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Classical Chinese poetry is full of: Coldly compiled anthologies Let's honour the classical Chinese tradition of compiling poems into anthologies with titles like Collection of the Even More Mysterious and Breath of the Cosmos by posting the Pearls and Blossoms of the Book Fair. To lend some wise order to an imprudently lovely OP, the classics we've contemplated thus far are listed at the end of this post. Uplifting life stories quote:Li He also has a penchant for erotic, romantic and even morbidly violent imagery, and his poems grate against the nerves with the shrieking of ghosts, the weeping of flowers, and the burning of sinister fires. He was something of a Chinese Edgar Allan Poe, though a much better poet than Poe was, and like Poe his reputation suffered because literary culture couldn't stomach his unclassifiable works of genius. Sponsored in his day by the prominent poet and prose writer Han Yu, Li He quickly disappeared from literary consciousness after his death (aged 27, obv -Shogi), making a comeback only in the last two centuries. Two hundred forty of his poems have survived centuries of neglect, though legend states that what remains was part of a larger collection that was thrown into a toilet by his vindictive cousin. ... 'Shown to my Younger Brother' was written because Li He was deprived of his candidacy for the imperial examinations on the grounds that the degree "Jinshi" he was seeking sounded like the name of his father, "Jinshu". According to the Confucian tradition, it is a violation of filial piety to mention directly one's father's name. Therefore, it was taboo for Li He to sit in an exam for "Jinshi". Li He has some great and jarringly mystical poetry, including the bizarre Tang dynasty Weekend at Bernie's tale of Flying Light in which he seems to coin a cool term for Joe Average or John Doe: 'Who is Ren Hungzi, riding a white rear end through the clouds?' (lol) Ren Hungzi could mean something like 'Human Soul' Virgins and chads du fu: writes 'sorrow' in the air, gets disrespected by his own sons, writes poems about his failure as a poet, dreams of li bai li bai: gets naked and dicks around in the forest, stays at whoever's house he wants due to natural charm, writes poems about his own genius, dreams about not wasting his life working, then doesn't du fu is pretty cool though and these two were actually bros. check du fu's Song of a Thatched Hut where he wishes he could 'shelter all the cold people under the sky' Elegant English translations Love to call a six-line poem Visiting the Mountain Courtyard of the Distinguished Monk Tanxing at Enlightenment Monastery Grapes of wrath from a thousand years ago quote:Light Fur and Fat Horses Existential tension between the heart of dust and the desire for nonbeing Wang Wei's poems often showcase this feeling of being torn between the mundanities of busy imperial bureaucratic life and a need for blissful, empty stillness. Song of Peach Tree Spring, reimagining a fantasy by the earlier Daoist Tao Qian, is interesting for this. Wang Wei sees himself drifting through the forest on his fishing boat, through a grove of blossoming peach trees, losing track of place and time and drifting through a narrow pass in the mountains, into another realm cut off from the normal world since the Han era... Wang Wei, tr. Willis Barnstone and Xu Haixin posted:... Naturally he never can get back to Narnia: quote:... Spaghetti western vibes delivered by Mongolian-Chinese folk song quote:Autumn Thoughts, to the tune of Sky-Clear Sand And much more From endless poems about day drinking by poets who would eventually drown while day drinking, to Mao reminding us that the warlords of the past were bullshit, it's all just great and really rewarding. Read Chinese poetry and you too can care about parallelism so complicated it ended careers and sanities, and the five tones: ma, ma, ma, ma and ma Classics contemplated: Warring States period Qu Yuan (~340-278 BCE) Heavenly Questions, aka Ask the Sky (excerpts) Han dynasty Anonymous (?) Nineteen Old Poems (14th of 19) Cao Cao (155-220 CE) A Short Song Jin dynasty Lu Ji (261-303 CE) Inspiration, from the Essay on Literature Zi Ye (?) Three Songs Sui dynasty Xue Daoheng (540-609) Nocturnal Song Yang Guang (569-618) Meeting with Qimin Towards the Plain Tang dynasty Wang Wei (699-759) Song of Peach Tree Spring (excerpts) Birdsong Brook Sketching Things Deer Park (tons of different translations compared) Li Bai (701-762) Zazen on Ching-T'ing Mountain Drinking Alone by Moonlight Gazing at a Waterfall on Mount Lu Du Fu (712-770) Leaving the Town Crazy Man Meng Jiao (751-814) Laments of the Gorges (excerpts) Autumn Thoughts (5th of 15) Seeing off Reverend Dan XII (excerpt) On Failing the Examination After Passing the Examination Complaints Exile's Song Bai Juyi (772-846) Light Fur and Fat Horses Golden Bells Remembering Golden Bells Sighs for the Fallen A Poem Posted to Yuan the Ninth Having Seen his Poem about Pomegranate Blossom near Wuguan Pass Poem in Place of a Letter (excerpt) Reading Laozi Yuan Zhen (779-831) Apricot Garden Two Poems on the Wall of Luokou Post On Seeing Letian's Poem In Response to Letian, Who Often Dreamed of Me The Story of Yingying (excerpts, prose-poetry hybrid) Li He (790-817) Song of an Arrowhead from Changping To Be Shown to My Younger Brother Yu Xuanji (840-868) Melancholy Thoughts Unsold Peonies Visiting Lofty-Truth Monastery and Viewing the Names of New Graduates at the South Tower Song dynasty Liu Yong (~984-1053) Partridge Omen Mei Yaochen (1002-1060) An Excuse for not Returning the Visit of a Friend The Potter Eyes Dark Sorrow Su Shi (1037-1101) Written on the Wall of West Forest Temple On the Birth of a Son Mountain Village (4th of 5) On the Zhu-Chen Village Wedding Painting (2nd of 2) Excerpts from the 'Crow Terrace Poetry Trial' (legal records) Li Qingzhao (1084-1155) Sorrow of Separation, to the tune of A Sprig of Plum Blossom Yuan dynasty Ma Zhiyuan (1250-1321) Autumn Thoughts, to the tune of Sky-Clear Sand Guan Daosheng (1262-1319) Love Poem Qiao Jifu (?-1345) Hostel Window Thoughts on Qingming, to the tune of Cutting the Cassia Tree Ni Zan (1301-1374) Wind among the Trees on the Riverbank Ming dynasty Xu Wei (1521-1593) Peach Leaf Ferry Grapes Four Cries of a Gibbon (excerpts, set of four plays) Qing dynasty Pu Songling (1640-1715) Remarks on the seven transformations of the examination candidate (prose) Kong Shangren (1648-1718) Trying On Glasses Seeing Monk Shuju Return to Jinling Warlord era Zhou Enlai (1898-1976) Arashiyama in the Rain Zhang Zongchang (1881-1932) Visiting Mount Tai Poem About Bastards KMT-CPC Civil War Zhao Yuanren (1892-1982) Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den Mao Zedong (1893-1976) The People's Liberation Army captures Nanking Snow People's Republic Li Jiahua (~1940s-) No, You Did Not Die Bei Dao (1949-) Nightmare Wang Juntao (1958-) Poem about Qingming, 1976 Yin Lichuan (1973-) Method Xiaobai Had a Surgery Spring Drought From other cultures Enheduanna - (23rd century BCE) Exaltation of Inanna (excerpt, orig in Sumerian) Julia Balbilla (~72-130s CE) - When on the first day we didn't hear Memnon (orig in Greek) Shogi fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Nov 14, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 23:24
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Are there any good online sources/print collections you'd recommend for English versions of Chinese poetry?
