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Chinese Poetry, 2nd ed., Revised: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres

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CHINESE POETRY : An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres. Edited and translated by Wai-lim Yip. 358 pp. Durham NC and London : Duke University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8223-1951-9 (pbk.)

Wai-lim Yip, Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego, is a poet, a sophisticated thinker, and a brilliant translator, critic, and theorist. As heir to one of the richest and most subtle literatures in the world, he has always been understandably concerned about the often inferior quality of Western translations from Chinese, an inferiority he attributes to a misreading of the Chinese sensibility, and a reading into it of invalid Western assumptions. In other words, Western translators who do not understand the classical Chinese mind, can only represent it as operating more or less like their own minds, and in thus representing it end up by grossly misrepresenting it.

Professor Yip earlier devoted an entire study to this subject : 'Diffusion of Distances : Dialogues Between Chinese and Western Poetics' (1993). In the present book he has given the essentials of his argument in an introductory essay that bears careful reading : 'TRANSLATING CHINESE POETRY : The Convergence of Language and Poetics - A Radical Introduction' (pp.1-27).

In the Preface to his book, Professor Yip tells us that : "Underlying the classical Chinese aesthetic is the primary idea of noninterference with Nature's flow [cf., the Taoist 'Wu Wei']. As reflected in poetic language, this idea has engendered freedom from the syntactical rigidities often found in English. . . . This opens up an indeterminate space for readers to enter and reenter for multiple perceptions rather than locking thm into some definite perspectival position or guiding them in a certain direction" (page xiii).

This opening up of spaces in which all things, including the reader, are allowed to become themselves may sound a bit abstract to some, but its marvelous effects will be felt by anyone who sincerely opens themselves to the poems in this anthology.

The anthology contains 150 poems, drawn from all major modes and genres, which span two thousand years - from the 'Book of Songs' (c. - 600) to the poems of the Yuan Dynasty (+ 1260-1368). Each poem is printed with the original Chinese text in Professor Yip's beautiful brushed calligraphy, co-ordinated with word-by-word glosses, and followed by his spare and powerful translations. The effect is to correct more than a century of distortion caused by translators who were blind to the intricacies and aesthetics of the Chinese language, and to let English readers finally enter into the dynamics of the originals. Each section of the book is preceded by a short essay on the mode or genre to follow, and a useful 5-page Bibliography rounds out the book.

Here, as an example of Yip's style, is his rendering of a poem by Wang Wei on page 228. The Chinese text is given first at the top of the page, then the word-by-word translation which I shall omit, and then the final translation in four lines (numbered by Yip for the convenience of readers, and with my obliques added to indicate line breaks) :

"1. High on tree-tips, the hibiscus. / 2. In the mountain sets forth red calyxes. / 3. A home by a stream, quiet. No man. / 4. It blooms and falls, blooms and falls."

The poem's spareness opens up a space which allows each of us to generate our own vividly realized scene, and to entertain different ideas at different readings. Wang Wei, who was Buddhist, rather than getting in the way and trying to control things, is allowing them to come forward and declare themselves, and his procedure gains in meaning if we set it alongside an observation made by Dogen (+ 1200-1253), who wrote:

"Conveying the self to the myriad things to authenticate them is delusion; the myriad things advancing to authenticate the self is enlightenment" (Tr., F. H. Cook, 'Sounds of Valley Streams,' page 66).

In a word, Professor Yip's "noninterference."

So here is a truly marvelous book by a highly competent authority in which the English reader can finally find out what Chinese poetry is really all about. The book is beautifully printed on excellent strong paper, bound in a sturdy decorative wrapper, but sadly has a glued spine instead of the stitching that would have given us a book that could have been held open without effort.

Apart from the spine, my only complaint is that Professor Yip's calligraphy, though beautiful, is brushed in a cursive style which tends to make the structure of the more complex and less common characters hard to discern for beginners. Ideal in a book of this nature would have been to give the Chinese texts in large printed characters along with their romanized transcriptions.

But you can't have everything, and we should certainly be grateful for the labors that went into this unique anthology of Chinese poems, a book designed to give the English reader true access to the dynamics of one of the most subtle and interesting literatures in the world.

