Chinese Poetry

 

The earliest Chinese poetry begins with the Shih Ching, a collection of 305 poems of varying length, drawn from all ranks of Chinese society. The title Shih Ching is usually translated in English as The Book of Songs or sometimes as The Odes. Shih means "song-words." Ching can mean "classic" or "traditional" or in the context of literature, it means "writings" or "scripture." Commentator Mao ordered the poems and assigned each one a number, and his number is still used as the primary means of referring to each poem in Chinese texts, though I have chosen to list my samples below by first lines and titles.

 

Some of these poems may date back to 1000 BCE. The oldest poem in this collection that can be pinpointed precisely dates back to 621 BCE, the date of the death of Duke Mu of the state of Ch'in. The various poems probably were compiled over several centuries, most of them during the Zhou (also spelled Chou) period around 600 BCE. This treasury of traditional songs is the oldest collection of poems in world literature, and it became one of the Five Confucian Classics.

 

In spite of the many centuries that the Shih Ching embraces, there are several traits prevalent in the poems that later became traits of Chinese poetry generally.

 

Traits of Classical Chinese poetry:

 

(1) Usually, the Chinese poem is fairly simple on the surface. Western culture, which was influenced by Shakespeare, Milton, and the Romantic poets, had a pronounced tendency to think of poems as ornate, elaborate creations made by a few men of genius. Chinese culture, influenced by the anonymity of the Shih Ching, had a tendency to think of poems as something written by common humanity for the eyes of other humans.

 

(2) Usually the poem deals with either agrarian imagery, courtship and marriage, or dynastic concerns. The Zhou (or Chou) dynasty was agrarian in its roots, and for its people, "their sense of beauty and order is closely related to the cycles and abundance of the agricultural year," as Stephen Owen suggests (xx). Likewise, the poems often revolve around the sorrows and joys of romance, or dealt with the heroic and legendary exploits of rulers and kings. Other poems, which probably originated in folk-songs, deal with the everyday trials and tribulations of love, life, and the family.

 

(3) Each poem is usually composed of lines of four syllables, usually with rhymed endings in the original Chinese. Often these four syllables appear as four pictograms. The normal form of the courtship and marriage songs is three verses of four lines each. Only a single non-fragmentary poem consists of a single quatrain, the form that later became popular in modern Chinese poetry.

 

(4) The poetic principle organizing the poem is often one of contrast. Often Chinese poetry will juxtapose a natural scene with a social or personal situation. The reader of the poem sees the similarity in the natural description and the human condition, and comes to a new awareness of each by this contrast. In Chinese, this idea is embodied in the terms fu, bi, and xing (pronounced "shing"). Fu refers to a straightforward narrative with a beginning, middle, and conclusion, that stands by itself. Bi, literally "against," implies a comparison or contrast, placing two things side by side. When one takes two different fu, and places them together, the two create a bi. This results in xing, a mental stimulation or "lightning" that pervades the mind of the reader, bringing new insight or awareness into the nature of the individual fu that compose the poem. Confucius stated that this xing is the purpose of poetry, that the point of a poem was to make the mind contemplate its subject deeply.

 

Like European poetry, Chinese poetry often relies on alliteration, repetition, and onomatopoeia to create its effects. Song #1 of the Shih Ching (#87 in the Waley anthology) illustrates this point when we contrast the original Chinese with the English translation of the poem.

 

Additionally, the Shih Ching contains four general subtypes of poems:

 

            Feng, (folk-songs)

            Minor Odes

            Major Odes

            Dynastic Songs

 

Translation

In the course of translating, problems will crop up, then translators and scholars begin to argue about what criteria they should follow, and what methods they should adopt. The voice of argument is louder in the sector of poetry translation.

By the end of the 19th century both James Legge (1815-1897) and Herbert A. Giles1 (1845-1935) had published their translations of classical Chinese poetry. Legge was a monumental translator and transmitter of “Confucian books” to the Western world. The Book of Poetry was to his credit. Herbert A. Giles is better known in China. He published Chinese Poetry in English Verse in 1898. The first decade of the 20th century saw the publication of several volumes of translations such as Book of Odes (Shi-King) by Launcelot A. Cranmer-Byng in 1905.

 

Then in 1915 Cathay was brought out. Ezra Pound (1885-1972), the noted modernist and imagist poet, had poor knowledge of Chinese language and his rendering was unreliable. Despite this, Pound helped to make classical Chinese poetry and its direct presentation of images an integral part of modern poetry. Imagist movement leader Amy Lowell (1874-1925) also translated some Chinese classical poetry. As an imagist she championed free verse, tight precision in vocabulary, and concise style and happened to find the last two characteristics in Chinese poetry.

 

The compatriot of Herbert A. Giles, W.J.B. Fletcher (1871-1933), had served as British consular official in China and put out Gems of Chinese Verse, a Giles-like translation.

 

From late 1910s, Arthur Waley (1889-1966), the celebrated English Oriental scholar and translator, started to publish his translations and was an authority on the poet Li Bai (Li Bo, Li Po, or Li Pai). It is commonly believed in China that he did the job better than Giles and Pound.

 

Another well-known translator of Li Bai was Japanese scholar Shigeyoshi Obata. He published The Works of Li Po, the Chinese Poet in 1928, which includes one hundred and twenty four poems. Obata enjoys equal reputation with Waley in China. He is believed to have known more and delivered more than most of other Chinese classical poetry translators.

 

Tang (T'ang) poetry is many translators’ favorite. With the help of Kiang Kang-hu (a Chinese), Witter Bynner (1881-1968) wrote The Jade Mountain in 1929, which contains the translation of 300 T'ang poems.

 

In 1940, Soame Jenyns published Selections from the Three Hundred Poems of the T'ang Dynasty.

 

In 1965, A.C. Graham, one of the most distinguished Sinologists, brought out Poems of the Late T'ang.

 

In early 1970s, Innes Herdan put out The Three Hundred Tang Poems. Besides Li Bai, Du Fu (Tu Fu), Bai Juyi and Wang Wei are preferred by many translators, such as Arthur Cooper, A.R. Davis, G.W. Robinson, David Young, Rewi Alley, Vikram Seth and David Hinton. They chose just one or two of T’ang poets.

 

In 1976, John Turner et al. published A Golden Treasury of Chinese Poetry.

 

Award-winning translator Burton Watson turned out The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century in 1984.

 

In April 2003, The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry came out. Edited by poet Eliot Weinberger, the anthology includes translations by four American poets Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder and an above-mentioned scholar-translator David Hinton.

1 In my opinion Giles is the best translator.