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Apr 20, 2023 23:48
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gently caress yeah! I'd love to hear other print recommendations. In college my Chinese poetry course used a great compilation called Sunflower Splendor. It covers a huge stretch of time, though, so if a particular period is of interest, there might be a better collection that focuses there. I love Du Fu and found Du Fu: a Life in Poetry translated by David Young to be wonderful. I don't know Chinese at all so I have no idea if the translations are particularly faithful, but the poems themselves are great. Also I have a Waley collection that's pretty good, there's a set of two poems by Po Chu-i in the 810s a few years apart that absolutely devastated me: GOLDEN BELLS When I was almost forty I had a daughter whose name was Golden Bells. Now it is just a year since she was born; She is learning to sit and cannot yet talk. Ashamed--to find that I have not a sage's heart: I cannot resist vulgar thoughts and feelings. Henceforward I am tied to things outside myself: My only reward--the pleasure I am getting now. If I am spared the grief of her dying young, Then I shall have the trouble of getting her married. My plan for retiring and going back to the hills Must now be postponed for fifteen years! REMEMBERING GOLDEN BELLS Ruined and ill--a man of two score; Pretty and guileless--a girl of three. Not a boy--but still better than nothing: To soothe one's feeling--from time to time a kiss! There came a day--they suddenly took her from me; Her soul’s shadow wandered I know not where. And when I remember how just at the time she died She lisped strange sounds, beginning to learn to talk, Then I know that the ties of flesh and blood Only bind us to a load of grief and sorrow. At last, by thinking of the time before she was born, By thought and reason I drove the pain away. Since my heart forgot her, many days have passed And three times winter has changed to spring. This morning, for a little, the old grief came back, Because, in the road, I met her foster-nurse. Reading through the paperback “Chinese Poems”, I couldn’t believe how moved I was by these. I read the first one and marked it because it conjures a very specific stage in the development of a child that wasn’t all that long ago for my daughter, and it wrestles with philosophical concerns being pulled down to earth by material, present things, as well as historical cultural interest in the flippant notion of “if I am spared the grief of her dying young / then I shall have the trouble of getting her married”. So imagine my surprise when 11 poems and 16 pages later I see “Remembering Golden Bells” as the title and got a feeling of dread. The poem just states everything so plainly, it’s devastating. Obviously the “not a boy—but still better than nothing” line hasn’t aged well, but the rest of it just resonates so powerfully as a sequel to the first poem, something you don’t tend to see a lot of when it comes to poetry. Using, again, a very specific detail to illustrate her age, how “she lisped strange sounds, beginning to learn to talk” just cemented it further—he will not, after all, have the trouble of getting her married. He gets the other thing. The pain of having to force your heart to forget and then the old wound throbbing again due to a chance encounter—so relatable and simple, impossible not to insert your own circumstances into the poem, imagining any grief, not just a father’s. Great poetry communicates Truth and these two definitely qualify—having endured over 1200 years, written in a distant time and place, yet the emotions are unmistakably human and timeless. It’s incredibly humbling to think that a Chinese poet’s grief from over a thousand years ago could sail forward through time to today and remain completely intact.
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Apr 21, 2023 04:51
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A Strange Aeon, those poems together moved me deeply. I'll check out the collection for sure.
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Apr 21, 2023 16:49
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Leraika posted:Are there any good online sources/print collections you'd recommend for English versions of Chinese poetry? The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry gives you a swift overview of the entire corpus of Chinese poetry from Laozi to Mao Zedong, along with lots of helpful context. You can use that to find the eras and genres you're most interested in, then drill down from there. A translator of poetry has to decide what to preserve, and what has to be lost. The Anchor book generally tries to preserve the immediacy of the imagery without dropping completely into prose, so there are some inventive translations at times. This is the book that furnished that opening quote about Li He. Speaking of which, JD Frodsham's Collected Poems of Li He is one of your only options for a complete Li He in English, excepting the ones lost to the cousin's toilet of history. I really recommend it. The striking slap-in-the-face power of the poems comes through in the translations, and brings a brilliantly different vision of a famous era. Tang poetry has that starry reputation for a reason, so you might want a more general collection of the Tang greats. The big four are: -Bai Juyi, a bit of a man of the people who wrote in a nice flowing narrative style; -Du Fu, like some ideal of Confucianism, a genius of ridiculous scope and technical mastery; -Li Bai, the famous Daoist free spirit; -Wang Wei, the Chan Buddhist I quoted in the OP. He was an accomplished painter and his poems are very visual too. Three Hundred Tang Poems is a nice little book with plenty of all four. The Anchor book gives you a few snippets of the Songs of Chu which imo are wonderful - mystical and emotional and difficult to grasp. You can read a whole lot more for free here.
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Apr 21, 2023 18:38
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Shogi posted:The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry gives you a swift overview of the entire corpus of Chinese poetry from Laozi to Mao Zedong, along with lots of helpful context. You can use that to find the eras and genres you're most interested in, then drill down from there. A translator of poetry has to decide what to preserve, and what has to be lost. The Anchor book generally tries to preserve the immediacy of the imagery without dropping completely into prose, so there are some inventive translations at times. This is the book that furnished that opening quote about Li He. Speaking of which, These are great references, thank you so much! I'd been browsing the University of Virginia's Tang poetry collection but had absolutely no idea where to go from there.
