Embracing the Seasons of Heaven

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

I suspect I am not the only reader who loves David Hinton’s translations of Chinese poets so much that I take a kind of holiday when each new one appears. I savor his introduction characterizing the poet’s uniqueness, read a few poems every morning and night, hope that the book won’t come to an end too soon – and when it does, feel like I have a new friend with whom it will be a comfort to dwell for the rest of my life.


In his combination of quantity and quality Mr. Hinton has established himself as the premier Chinese translator of our generation, taking his place in a line that includes both pure poets – Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder – and scholar-poets – Arthur Waley, Burton Watson, A.C. Graham. In the cumulative insight into Chinese poetics to be found in his introductions,he also takes his place alongside Wai-lim Yip, Francois Cheng, Eliot Weinberger, and Stephen Owens.


Mr. Hinton’s first gift was Tu Fu, China’s Shakespeare, in 1988. This was followed byT’ao Ch’ien, founder of “fields and gardens” poetry, and Hsieh Lingyun, founder of “mountains and rivers” poetry; the two together,in the fifth century, set in motion the great tradition of wilderness poetry Mr. Hinton cares most about.


Since then we have had from him, besides Taoist texts and even some contemporary poetry: Meng Hao-jan, the first great T’ang dynasty poet, the first to take the maturing fusion of Taoism and Buddhism and infuse its consciousness into the wilderness tradition; Li Po, Tu Fu’s older friend and rival for poetic pre-eminence; Meng Chao, who reinvented poetry for the late T’ang, abandoning the tradition of response to immediate experience for a new, more symbolist world of inner imaginings; and Po-Chu-i, whose “interiorization of wilderness,” in a voice that presents the poet’s own ego “egolessly” among the other “ten thousand things,” came to define the second great age of Chinese poetry in the Sung.


His greatest gift appeared in 2002, and has now happily come out in a New Directions paperback – “Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China” (New Directions, 295 pages, $17.95). Twelve other T’ang and Sung poets appear here in addition to selections from the seven just named. If you were to give a single volume to everyone you cared about, in the hopes of making them fall in love with Chinese poetry, I would argue that “Mountain Home” should be it.


But before you set off to hike for months in these poetic wildernesses,you would do best to prepare yourself with a different kind of guide: the character-bycharacter translation and commentary. It only takes exposure to one instance of this genre to realize that the most gifted poet in English will never be able to reproduce, over the length of a whole volume, certain standard features of classical Chinese verse.


For starters, the classical language dispenses with plurals, separate parts of speech, tenses, and personal pronouns. When your translator translates the character “go”as “I went”he is introducing an ego that isn’t necessarily meant to be there and a narrative unnecessarily pinned down in a past tense; when he writes “chilled by green pines” he is interpreting from “cold green pine.”


Each line of a classical poems is five or seven monosyllabic words, with a sensebreak after the second or fourth syllable, respectively. They also are rhymed, and pronunciation changes over centuries have made the rhyme unclear even to most Chinese today. The high T’ang eight-line lu-shih, or “regulated verse” form – as central to Chinese tradition as the sonnet to English – actually proceeds by “monorhyme.” The same rhyme sound is present in all four even lines, and sometimes also in the opening line, like the systole and diastole of a heartbeat, moving the whole to an inexorable conclusion.


It gets even more elusive. This same “regulated verse” sorts the four tones of classical Chinese words into two groups, “level” and “deflected,” and requires in each couplet a counterpoint, syllable by syllable, between each of the two categories,in which,say,if the fourth syllable of the couplet’s first line is level,then the fourth of the second must be deflected. The four monorhymes must all be in the level tone.And the two inner couplets of the four-couplet structure must observe a strict parallelism, not only in tones but in grammar and syntax.


For example, Stephen Owens interprets:



stream sound choke sheer stone sun color chill green pine


as:



A stream’s sounds choked on steep-pitched stones, and hues of sunlight were chilled by green pines.


Already in 1967, David Hawkes performed the service of taking 35 wellknown poems of Tu Fu and lexically mapping them, character by character, with accompanying commentary; similar services since then have been performed by Wai-lim Yip and Greg Whincup. In 1987 Mr. Weinberger pulled off the ultimate tour de force: In “Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei,” he mapped a single four-line poem this way, then critiqued 19 different translations of it into English, French, and Spanish.


Read Mr. Weinberger’s little book in an hour and you will never read a Chinese “poetic” translation again the same way.You will start guessing which pronouns, prepositions, tenses, and qualifiers just wouldn’t be there in the original. You may turn away in disgust at the relentless imposition of the romantic “egotistical sublime” in all those “I sits” and “I wandereds.” And you may go mad trying to imagine lost monorhymes and inaccessible Bachlike tonal counterpoints.


