{"id":776,"date":"2008-11-02T15:42:55","date_gmt":"2008-11-02T20:42:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/china\/?p=776"},"modified":"2014-08-30T13:38:16","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T13:38:16","slug":"mountains-vikings-and-chinese-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2008\/11\/mountains-vikings-and-chinese-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Mountains, Vikings, and Chinese Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lots of people seem to like Chinese poetry. The latest NYRB has a review of a reprint of A.C. Graham’s Poems of the Late T’ang by Eliot Weinberger.<\/a>1<\/a><\/sup> The book was first published in 1965. A review now may seem odd, but it seems like its always a good time for people (everyone from Ezra Pound to Kilgore Trout) to talk about Chinese poetry. Part of the reason for this is that a lot of Chinese poetry, and especially Tang stuff, sounds very much like modern poetry once you translate it. I assume some translator of Chinese poetry has expressed this as well, but I take an example from Jane Smiley’s introduction to The Sagas of Icelanders.<\/em>2<\/a><\/sup> The Sagas have been tremendously popular (in literary terms) in the twentieth century just like Tang poetry because they are both modern (more a novel in the case of the Sagas) and medieval at the same time. As Smiley puts it.<\/p>\n

And yet, these stories are so clearly medieval
\nAnd yet, they are not
\nThis is their fascinating paradox<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Chinese poetry turns out to be much the same. Weinberger says that when Graham’s translation first came out “most of the poets I knew avidly read it.” One of the poems he brings up is Han Yu’s The South Mountains (\u5357\u5c71) It is a very long poem, and he only cites a few lines out of a much longer section of similes describing mountains.<\/p>\n

Scattered like loose tiles
\nOr running together like converging spokes,
\nOff keel like rocking boats
\nOr in full stride like horses at the gallop;
\nBack to back as though offended,
\nFace to face as though lending a hand<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Weinberg says that this “combination of trance-inducing repetitive rhyme and hypersimilitude would not be attempted again for another 1,000 years, until the Chilean poet Vincente Huidobro’s modernist extravaganza Altazor”<\/p>\n

As this is a blog an I have unlimited electrons, I can give you the whole section on mountains.3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Climbing up high I reached the summit,
\nQuickly bolting squirrels and weasels scattered.<\/p>\n

Before and below opening wide,
\nScattered and strewn corrugations piled up:<\/p>\n

Some joined like marriage
\nOr constrained like combat<\/p>\n

Or relaxed like lying prostrate
\nOr alert like startled pheasants<\/p>\n

Or dispersed like broken tiles
\nOr guided like spokes to the hub<\/p>\n

Or floating like boat travel
\nOr direct like horses running<\/p>\n

Or backed off like enemies
\nOr face to-face like partners<\/p>\n

Or confused like bamboos germinating
\nOr swollen like cauterizing moxa<\/p>\n

Or disarrayed like lines in a sketch
\nOr sinuous like Great Seal Script<\/p>\n

Or meshed like star configurations
\nOr dense like hovering clouds<\/p>\n

Or buoying up like waves
\nOr breaking apart like plows<\/p>\n

Or like the valiants Meng Pen and Hsia Yu
\nWho gamble victory fighting for the prize\u2014<\/p>\n

The victor strong exuding power,
\nThe defeated stunned grumbling his anger.<\/p>\n

Or like the grandeur of a ruler
\nWho gathers, at court the humble and youthful;<\/p>\n

Intimate, yet never too familiar;
\nDistant, yet never estranged.<\/p>\n

Or like facing a banquet table
\nWith dishes in excess spread for show,<\/p>\n

Or like traveling through Nine Plains
\nWhere grave mounds embrace their coffins.<\/p>\n

Or stacked up like a double-boiler
\nOr erect like a sacrificial urn<\/p>\n

Or upturned like terrapins sunning themselves
\nOr collapsed like sleeping quadrupeds<\/p>\n