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Apr 21, 2023 18:44
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Not at all, it's a pleasure to hunt through the bookshelves for good stuff :3 Here's a libgen link for the Li He collection by the way.A Strange Aeon posted:Remembering Golden Bells Excellent post. For anyone that doesn't know, Bai Juyi and Po Chu-i are the same guy in Pinyin and Wade-Giles transliterations respectively. The Golden Bells pieces hit hard and they sum him up really - he was a writer who eschewed prissy, rigid forms for something much more direct. He had a really keen sense for common sufferings that has made him timeless, like Strange Aeon said. Here's another piece on mortality: Bai Juyi posted:Sighs for the Fallen For light relief from dead daughters and encroaching baldness, here's an unusually good Twitter thread about a Song dynasty poet's cats: http://recursion.org/2020/10/29/lu-you-cat-poems
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Apr 21, 2023 20:53
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This one has always stuck with me, by Meng Chiao, lived 751-814. Translated by Stephen Owen. Laments of the Gorges, two selections The edges of the gorges hack up sun and moon, sun and moon always ruined in their shining. All things grow warp and slanted, bird's wings fly warped and slanting. Teeth on sunken stones locked; spirits of the drowned summoned but don't return. A blur--armor-shells in a clear spring, splotched, the emerald robes on stone. Hungrily lapping up the howl of rushing waters; slavering, seems like whirling, swirling oils. Don't go strolling through the gorges in springtime-- stinking grasses grow tiny, tiny. Owls mimic human speech, dragons suck in mountainous waves. They can, during broad daylight, coax you with pleasant clear breezes, shake judgment, make all living things stumble, gather reeking smells to spread from deep vines. Toothed streams, bleak and bottomless, hacksaw froth, found everywhere. Slanted trees where birds won't nest, dangling gibbons swing past them. You can't listen to the laments of the gorges, for nothing can be done about the bitterness there. There's just a real menace to the landscape being described that slants almost to cosmic horror imo. And the conclusion that you just can't listen to the laments of the gorges bothers me the same way in the NT as when Jesus says the poor will always be with us, but it's definitely a powerful statement.
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Apr 21, 2023 21:02
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A Strange Aeon posted:Laments of the Gorges, two selections - Meng Jiao tr. Stephen Owen Love the way this makes the familiar feel otherworldly, as though some kind of alien light were playing across Earth and revealing sharp skewed things. Good translation that transmits a really complex sense of awe, thanks for posting it - I haven't read it yet myself but Stephen Owen wrote a whole book about the poems of Meng Jiao and his close friend Han Yu which I bet will help understand the jaundiced and almost apocalyptic tone you see in Laments of the Gorges. Meng Jiao failed his imperial exams (clarifying edit: several times - he did get a good pass in the end, though he didn't see much success from it) and generally had a tortured relationship with poetry: Meng Jiao, tr. David Hinton posted:Autumn Thoughts Bones crop up in Meng's self-image often. He contrasted his work with his pal's: 'Poetry's bones jut in Meng Jiao, its waves flow forth in Han Yu' e: Just gonna elaborate a bit on Meng Jiao's relationship with poetry and how it informs his depiction of nature. It's not just a love-hate 'my passion has become my job' thing or sourness at not being as successful as his heroes - though both of those are a big part of it. He saw a contradiction in the creative work of his time, with the complexity of composition and obsessive, cloistered lifestyles separating Tang poets from the world and society they were trying to capture. That 'cosmic horror' In Laments of the Gorges maybe represents Meng's terror of his own alienation from a natural world that confronts him as extrinsic and irreconcilable with his attempts to depict it. You can't listen to the laments because it's impossible to interpret them faithfully with the tools Meng had inherited, and so he turns to surrealism and a faintly comical level of bitterness. Meng Jiao posted:A lifetime spent in useless squawking, Shogi fucked around with this message at 16:57 on May 28, 2023 |
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Apr 23, 2023 13:10
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Shogi posted:Anchor book gives you a few snippets of the Songs of Chu which imo are wonderful - mystical and emotional and difficult to grasp. You can read a whole lot more for free here. I have the Penguin Classics Songs of the South. Different and slightly starchier translation, but still a great read. There’s not all that many poems in the world about how if you fail at politics it’s kind of like if you made a sick garland from all the flowers of the field and showed it to your boyfriend and he was said it was lame, and what you should do in that case is ditch him and go on a spirit quest and summon the gods in a flying chariot. Anyway this book has two of those. It also has the “Heavenly Questions”, a list of questions about ancient myths. They’re sometimes very allusive and obscure and a bunch of them do not make any sense because, allegedly, the ties that held the bamboo slats of the original book together rotted away and later editors couldn’t figure out what order everything came in or what was missing. I’ll see if I can post some of these later because they cover the spectrum from interesting to deranged.
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Apr 25, 2023 14:09
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skasion posted:There’s not all that many poems in the world about how if you fail at politics it’s kind of like if you made a sick garland from all the flowers of the field and showed it to your boyfriend and he was said it was lame, and what you should do in that case is ditch him and go on a spirit quest and summon the gods in a flying chariot. Anyway this book has two of those. lol, also notable for said flowers doing double duty as obtuse metaphors for power players in a political-religious struggle which is allegorised through the concept of 'being slutshamed for my bangin eyebrow texture while genderbent and possessed' Leaving the 3rd century BCE's Songs of Chu in skasion's capable mitts, i'm gonna zoom to the opposite end of the timescale with another political poet, Communism's Mao Zedong: quote:The People's Liberation Army captures Nanking *Xiang Yu was a Chu warlord who lived a brief, dramatic life about a century after Qu Yuan wrote the poems that make up most of what we know as the Songs of Chu. There are a lot of parallels and red threads flying around here. Qu Yuan's poetry is full of tear-stained layers of allegory forecasting the fall of his Chu, land of shamans, and he drowned himself not long after it was conquered by Qin. Xiang Yu rose to power as peasant rebellions threw off the Qin yoke, and he went on to win a string of brilliant military victories in the Contention between Han and Chu to rule China. Unfortunately he dropped every possible bollock in the political arena with a winning combination of arrogance and weird sentimentality, saw Chu BTFO again and killed himself. Mao was more the type to press an advantage home. e: had a crack at retranslating one line of the poem - I think there's an error in most editions online stemming from copying a typo in a 70s PRC translation Shogi fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Apr 30, 2023 |
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Apr 25, 2023 20:54
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I love what Phil Ochs did for the back of his live album: Sorry if it's hard to make out, but he put several poems by Mao and then asks "is this the enemy?"