This splendid volume was my first serious introduction to the beauty of Chinese poetry. Yip begins his anthology with the classics of Chinese literature such as the "Book of History"and "Book of Poetry". What most pleased me, however, was that he dedicates a significant portion of his volume to the stirring, passionate and, unfortunately, dying poetic form called "Yueh Fu". Such poetry is rarely published these days in either Chinese or in translation. Thus, to have the opportunity to enjoy such poetry, whose themes are as fresh and touching today as they were 3,000 years ago, was truly a delight. Yip is further to be commended for including poems which demonstrate how this ancient form was imitated and re-worked in Song dynasty poetry.

For the person who wishes to gain an understanding of Chinese poetry, this is an excellent first volume. For those literate in Chinese, this volume (unlike many others) places the original Chinese alongside the english translations. For those who are not literate in Chinese, this volume, in most cases, provides as good a translation as can be found anywhere.

Upon completing this volume (which you will undoubtedly come back to many times), you will not only have a knowledge of the great poems of the Chinese literary tradition (such as Su Shi's "The Beautiful Nien Nu") but you will also have a good understanding of the structure of the various genres of Chinese poetry. In addition, this volume is full of gems of poetry which are to be in few other volumes. Lastly, the reader will come to appreciate richness, subtely, passion, variety and depth of Chinese poetry.

I have been very uneasy with most translations of Chinese classic poetry because it is usually rendered in English classic poetic style [iambic pentameter, end rhymes in ENGLISH!, etc.]

This is the first translation I have seen that makes an argument for a convincingly Chinese meaning. One does not need to understand Chinese characters to appreciate the character-by- character, word-by-word rendering. Then, there follows a sparse poetical version which lets one see the minimalism of the original Chinese.

A truly fine translation that has helped me appreciate the real beauty of Chinese poetry.

First a note on the format of the book. The subtitle is important: "An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres". This is the theme which governs the organisation of the material: the poems are grouped by form rather than by poet. There is a contents list for the poems, but no indexing by author or title, so the book seems to be aimed at those who will like what they are given rather than those who know what they are looking for.
Wai-lim Yip is Chinese poetry's equivalent of the period instrument zealots of classical music. He produced this collection in the 1970s in what he calls "dismay and anger" at what he sees as the "gross distortions" of Chinese poems by the old school translators of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Yip's argument is essentially that Chinese poetry is characterised by the juxtaposition of images; that the relationships between these images are the more expressive for being left unsaid; and that when they are spelt out by the insertion by translators of prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns, the productive ambiguity of these relationships is lost.
Thus far, Yip is absolutely right, but it is in his attempts to apply this argument to the practice of translation that he goes wrong. Firstly, his introductory essay is devoted largely to raising and destroying men of straw: the examples of "gross distortion" which he produces are from forgotten translators of a pre-modernist period and aesthetic, which differs as much from contemporary translations as it does from the Chinese viewpoint. He never takes on respected translators such as Waley, let alone those working in the 70s or today.
The second problem is that he fails to realise that the filling in of prepositions and other syntactic helpers is the result not of misunderstanding Chinese, but of understanding English. English translations need these words because that is the way that the English language expresses relationships; where they are omitted, we have good Chinese but bad English. Word for word translations such as Yip's are "half translations": helpful cribs for reading the original, but nothing more. Yip's failure to appreciate this shows the dangers of attempting to translate into, rather than from, a foreign language.
Yip attempts to circumvent this difficulty by pointing to poets of the modernist period, particularly Pound, who produced this kind of work under the influence of Chinese and Japanese poetry. But he fails to see that these are Orientalist works of the early 20th century, rather than signs of a lasting change in the English language or in the western aesthetic. Translating Du Fu and Li Bai as if they were Ezra Pound merely reinforces their apparent strangeness, rather than helping us to understand them.
As an example, Yip's Chun Wang is as follows:

Spring Scene
All ruins, the empire; mountains and rivers in view./To the city, spring: grass and trees are thick./The times strike. Before flowers, tears break loose./Separation cuts. Birds startle our heart./Beacon fires continued for three months on end./A letter from home is worth thousands of gold pieces./White hair, scratched, becomes thinner and thinner,/So thin it can hardly hold a pin.

