豐年
豐年多黍多稌 亦有高廩 萬億及秭 為酒為醴 烝畀祖妣 以洽百禮 降福孔皆
what a harvest
from The Book of Odes
translated by Mark Minster
what a harvest of sorghum and rice!
our barns bursting billions of grains
wine and rice wine for our forebears a hundred rites blessings for all
Rich is the Year with Much Millet and Rice
from The Book of Odes
translated by Cole Hardman
A good year:
our storehouses are full of millet and rice.
Hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of grains
to strain for wine and spirits,
to pour out for the spirits of our ancestors,
to drink at celebrations and weddings
throughout a year showered in good fortune.
長干行
妾髮初覆額 折花門前劇 郎騎竹馬來 遶床弄青梅 同居長干里 兩小無嫌猜 十四為君婦 羞顏未嘗開 低頭向暗壁 千喚不一回 十五始展眉 願同塵與灰 常存抱柱信 豈上望夫臺 十六君遠行 瞿塘灩澦堆 五月不可觸 猿鳴天上哀 門前遲行跡 一一生綠苔 苔深不能掃 落葉秋風早 八月蝴蝶來 雙飛西園草 感此傷妾心 坐愁紅顏老 早晚下三巴 預將書報家 相迎不道遠 直至長風沙
Evertown
by Li Bai
translated by Mark Minster
when this hair first spilled my brow braiding blooms in the playroom
he strode up on his wood horse circled my bed with green plums
we both lived in Evertown too small for even a clue
fourteen, I was as his wife red in the face, still closed off
head bowed by the shadowed wall never turned, for all his calls
fifteen, I began to peek ready for death-do-us-part
clutched at this pillar of troth where I wait and watch for him
sixteen, he’s all gone away down some gorge’s tossing stream
five months now we haven’t touched oh, animal sounds and grief
footprints in the front doorway watch them slowly grow green moss
moss too deep for any broom early wind on autumn leaves
gold as eighth-month butterflies that flit by twos through warm grass
such feeling strikes through my heart I sit, cares creasing my cheeks
soon or late, down Three-Wishes that some kind of news will come
that we’ll meet on some near road that it will run long, straight, far
A Song of Changgan
by Li Bai
translated by Cole Hardman
I was no concubine at the beginning
I barely had any hair on my head
when you came riding a bamboo horse
in circles throwing blue green plum-flowers
we kept a house along a road in Ch’ang
I guess that we were young and happy
married together before I turned fifteen
I couldn’t begin to look without blushing
bowed towards hidden shadowy ramparts
I wouldn’t answer your one thousand pleas
but at fifteen I began to raise my eyes
towards similar dust similar ash and love
beyond death I’ll stand by this pillar of truth
never doubting while I gaze at the distance
looking for my husband at his far-off station
but at sixteen you left me to travel
through the swirling clouds of mountainous Sichuan
and five months passed without a knock
just howling monkeys to bury my grief
it’s been so long since you left me here
moss-covered footsteps fade one by one
I tried my best to sweep the dusty time away
but each leaf like a page falls without news
eight months have gone and butterflies come
flying in pairs around our garden grasses
where you held a broken concubine’s heart
and left me to remember how to blush
but in the early evening I count my hopes
send some letter home tell me you’re here
I’ll take the long road forget the distance
I’ll take the quickest path to Chang-feng Sha
to hear your voice again to talk to you again
These poems were translated with the aid of Google Translate and available word-for-word translations. Translating poems in this way recalls Ezra Pound’s chapbook Cathay, his (in)famous collection of poems translated from the original Chinese with the aid of Ernest Fenollosa’s notes. Pound was not known to speak or read the language he was translating, which evokes questions about the art of translation that lead to philosophical investigations into the heart of language and how we represent ourselves linguistically—specifically, we are asked to consider the trust we put into the truthfulness of words, even into the truthfulness of the symbolic lie that sits at the heart at most of poetry. The software used to make these translations, as opposed to the notes of someone who does speak the language, also attests to the current technological shifts in how we communicate and leads to an investigation of early systematic and structural attempts at corralling language such as those found in Saussure, as well as the modern development of computational linguistics.
Naturally, translations made in this way do not seek to represent some sort of literalism, but instead try provide room for the same types of investigative play found in the original poems. The two poems I have presented here are good examples of an attempt at reconstructing similar rooms of play and show how differences in form might provide equally compelling but antithetical experiences. My first translation, “Rich is the Year with Much Millet and Rice,” was written with the intent to save a sense of the symbol-for-word translation through flexible lines, while still preserving the musical nature of the original found in The Book of Odes. In “A Song of Changgan,” by Li Bai, I made a special attempt to recreate the flavor of the original poetic form by preserving the caesura and carefully constructing aspects of parallelism and ambiguity, which were hallmarks of the great T’ang Dynasty poets.
Cole Hardman
Features of Classical Chinese poetry, especially the jintishi forms loved by T’ang poets like Li Bai, make it essentially untranslatable: its lines dense as gems, its rigors of structure and sound, and through these its extraordinary chambers of echoing meaning. The great 20th-century English-language versions of East Asian poetry have come through Pound and his heirs—Kenneth Rexroth, Burton Watson, David Hinton, my teacher Gary Snyder—so their translations have relied heavily on a kind of Zen-like free-verse line more linear, if oblique, in imagery than the originals. They have tended to abandon the poems’ formal features altogether. And rightly so, perhaps, since the literary language of poems like this is far from the language of speech, at once too compressed, too open, too symmetrical, too sonorous. To cram one five-character Chinese line into five English syllables would make it mere babble.
But to me a seven-syllable English line allows a fair balance of distillation and speed. Assonance and internal rhyme (“blooms… playroom” with “plums” and “clue,” picked up later, elegiacally, by “broom”) approximate some, just some, of the structuring principles at work in the original. Cutting out the ligaments of prose—punctuation, capitalization, even proper syntax—seem to me to allow some room for ambiguity and semantic play.
As for this poem by Li Bai, a superb brooding on the eros and inevitability of loss, it seemed to me the last goal was to get out of its way. Make it new, Pound commanded. I hope I’ve done nothing of that kind.
Mark Minster