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Apr 25, 2023 21:13
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A Strange Aeon posted:Phil Ochs "is this the enemy?" While we're on Phil Ochs, there's a song on that album whose lyrics feel like they take some of their colour from Chinese poetry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqoWEN_iHI0 He was a fascinating guy who wrote some lovely songs. I'm fond of The Scorpion Departs, but Never Returns - and Phil, the song Tom Paxton wrote about his death: Oh, I remember 'There But For Fortune' There but for fortune you and I would go Fortune turned its back on you Or so it must have seemed to you And Christ alone knows what was the final blow In his last years Ochs unsettled everyone around him with strange new identities and paranoid rants about the CIA, and naturally once he was dead it turned out they had a bunch of huge dossiers on him. Swinging back around to the topic - the Ochsiest Chinese poet is probably one of my big faves, Li He, who also has a great social protest poem in Song of the Old Jade-Hunter. Let's go with something looking back at war though, another prime Ochs topic. Li He, tr. JD Frodsham posted:Song of an Arrowhead from Changping
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Apr 27, 2023 22:12
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I've always been a fan of this short poem by Li BaiLi Bai, tr. by Sam Hamill posted:Zazen on Ching-T'ing Mountain Jossar fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Apr 27, 2023 |
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Apr 27, 2023 23:13
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selections from Tian wen/Heavenly Questions!David Hawkes posted:Questionnaires, it seems to me, can be divided into two main categories: those in which the questioner doesn't know the answers and those in which he does. [...]Tian wen is curiously enough not easy to assign to either of these two main categories. He helpfully provides a good number of answers in endnotes. I'll paraphrase these since there's more endnote than poem, but in spoilers, in case you want to try to figure some out yourself... quote:Who passed down the story of the far-off, ancient beginning of things? idk lol quote:Where did the Eight Pillars meet the sky, and why were they too short for it in the south-east? At the eight points of the compass; the pillars are mountains at the edges of the earth, which help hold the sky up (in addition to the central celestial pole). The reason why the south-east pillar is too short can be expressed in two ways: in terms of purpose, it's a cosmological myth explaining why the heavens revolve rather than staying still; why they seem to center around a point which is not directly overhead, but north of the zenith; and also why the earth (i.e. China) slopes downward toward the east. Now, how did this come to happen? According to the Huainanzi, "Long, long ago Gong Gong contended with Zhuan Xu for mastery of the world. Enraged by his defeat, he butted against the Bu-zhou Mountain, breaking the supporting pillar, snapping the cords, and causing the sky to tilt downward towards the north-west." tl;dr primordial snakeman did it in a bad mood. quote:What is the peculiar virtue of the moon, the Brightness of the Night, The toad is the transfigured Chang E, who stole the herb of immortality from her husband Yi and fled to the moon. That's why the moon has phases. Also, if you think that the moon has a rabbit instead of a toad, Hawkes thinks you are wrong, even though he admits that it's a more natural reading of the characters he reads "toad"! quote:When Ping summons up the rain, how does he raise it? Ping is the rain god: the poet is more or less asking how the water cycle works. The second line is about another god, Fei Lian, a weird chimera-type thing that controls the winds and does mischief. quote:Who built the ten-storeyed tower of jade? Hawkes says no one can explain this, but I love the idea of somebody foreseeing this. What kind of signs just say "ten-storeyed tower of jade"? quote:When the witches were tied up together, what was it that was crying in the market-place? it was the infant Bao Si, the abandoned child of a palace maid who had been "impregnated by a terrifying flood of dragon-sperm which someone had imprudently let out of a chest". The "witches" were actually innocent merchants who had fallen foul of a prophecy which said that the Zhou kingdom would be destroyed by a mulberry bow and a bamboo quiver. Because they were selling these in the market, they were tied up, but hearing the baby's cries, escaped and carried her away to the land of Bao. Bao Si goes on to be married to a prince of Zhou, and eventually indeed causes the destruction of the kingdom by goofing around at the expense of the royal vassals (she would have the beacon-fires that are supposed to signal an invasion lit just to laugh at the vassals when they showed up with their armies only to find out there was no invasion). Eventually she cries wolf too much and the vassals leave the kingdom to get its poo poo rocked quote:Why did Bo Lin hang himself? Unfortunately, nobody knows! Poor guy. Probably the name is corrupt. quote:Where is Kun-lun with its Hanging Garden? Out of place but it's my favorite bit so I figured I might as well put it at the end. Astonishingly, Hawkes has nothing to say about a single line of this. Personally it sounds to me like Qu Yuan trying to find his way around the state fair while stoned off his rear end. skasion fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Apr 27, 2023 |
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Apr 27, 2023 23:41
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Loving all this stuff! Finding the arrowhead was really evocative, I need to read more of that guy for sure. That short verse about the mountain is great, very memorable and thoughtful. The riddles are also interesting, bizarrely my daughter was into this Netflix movie called Over the Moon which included a big part about Chang E and her rabbit on the moon. I can't read Chinese poems without having Ezra Pound's 13th Canto come to mind; I'm not sure it's even attempting to be a translation but it has the feeling of it and is one of my favorites.
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Apr 28, 2023 04:41
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skasion posted:Tian wen/Heavenly Questions! Brilliant post! (mods pls rename thread Chinese poetry - imprudently let out of a chest) Sukhu translates Tian wen as 'Ask the Sky' which gives the questions an appropriate wry tone, like Qu Yuan isn't expecting many understandable answers. That 'stoned at the fair' comment gets even more plausible with Sukhu's translation of the 'nine-branched weed' couplet as: Qu Yuan, tr. Gopal Sukhu posted:When duckweed spread to the nine crossroads, Sukhu has lots of exegesis on that section where Hawkes doesn't give you much, well worth a look! Jossar posted:I've always been a fan of this short poem by Li Bai Me too. That poem's economy of force is astonishing, it conjures up so much in so few words even in translation. Li Bai is perhaps the best exemplar for comparing translation strategies, because he's astonishingly good and enduringly popular, so sinologists have been translating him into english for ages already. See this page if you wanna see what I mean. Let's pick two of those translations: Li Bai, tr. Arthur Waley posted:Drinking Alone by Moonlight Li Bai, tr. DW Landrum posted:We Three Shogi fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Apr 29, 2023 |
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Apr 29, 2023 22:03
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Definitely recommend checking out the Chu ci edition Shogi linked to upthread. I also found a great story in the footnotes:quote:The Han Feizi tells us, “In ancient times King Zhou of Shang had ivory chopsticks made, causing fear in the heart of Viscount Ji. He thought, ‘Ivory chopsticks would certainly not go with earthen soup cauldrons. Next will come cups made of rhino horn and jade. And with ivory chopsticks and cups of rhino horn and jade the king will certainly not eat bean soup; it will have to be meat of yaks, elephants, and leopard fetuses. And while eating those, one certainly cannot wear short cloth coats and eat under a thatched roof; he will have to have nine layers of embroidered cloth and broad mansions with high towers. I fear how it will end; therefore I have horror of the beginning.’ After five years Zhou built the meat park, set up the roasting pillars, climbed the wine dreg hill to look down on the wine pool. As a consequence, Zhou was destroyed."
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Apr 30, 2023 20:55
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I have a collecton of poems in translation by Du Fu, but I don't think I've ever opened it
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Apr 30, 2023 21:16
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ulvir posted:I have a collecton of poems in translation by Du Fu, but I don't think I've ever opened it You should do so at once!
