a Visit 		37
	Next Door 					38
	Melon Girl 					39
	Fish Peddler 					40
	The Crescent Moon 				40
	On the Death of a New Born Child 		41
	Sorrow 						42
	A Dream at Night 				43
	I Remember the Blue River 			44
	On the Death of His Wife 			45
	In Broad Daylight I Dream of My Dead Wife 	46
 	I Remember the River at Wu Sung 		47
	A Friend Advises Me to Stop Drinking 		48

  OU YANG HSIU Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072]
	In the Evening I walk by the River 		51
	Fisherman 					51
	Spring Walk 					52
	East Wind 					52
	Green Jade Plum Trees in Spring 		53
	When the Moon is in the River of Heaven 	54
	Song of Liang Chou 				55
	Reading the Poems of an Absent Friend 		57
	An Answer to Ting Yuan Ch'en 			59
	Spring Day on West Lake 			60
	Old Age 					62

  SU TUNG P'O
	The Red Cliff 					65
	At Gold Hill Monastery 				67
	On the Death of His Baby Son 			69
	The Terrace in the Snow 			70
	The Weaker the Wine 				72
	The Last Day of the Year 			74
	Harvest Sacrifice 				75
	A Walk in the Country 				76
	To a Traveler 					77
	The Purple Peach Tree 				78
	The Shadow of Flowers 				78
	The End of the Year 				79
	On the Siu Cheng Road 				80
	Thoughts in Exile 				81
	Looking from the Pavilion 			82
	The Southern Room Over the River 		83
	Epigram 					84
	At the Washing of My Son 			84
	Moon, Flowers, Man 				85
	Begonias 					86
	Rain in the Aspens 				87
	The Turning Year 				87
	Autumn 						88
	Spring Night 					89
	Spring 						90

  THE POETESS LI CH'ING CHAO
	Autumn Evening Beside the Lake 			93
	Two Springs 					94
	Quail Sky 					95
	Alone in the Night 				96
	Peach Blossoms Fall and Scatter 		97
	The Day of Cold Food 				98
	Mist 						99

  LU YU
	The Wild Flower Man 				103
	Phoenix Hairpins 				104
	Leaving the Monastery 				105
	Rain on the River 				106
	Evening in the Village 				107
	I Walk Out in the Country at Night 		108
	Idleness 					109
	Night Thoughts 					110
	I Get Up at Dawn 				111
	Autumn Thoughts 				112
	Sailing on the Lake 				113

  CHU HSI Su Shi (1037-1101)
	The Boats are Afloat 				117
	Spring Sun 					118
	The Farm by the Lake 				119
	Thoughts While Reading 				120

  HSU CHAO
	The Locust Swarm 				123

  THE POETESS CHU SHU CHEN
	Plaint 						127
	Hysteria 					128
	Spring 						130
	The Old Anguish 				131
	Morning 					132
	Stormy Night in Autumn 				133
	Alone 						134
  NOTES 						135
  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 				146

Review at chinese-poems.com

	 	 http://www.chinese-poems.com/rex.html
[Rexroth's] approach, set out in a brief introduction, is simply to produce
the best English poem he can in the spirit of the original. The resulting
translations are more or less free as he thought appropriate for each
individual work. ...

An interesting example:

      Another Spring

	White birds over the grey river.
	Scarlet flowers on the green hills.
	I watch the Spring go by and wonder
	If I shall ever return home.

Rexroth has changed the river's colour from blue in the original to grey: a
good example of a liberty which would be objectionable from a translator, but
which he can get away with. He also clarifies "blazing" in the original to
"scarlet", which allows him to preserve the original's strictly parallel
parts of speech in the first couplet.

--- blurb

Now in its 21st printing. Thirty-five poems by the great Tu Fu (T'ang
Dynasty, 713-770) make up the first part of this volume -- with the remainder
devoted to classic poets of the Sung Dynasty (10th-12th centuries) including:
Mei Yao Ch'en, Su Tung P'o, Lu Yu, Chu His, Hsu Chao, and the poetesses Li
Ch'ing Chao and Chu Shu Chen. With a translator's introduction, biographical
notes on the poets and poems, and a bibliography of other translations.


amitabha mukerjee (mukerjee [at-symbol] gmail.com) 2011 Jun 13