In the end, though, only such a cold shower will entitle you to an informed admiration for the painstaking choices that masters like Mr. Hinton must make in order to craft a living breathing English poem. Tuck one of those lexical map books into your backpack along with “Mountain Home” and you can set out into the wilderness with a clean conscience.


One of the first things you will notice is that Mr.Hinton makes frequent use of a device the Chinese couplets always avoid: enjambment. Having lost the tensions of monorhyme, tonal counterpoint, and parallelism on which the originals thrive, he has the good sense to substitute the kind of runover word or phrase that can sustain a tension between line-end and syntax until the final couplet resolves it.


The words he sets alone at the beginning of lines in these enjambments are, in fact, usually those which bespeak the deep themes he is after in his wilderness selections.These are poems, as his introduction sums it up,of “utter belonging to a wilderness cosmology as dwellingplace” – and indeed, his title imitates the Chinese genius for summing up everything in two words: “Mountain Home.” Thus is it no surprise to see enjambments of words of poignant aging and distance, as in this example:



Wherever the mind dwells apart is itself a distant place. Picking chrysanthemums at my east fence, I see South Mountain far off.


And this one:



Faint, drifting from a city, a crow’s cry fades. Full of wild grace, egrets sleep.


Nor is it a surprise to see words enjambed that affirm joyous and reverent noticing and dwelling, as in this example:



These fragrant woodland chrysanthemums ablaze


Or in this:


I begin to feel the depths of a bamboo path, and soon come to know a master’s timeless dwelling.


As you continue wandering through his wilderness, though, enjambment falls away, and one self-contained couplet after another stops you dead in your tracks by the sheer majesty of its combined euphony and rhythm, whether in short lines or long. In this realm almost every ravishing visual is further enchanted by assonance and alliteration.



Here you will wander beyond shorelines all lone grace and long islands of lush brocade


will watch



shad and salmon, each in their season, stream up into creeks and shallows, sunfish and knife-fish follow rapids further, emerge in mountain springs


and will catch glimpses in the distance of mountains whose names Mr. Hinton has the tact to translate for us:



Cloud-Dream southlands a trifle in the palm, Savage-Knoll lost in that realm of blossoms.


Of course, no Chinese wilderness outing would be complete without visiting the “recluse home” of a “longago sage”; now,



his timeless cinnamons regal and empty, he’s white cloud that one day drifted away.


Once, though, the opposite happens; “A master at the gate of Way” visits the poet in his boat,



arrives from exalted mountain peaks, lofty cloudswept face raised all delight, heart all sage clarity spacious and free.


This is a wilderness of wonders, and in wondrous words.


Through his principle of selecting poems of “a wilderness cosmology as dwelling-place,” Mr.Hinton has given us no ordinary anthology of Chinese masterpieces. What he has placed in our hands is a book for all seasons, which I would give, with an equal sense of rightness, to young eco-idealists setting out alone with backpack on a four-day loop, to harassed executives whose weekend country houses are seeming more and more like where real meaning lies, to baby-boomers thinking about what retirement might really amount to.


Perhaps the most lovable of the T’ang masters is Po Chu-i, whose “gentle power” bespeaks a sense “of dwelling at the very center of one’s life.” Listen to what wilderness means for his old age:



My best years offered up day by day, I trust old age to this mountain return, a tired bird finding its thick forests, a worn-out fish back in clear streams. If I ever left here, where would I go – that peopled realm all trial and peril?


Or, to end on a more remote and august note, listen to the founder of the whole “mountains-and-rivers” tradition, Hsieh Ling-yun, speak reverently of his grandfather’s “retreat in the dusk of old age”:



Embracing the seasons of heaven through bright insight, the impulse turning them, and the inner pattern’s solitude … choosing the sacred beauty of occurrence coming of itself, he made the composure of these mountain peaks his own.


Mr. Hinton, if there is any justice, will be given grants for the rest of his life.He is a national treasure. We should pray that he grows old translating twice as many Chinese poets again as he already has. And we should assign a scholar to him who will draw up lexical maps for each poem he translates, with commentary on rhyme and tone and parallelism, to be published en face. Why shouldn’t we have it all?


Then, having it all, each of us, following the wisdom of those old sages, will do well to pare down the mass to a few favorite poets, poems, couplets, lines – and grow old with them.



Mr. Mullen has published translations of Tu Fu. His poem on China’s Three Gorges Dam is at www.thethreegorges.com.


The New York Sun

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