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Apr 30, 2023 21:54
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skasion posted:Definitely recommend checking out the Chu ci edition Shogi linked to upthread. I also found a great story in the footnotes: This owns so much. Sorry for the double post, here's a short one with a really striking image: Birdsong Brook Wang Wei, 701 -761 Mind at peace, cassia flowers fall, Night still, spring mountains empty. Moon rising startles mountain birds Now and again sing from spring brook. The quietude and slowness that's described in many of these poems seems impossible to experience in the modern world, but maybe I just haven't been deep enough in nature where I couldn't hear cars passing by or a plane going overhead.
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Apr 30, 2023 22:04
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A Strange Aeon posted:Birdsong Brook 人閒桂花落 Rén xián guì hua luò 夜靜春山空 Yè jìng chun shan kong 月出驚山鳥 Yuè chu jing shan niao 時鳴春澗中 Shí míng chun jiàn zhong The opening character is 人 rén meaning person/human. That represents the poet, but the sense of first-person perspective present in lots of Wang Wei's poems is missing. It feels like he's stepped outside himself, like he's looking at a self-portrait in a nature scene. He's at peace and his being has dissolved into the wider world. So much so that he can feel or hear the cassia flowers falling in the dark, as the moon only rises in the third line. The sudden light, sound and movement in the second half brings out that emptiness and stillness in the first half even more, with Wang Wei in full Chan mode simply observing and accepting both. Antithetical parallelism was one of the form requirements of Tang regulated verse, and Wang Wei is operating on multiple antithetical levels here - juéjù required a strong pause before the last three characters of the third line. Here the third line is where the sudden contrast comes in: 月出驚山鳥 Yuè chu jing shan niao The caesura lands between 'moon comes out' and 'startles mountain birds', strengthening the sense of contrast through use of form. One of the many requirements in juéjù is an end-rhyme scheme in either xAxA or AAxA - the last characters in lines 2 and 4 must rhyme. Here the rhyme is kong 'empty' or 'air' in "Quiet night, the spring mountain empty" and zhong 'in' or 'within' or 'middle' in "Pulses of song in the spring ravine", bringing the entire natural scene together as a place of blissful emptiness with the empty/within pair acting as the poem's crux. We could dig into this even more with the tonal patterns of smooth/sharp etc but I'm a lot stupider than Wang Wei and mā/má/mǎ/mà/ma gives me a headache fast so maybe later! Instead here's another evocative four-liner: Wang Wei tr. Barnstone/Xu posted:Sketching Things
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May 1, 2023 18:29
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Man, I feel I'm missing so much texture being only able to appreciate poems in translation. Is learning to read classical Chinese poems equivalent to learning old or middle English to read stuff? Or has the language not changed that much since 700 or whenever?
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May 4, 2023 15:35
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A Strange Aeon posted:Man, I feel I'm missing so much texture being only able to appreciate poems in translation. Is learning to read classical Chinese poems equivalent to learning old or middle English to read stuff? Or has the language not changed that much since 700 or whenever? Short answer from a non-expert: The written language remained surprisingly consistent for most of the last 2500 years, in large part because it became this highly conserved and artificial literary language in the same way as Latin did in post-Roman Europe. (This has changed in the last century because classical Chinese is no longer the language of government in the post-imperial period). So in one sense, it is easier to read than Middle or Old English, which had no standardized orthographies—the time frames over which both these language-groups were used, flourished, and faded away entirely, fit comfortably inside the period over which classic Chinese was a standard and intelligible, though not static, literary language. That said, because Chinese characters aren’t phonological, pronunciation of a character can wildly differ between dialect groups even today, and if you try to write out Classical Chinese pronunciation you’ll see poo poo that doesn’t look Chinese at all. So if you tried to read these poems back to Confucius like they were written in Mandarin, he’d probably freak the gently caress out.
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May 4, 2023 16:06
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and it can't really be overstated how different things can get. when you tell an english speaker that a character is pronounced differently, they'll think "dog" vs "dag" or "dawg." but it's more like "perro" or "chien" in that there need not be any phonemic similarity (but ofc there can be). it's just that the same character is used to write it.
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May 4, 2023 19:13
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A Strange Aeon posted:Man, I feel I'm missing so much texture being only able to appreciate poems in translation thought about this before and figured that sense of unfulfilled yearning fits most Chinese poetry pretty well Translating it is quixotic at best and a mug's game at worst. Putting Pindar or even like García Lorca into English is hard enough, trying to preserve the sensory elements while worrying about allusions, double-meanings, assumed knowledge and philosophical imponderables. But at least their languages were alphabetic and non-tonal. Chinese characters in poetry include and imply other characters, lean on one another to resolve their meanings in a loose syntax, and convey a lot of information in a small space. Representing that in English directly is impossible, at least without writing in a really tortured way that will result in weightless euphuistic shite. How do you get Tang poetry into English and retain the symbolism, the glances at already-ancient history and vying schools of thought, the driving rhythms and weird multi-dimensional symmetries? How the gently caress are you meant to do that AND have any emotional depth in between the seventeen rambling footnotes about yellow scarves? Can you, a 21st century Westoid, meaningfully collaborate with a guy who drowned in Vietnamese exile because Gaozong of Tang didn't find a satirical call to arms against his son's cock very funny? It's a romantic idea but does it work? Still, we've got all these great poems in English which wouldn't exist unless people tried. Each one comes with hidden depths, it's like a good Doom wad or something. You can have a chill time appreciating it and move on, or if something particularly grabs you then you can start hunting for secrets, trying to make wallrun jumps to distant ledges and using IDCLIP to wander out of bounds. IMO as a dumb hobbyist it's an added bonus, the option to break out your reference books and start driving yourself mad over a poem that called to you for some reason. skasion posted:The written language remained surprisingly consistent for most of the last 2500 years ... if you try to write out Classical Chinese pronunciation you’ll see poo poo that doesn’t look Chinese at all. So if you tried to read these poems back to Confucius like they were written in Mandarin, he’d probably freak the gently caress out Achmed Jones posted:and it can't really be overstated how different things can get... sorta like Greek plus. give me Beowulf and you'll get 'u hwæt m8' but a modern Greek can understand the Iliad fine. they'll just pronounce it very different cos of beta-to-veta shift (barbaros is now pronounced 'varvaros'), simplification of vowel sounds, loss of most accents and spirits, etc etc. With Middle Chinese vs Mandarin you still have to contend with that kind of pronunciation drift, eg both Greek and Mandarin have lost a lot of stops. but on top of that the tones have changed as well. and since orthography->pronunciation is arbitrary in Chinese (unlike in alphabetic where orthography->definition is arbitrary) it's trickier to write a simple key for the changes. academics can study the differences thanks to old rime books that listed characters by the initial and final sounds used to pronounce them, and comparing these in brain breaking ways to Chinese loan words in Japanese, Vietnamese etc. long story short, the 'original' sound of the poetry can't be pinned down for definite, only approached ulvir posted:I have a collecton of poems in translation by Du Fu, but I don't think I've ever opened it missed this - a much better argument than all this for translating chinese poetry is reading Du Fu in English, it's more than worth your time to crack that book to a random page and have a look Du Fu, tr. Stephen Owen posted:Leaving the Town We've seen a lot of Tang poetry in this thread tho, how about something different? Since we've been talking meta here's a piece from the amazing Essay on Literature written by Lu Ji, who had the bad luck of being a military general in one of China's spiciest times, the late Three Kingdoms/Jin clusterfuck. Lu Ji, tr. Achilles Fang posted:Inspiration And a poem with a threatening aura, written by a great Yuan dynasty painter in response to her husband's 'thinkin bout getting a concubine' trial balloon poem: Guan Daosheng, tr. Barnstone/Chou posted:Love Poem
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May 5, 2023 17:45
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Those are both fantastic; that description of inspiration is incredible, coming from 280 AD or whenever and being so brilliantly concerned with the same questions any creative person feels today about the mystery of art. I love that menacing clay doll poem as well--it makes me want to know more about the role and legacy of women writers in the Chinese tradition. Obviously the Western tradition doesn't start caring about women writers until quite recently, barring Sappho I suppose.
