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).
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.
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)
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.
(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 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."
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
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.