Or undulating like hidden dragons
\nOr wings flapping like a captured condor<\/p>\n

Or equal like friends
\nOr following like first and second<\/p>\n

Or adrift like exile
\nOr pensive like waiting<\/p>\n

Or antagonistic like enmity
\nOr close like marriage<\/p>\n

Or solemn like high miters
\nOr swirling like dancing sleeves<\/p>\n

Or immovable like battle formations
\nOr encircling like the great hunts<\/p>\n

Or submissive\u2014flowing east
\nOr restful\u2014head to the north<\/p>\n

Or like the blaze from a roasting fire
\nOr like vapor rising while steaming rice<\/p>\n

Or moving and not pausing
\nOr left and not gathered<\/p>\n

Or aslant and not inclined
\nOr slack and not taut<\/p>\n

Or naked like bald temples
\nOr smoking like a wooden pyre<\/p>\n

Or like the cracks on tortoise shells
\nOr like the lines of the eight trigrams<\/p>\n

Or level on top like po
\nOr broken underneath like kou4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Elongated-like: broken then joined again
\nUnbending-like: deserting then meeting again<\/p>\n

Agape-like: fish mouths gasping from duckweed
\nSparse-like: constellations traversed by the moon<\/p>\n

Majestic-like: trees tall in the courtyard
\nPeaked-like: granaries stacked up high<\/p>\n

Pointed-like: halberds standing sharp
\nGlittering-like: holding jade and jasper<\/p>\n

Opening-like: flowers unfurling the calyx
\nDripping-like: rain falling from broken eaves<\/p>\n

Leisure-like: stretched out and calm
\nObstinate-like: familiar and pushy<\/p>\n

Superior-like: emergent and speeding
\nSquirming-like: frightened, unwilling to stir.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For a Modernist this might just be playing with language, but for Han Yu it was something else. Steven Owen sees the poem as an example of “architectural representation”, where each part of the description is part of a transparently orderly whole. The poem ends<\/p>\n

Mighty they stand between Heaven and Earth,
\nin orderly function like the body’s ducts and veins.<\/p>\n

Who was he who first laid out their origin?
\nWho, in labor and striving, urged it on?
\nCreating in this place the simple and artificed,
\nwith forces joined, he bore long-suffering toil.
\nCould he have not applied hatchet and ax?\u2014
\nhe must have used spells and incantations.
\nNo tradition survives from the Age of Chaos,
\nsuch a mighty deed none can repay.
\nI have heard from the priest in charge of
\nsacrifice
\nthat he descends to taste the offering’s sweet
\nscent.
\nFinely wrought, I made this poem,
\nby which I may join in requiting him.<\/p>\n

So for Han Yu this is not a riot of descriptions, but rather an affirmation of the orderliness of the universe. Mountains, words, Han Yu, crocodiles<\/a>, all of them are part of an orderly, knowable whole. Not how I would explain the modernist approach to art or reality. Not that I am really here to tell poets they can’t say anything they want about Chinese poetry, but it is interesting to see the corpus of classical Chinese poetry leading two lives.<\/p>\n

  1. Graham, A.C. Poems of the Late T’ang. NYRB Classics, 2008. ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li>

  2. The Sagas of Icelanders: A Selection. 1st ed. Viking Penguin, 2000. ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li>

  3. This is from the Charles Hartman translation in Liu, Wu-Chi and Irving Yucheng Lo eds. Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry. Indiana University Press, 1990., so it is a tad different ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li>

  4. hexagrams from the Yijing ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Lots of people seem to like Chinese poetry. The latest NYRB has a review of a reprint of A.C. Graham’s Poems of the Late T’ang by Eliot Weinberger.1 The book was first published in 1965. A review now may seem odd, but it seems like its always a good time for people (everyone from Ezra…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[165,119,148,164],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-english","category-poetry","category-translation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-cw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4766,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions\/4766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}