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May 7, 2023 15:32
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There’s a bunch of female Greek and Latin poets btw. They tend to be fragmentary but so is Sappho. Here’s a fun poem the noblewoman and courtier Julia Balbilla wrote (in Greek) on the leg of one of the Colossi of Memnon in AD 129-130. For context, these were giant stone figures one of which was supposed to “sing” when the wind blew over it: the weird noise was a tourist attraction, said to bring good fortune, and the imperial household decided to pay a visit. Balbilla first went to go see it with the empress Vibia Sabina. The statue however failed to cooperate, so when she showed up with Sabina and the emperor Hadrian the next day, Balbilla had some graffiti ready to tell it off:quote:When on the first day we didn’t hear Memnon
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May 8, 2023 14:24
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What a neat story - if graffiti is any guide then a decent number of Roman women were literate, though that's one of the classier examples I've read (from wondrous femininity or otherwise). The first poet we can pin an identity on was a woman. Enheduanna was a v important figure since she was Sargon of Akkad's daughter and helped develop the religious culture of Sumeria as high priestess in Ur: Enheduanna, tr. Betty De Shong Meador posted:excerpt from Exaltation of Inanna China has a long history of women writing poetry (as does Greece, like skasion said - there's probably an interesting comparison study in there somewhere). It's complicated a little by the tradition of male poets writing from a female point of view. Sometimes we're not sure of the exact provenance of a poem or even a whole 'author'. The 'Music Bureau' anthology of poetry includes a bunch of poems attributed to 'Zi Ye' which means Lady Midnight, and a lot of them are pretty suggestive. Maybe there was one 3rd century courtesan who wrote all these, maybe there were many, maybe not all of them were written by women at all. Zi Ye, tr. Barnstone/Chou posted:Three Songs
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May 8, 2023 21:22
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Speaking of Wang Wei and translations, I highly recommend reading Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, which is exactly what it says on the tin: The author examines nineteen different translations of a single four line Wang Wei poem and discusses what the translation says about the translator and the evolution of western ideas of poetry. The latest edition includes even more translations since translators took the first edition as a challenge. If you are the kind of nerd who prefers to learn about things in the context of video games, watch this Jacob Geller video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgQ_buy8xJ0 SimonChris fucked around with this message at 09:32 on May 11, 2023 |
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May 11, 2023 09:05
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i just want to say, i have nothing to add to this thread, but i appreciate all the posts.
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May 12, 2023 09:19
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Made up to hear people are enjoying the poems. No pressure to post deep thoughts, analysis or anything at all. Letting the thread wash over like rain in the night is a suitable vibe. A fun thing about Chinese poetry is how rather bureaucratic qualities - rigorous forms, conventional references, coldly compiled and categorised anthologies - gave us so much creative depth and a pretty impressive breadth of perspectives. Yu Xuanji wrote some of the most emotionally complex Tang poems, and no wonder - she went from courtesan, to spurned secondary wife to the Rectifier of Omissions in Chang'an, to mountain hermit, to Daoist priestess-courtesan in her short life before being executed for murder. That's not the kind of life that generally gets your poems preserved for posterity, but we have forty-nine of them thanks to Song dynasty PYF Poems By Ghosts, Foreigners and Loose Women anthologies. Xuanji was probably the name Yu took on at her convent. It means 'deep and mysterious principles'. Yu Xuanji, tr. Leonard Ng posted:Melancholy Thoughts Yu Xuanji, tr. Jinhua Jia posted:Unsold Peonies Next time: going down to tone town (maybe)
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May 12, 2023 23:48
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SimonChris posted:Speaking of Wang Wei and translations, I highly recommend reading Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, which is exactly what it says on the tin: The author examines nineteen different translations of a single four line Wang Wei poem and discusses what the translation says about the translator and the evolution of western ideas of poetry. Since the book is not available for free, I thought I would quote a few of the translations to show the breadth of ways in which Chinese poetry can be translated: Wang Wei original posted:鹿(Deer) 柴(Fence) W.J.B. FLETCHER, 1919 posted:The Form of the Deer Weinberger posted:Fletcher, like all early (and many later) translators, feels he must explain and “improve” the original poem. Where Wang’s sunlight enters the forest, Fletcher’s rays pierce slanting; where Wang states simply that voices are heard, Fletcher invents a first-person narrator who asks where the sounds are coming from. (And if the hills are there, where is the narrator?) WITTER BYNNER & KIANG KANG-HU, 1929 posted:Deer-Park Hermitage Weinberger posted:Where Wang is specific, Bynner’s Wang seems to be watching the world through a haze of opium reflected in a hundred thimbles of wine. It is a world where no statement can be made without a pregnant, sensitive, world-weary ellipsis. The I even hears a voice where the sunlight shines back to him from the moss. Such lack of sense was traditionally explained by reference to the mystical, inscrutable Fu Manchu East. CHANG YIN-NAN & LEWIS C. WALMSLEY, 1958 posted:Deer Forest Hermitage Weinberger posted:It is a classic example of the translator attempting to “improve” the original. Such cases are not uncommon, and are the product of a kind of unspoken contempt for the foreign poet. It never occurs to Chang and Walmsley that Wang could have written the equivalent of casts motley patterns on the jade-green mosses had he wanted to. He didn’t. KENNETH REXROTH, 1970 posted:Deep in the Mountain Wilderness Weinberger posted:The title is eliminated, and the philosophical empty mountain becomes the empirical mountain wilderness. Certain words and phrases are his own invention. One of them, where nobody ever comes leads him into a trap: he must modify the sound of a far off voice with something like, and it makes a rather klutzy fourth line. But this is clearly the first real poem of the group, able to stand by itself. BURTON WATSON, 1971 posted:Deer Fence Weinberger posted:More than arrangements of tones, rhymes, and number of characters per line, Chinese poetry, like all ancient poetries, is based on parallelism: the dual (yin-yang) nature of the universe. Wang’s first two lines are typical: see no people / but hear people. He even repeats the character for people. Watson retains Wang’s parallelism effortlessly enough (no one / someone) yet he is the first translator to do so. G. W. ROBINSON, 1973 posted:Deer Park Weinberger posted:Robinson’s translation, published by Penguin Books, is, unhappily, the most widely available edition of Wang in English. In this poem Robinson not only creates a narrator, he makes it a group, as though it were a family outing. With that one word, we, he effectively scuttles the mood of the poem. Reading the last word of the poem as top, he offers an image that makes little sense on the forest floor: one would have to be small indeed to think of moss vertically. GARY SNYDER, 1978 posted:Empty mountains: Weinberger posted:Surely one of the best translations, partially because of Snyder’s lifelong forest experience. Like Rexroth (#11), he can see the scene. Every word of Wang has been translated, and nothing added, yet the translation exists as an American poem. SimonChris fucked around with this message at 17:48 on May 14, 2023 |
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May 14, 2023 17:37
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That was fantastic! When you mentioned that book I added it to my wishlist immediately, but didn't have anything to comment on it. Very glad you shared an excerpt, that's fascinating! It makes me worry whenever I read poetry in translation that I'm in a sense reading a kind of fanfic, though, and raises all sorts of questions about the nature of translation and what the translator's role should really be. Obviously if 4 lines can be translated at least 19 different ways, the answer to those questions is unsettled still.