In this translation, Yip's determination not to spell out the relationship between the elements leads him to deny their relationships. The translation of each line as one or more complete sentences, for example, destroys the couplets which are the main structural element of the poem. He can only avoid clarifying the relationship between the city and spring in the second line by producing a phrase with no meaning at all ("To the city, spring").
So Yip's translations fail as English poems. He replaces the implied connections of the original only with disconnections. But where the book does succeed is as a learning tool: the most valuable version of each poem is not the translation itself but the word for word crib which precedes it. This coupled with the reasonably legible calligraphic Chinese text is a great help for students of Chinese wishing to understand the original. This, then, is not a book for those seeking English translations, but it is an excellent resource for the student of the language.

Wai-Lim Yip sets the standard for the study of Chinese poetry by printing the original text side by side with both a word-for-word translation and an extended interpretation of the same for over 150 poems spanning all genres of Chinese poetry. By far, this book provides the most accessible versions of each poem. What it may lack in comprehensive representation, it more than makes up for in quality and packaging. While its translations do not fully become English poems, as critics have often said, the author does provide the reader with a most direct access to the binary data of the originals. As such, he expects the reader to work a little to put the poem to use. This book will interest a writer, especially one interested in translation and sources for new work, more than a scholar expecting brilliant English renditions of these classic poems.

Bottom line, there should be more books of Eastern poetry in "translation" in this form: original text in original characters, a word-for-word bare bones rendition, and then the translator's extrapolation of those bones. A fantastic learning tool for any writer.

others have characterized this book accurately. a curious omission is that there is no mention of the sound patterns of the originals, which as i understand it, despite changes in the way the language is spoken since the classical period, is still the main way a chinese reader would experience the poems' form.

I am neither a scholar, intellectual or poet. I had a passing interest in Chinese poetry and language. I picked this book up at random.

The chapter about translation is fascinating. To see how translation developed since the late 19th century is illuminating. I remember being taught in elementary school that Japanese and Chinese were "inferior" language because of their use of pictograms.

The poetry is beautiful and fascinating in its' spaciousness of translation, which invites the reader into experience.

This book drew me into studying Chinese for a short while, just enough to give me the ability to read a bit here and there in some simple poetry. With even my paltry understanding, Yip's analysis and examples of his students' experimental translations, gave me the audacity, perhaps, to try this. The most non-intellectual response: what a lovely treat!

I find Yip's approach to be a fundamental breakthrough in crosscultural awareness which attempts to bring chinese culture to life for the western mind.

This attempt reaches past the analytic perspective and borders on a cultural anthropology of mind. This is of keen value to psychologists, who began a primitive study in the late 1880's under the direction of Wundt. It went no further than 1900.

Besides the importance for linguists, those inspired by ancient texts, translators who value perspective within a language, students of comparative religion and traditional chinese medicine, a breakthough in the realm of poetry is attempted with a boldness that affirms the host culture as experienced by a chinese person. This will be an incredible experience for those who approach poetry with a serious intention. Yip's sensitivity and straightforwardness is refreshing and opens a vast new landscape. This, to me, places the text in the forefront of a new begining.

I find Yip's approach to be a fundamental breakthrough in crosscultural awareness which attempts to bring chinese culture to life for the western mind.

This attempt reaches past the analytic perspective and borders on a cultural anthropology of mind. This is of keen value to psychologists, who began a primitive study in the late 1880's under the direction of Wundt. It went no further than 1900.

Besides the importance for linguists, those inspired by ancient texts, translators who value perspective within a language, students of comparative religion and traditional chinese medicine, a breakthough in the realm of poetry is attempted with a boldness that affirms the host culture as experienced by a chinese person. This will be an incredible experience for those who approach poetry with a serious intention. Yip's sensitivity and straightforwardness is refreshing and opens a vast new landscape. This, to me, places the text in the forefront of a new begining.