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May 14, 2023 17:48
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SimonChris posted:Since the book is not available for free, I thought I would quote a few of the translations to show the breadth of ways in which Chinese poetry can be translated: Cheers for posting that in such a readable form - sticking that book on my reading list, and I also gotta stop slacking and play your IF. Really interesting. I like how he highlighted Burton Watson's preservation of contrast with no one/someone. Writing the perfect regulated-verse poem meant keeping track of conceptual, phonological and syntactical parallelism and tbh that's simplifying it to fit my time constraints and poor understanding. This 'dancing in chains' might partially explain the impressive number of gonzo mental breakdowns in the annals of Chinese poetry and it's also An Issue for translators. Ideally a good translation of regulated verse should keep a throughline of parallelism in an elegant way. The examples that manage it read better. Snyder's dart at a 'literal' translation with enjambment marking the 2 characters-pause-3 characters rhythm is cool too, though personally I wouldn't want every translation to be done that way. The variety of methods is part of the fun. Promised to talk about tone patterns so here goes - I'll maybe expand on it with examples sometime. Monstrously huge 'not an expert' disclaimer here. Remember mā/má/mǎ/mà/ma? Each one represents an inflective use of pitch, with the diacritical giving you a clue how it works. So, for modern standard Mandarin, in order they're: 1) mā level-high; 2) má rising; 3) mǎ dipping; 4) mà falling, and; 5) ma light (or 'neutral', a quick unstressed sound with contextual pitch - this one is sometimes called the zeroth tone or not counted at all). With the sound ma, they would mean 'mother', 'hemp', 'horse', 'berate' and <question indicator> so you really gotta get that pitch right. Tones are also subdivided into yin and yang registers, and there are some modifying rules based on the sequence, eg if there are two dipping tones in a row you switch the first one to rising. But like we said languages change, and even though the modern tones descend from those of the Middle Chinese used in Tang poetry, they don't quite correspond neatly. Here we have level (ping), rising (shang), departing (qu) and entering (ru). The old entering tone has melted away in Mandarin because it lacks Middle Chinese's plosive finals, words ending in -k, -t and -p sounds. Ru was really just a checked sound for these and glottal stops, and has been redistributed among the surviving tones in Mandarin. This can screw up the tone pattern when you read a Middle Chinese poem with Mandarin pronunciation as we'll see in a sec. The rest of the tones aren't AS bad. Somewhere in the Yuan dynasty, ping split down the yin-yang grain and eventually became today's 1 and 2. Shang was maybe a rising-mid tone and qu a steep falling tone - kinda close enough to today's 3 and 4. Here's a classic Du Fu poem read in modern Mandarin, reconstructed MC and in translation to give you the shape of this a bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIFLqA10w2o In terms of prosody, ping is classified as 'level' (or 'flat' or 'smooth') and the rest as 'oblique' (or 'deflected' or 'sharp') tones. So that means modern 1 and 2 read as level, while 3 and 4 read oblique. Now a lot of ru got shunted to modern 2, which means loads of oblique syllables in Tang poetry now read as level, and that can make the poems sound off-balance. The tone patterns in the original poetry could be fiendishly complex - just to give you an idea, in jueju the second, fourth and fifth characters in each line were special tonal positions. Within a couplet, positions 2, 4 and 5 had to contrast tonally so each had to be a level/oblique pair. From one couplet to the next otoh, positions 2 and 4 had to MATCH. Bear in mind that the tones are critical to meaning and you still had to maintain your rhyme scheme, metrical rhythm and conceptual antitheses. Hmm... Hey, talking about mental breakdowns, how about something by Xu Wei? After failing some exams (you may have noticed this is a common theme) he had a swashbuckling career fighting pirates with General Hu Zongxian. Hu's arrest seems to have broken the always-troubled Xu entirely and he became floridly paranoid, repeatedly tried to trepan himself to death, killed his wife and eventually died in black-eyed poverty. He was a playwright, poet and painter who wrote the aptly titled play 'Singing in Place of Screaming'. Here's a set of poems: Xu Wei, tr. James Cryer posted:Peach Leaf Ferry
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May 14, 2023 23:37
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The discussion on variation in inflective use reminds me of a more modern poem by Yuen Ren Chao. It's kind of the opposite though: in that while it has a mostly clear, translatable meaning, if you try to do a verbal reading of it in Standard Mandarin it sounds like nonsense, as all the characters are pronounced as identical homophones (the operative sound in question is shi). I can't find an "official" translation for it, but here's a translation from a blog post (by one Aaron Posehn). quote:« Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den »
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May 18, 2023 13:27
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Jossar posted:The discussion on variation in inflective use reminds me of a more modern poem by Yuen Ren Chao. It's kind of the opposite though: in that while it has a mostly clear, translatable meaning, if you try to do a verbal reading of it in Standard Mandarin it sounds like nonsense, as all the characters are pronounced as identical homophones (the operative sound in question is shi). Love this one, beats the hell out of that buffalo buffalo buffalo crap. Also Chinese poetry - Try to explain this matter. is the unofficial title for this post. My last effort was a bunch of bone-dry thrashing around with tones, so I thought I'd have a crack at some amateur analysis of an actual poem to liven it up. Specifically a fascinating seven-character jueju by one of the most colourful talents in history.  It's Gazing at a Waterfall on Mount Lu (wàng lúshān pùbù), and we're gonna attempt to do the moves along with the main character, Li Bai. Armed as I am with absolutely no education in Middle Chinese, this is gonna be The Chronicles of ZDic, using various internet sources and Victorian-era books to try to figure out stuff like the original tones. It's all in the spirit of fun and I'd be delighted to hear any suggestions or corrections! Li Bai has come up a couple of times already. He was a free spirit who wandered out of Shu and never came home, passing into legend as the Banished Immortal who drowned trying to embrace the reflection of the moon, by way of an instinctive command of regulated verse, free-flowing inspiration, brilliant sensory depictions, piercing human insight and a truly impressive range of poems about attempting to do things while drunk. In a lot of ways he's become an avatar of the peak of Tang poetry. Even his name is handy for the subject at hand. In Mandarin we pronounce his name Lǐ Bái - tones 3 and 2, dipping and rising. But he would probably have said it Lɨ Baek - tones shang and ru, rising and entering - Bai is one of those plosive finals that have been lost in the transition from Middle Chinese to Mandarin. For that Baek sound, you shape your mouth to say the -k sound then close it without voicing it, so you get a 'checked' sound. This means if we were to use Li Bai's name in a poem - which people have, of course - in MC the tone prosody would go: Li (shang, LEVEL) Baek (ru, OBLIQUE) but in Mandarin the exact opposite: Lǐ (3, OBLIQUE) Bái (2, LEVEL) This kind of shift is relevant for our poem, which benefits from a little background.  Li was writing about a spectacular aesthetic experience - Censer Peak at Mount Lu must have particularly moved him because this isn't the only poem he wrote about it. But that's also not the only thing this one's about, not really. By 742 CE Li's fame had grown and he was summoned to Chang'an by the Emperor Xuanzong, where he made himself a real favourite. We're talking having the Emperor ladle out his soup, blithely asking the most powerful and scheming eunuch in Chang'an to help him out of his muddy boots when he rolled into court half-cut of an evening, living like king poo poo basically. But in the winter of 755 a major rebellion kicked off in northern China, headed by the Blue-Turkish military governor An Lushan, another favourite of Xuanzong's who had been manoeuvring for years to improve his prospects should the emperor die. An Lushan had asked for 32 Han generals under his command to be replaced by non-Hans, probably knowing that Xuanzong's officials wouldn't let this fly, and now one of the most lethal wars in human history had begun. By spring 756, Chang'an had fallen, Xuanzong had abdicated and Li Bai was the unofficial poet to the military expedition of Li Lin, Xuanzong's 16th son. This did not go especially well. Li Lin was executed for treason and Li Bai was imprisoned in Jiujiang. Lushan had been a bane for the Banished Immortal - all that glory crashing down. Here's the poem Li Bai wrote: 望庐山瀑布 日照香炉生紫烟 遥看瀑布挂前川 飞流直下三千尺 疑是银河落九天 In Pinyin, with modern Mandarin tones and literalist English translations for each character: wàng (gaze|hope) lú shān (Mt. Lu) pù bù (waterfall) rì (sun) zhào (illuminate) xiāng lú (censer) shēng (give life) zĭ (purple|shēng zĭ = give birth to a son) yān (smoke) yáo (remote) kàn (watch|guard) pù bù (waterfall) guà (hang|suspend) qián (before) chuān (river) fēi (fly) liú (flow) zhí (straight|liú zhí = liquid) xià (under|down|decline) sān (three) qiān (thousand) chĭ (feet[distance]|musical notes) yí (suspect|doubt) shì (is) yín (silver) hé (river|yín hé = the Milky Way) luò (fall/drop back) jiŭ(nine) tiān(sky|heaven) In poetic translation by Tiana Wang: Gazing at a Waterfall on Mount Lu Sunlight illuminates Incense Burner Peak, kindling violet smoke; from afar, a waterfall hangs before the river. Water flies straight down three thousand feet— Has the silver stream of our galaxy plunged from highest heaven? First up, this is a heptasyllabic jueju, a highly regulated form of poetry. It needs to conform - mostly - to a set of rules designed to maximise tonal contrast between units and couplets. Tones, remember, are either level (Mandarin mā 1 and má 2) or oblique (Mandarin mǎ 3 and mà 4). We'll call those L and O so that the tone charts have as many LOLs as possible. An exclamation mark! means the line has an end rhyme as well. There are only four patterns that conform to the rules, two with a xAxA rhyme scheme and two with AAxA: 1: L L O O L L O O O L L O O L! O O L L L O O L L O O O L L! 2: O O L L L O O L L O O O L L! L L O O L L O O O L L O O L! 1a: L L O O O L L! O O L L O O L! O O L L L O O L L O O O L L! 2a: O O L L O O L! L L O O O L L! L L O O L L O O O L L O O L! So which one is this poem? If we check the tones we'll see that they're: rì4 zhào4 xiāng1 lú2 shēng1 zĭ3 yān1 yáo2 kàn4 pù4 bù4 guà4 qián2 chuān1 fēi1 liú2 zhí2 xià4 sān1 qiān1 chĭ3 yí2 shì4 yín2 hé2 luò4 jiŭ3 tiān1 Lines one, two and four have end rhymes if you squint hard enough right? That shakes out as: O O L L L O L! L O O O O L L! L L L O L L O L O L L O O L! Eagle-eyed readers may have noted this doesn't match any of the four patterns. It's not even particularly close. It doesn't work even if you follow the rule that characters one, three and kiiind of five can have variant tones, as a treat, if you balance them appropriately. What happens if we try to reconstruct the Middle Chinese pronunciation then, plosive finals and all? In terrible faux-IPA speak it's something like this, with MC tones afterwards: Key: 1 = level ping 2 = rising shang 3 = departing qu 4 = entering ru nyit4 tsiuh3 xian1 lu1 szhaen3 tsiech2 ʔin1 jiau1 khan3 buk4 puoh3 kwaeh3 dzen1 tshwan1 piu1 liuw1 duik4 gha3 sam1 tshen1 tshyek4 ngu1 dziech2 ngin1 ha1 lak4 kiuch2 thien1 This is already sounding pretty different, more like weird Hokkien or something. The rhyme scheme looks more convincing too. Let's see if it fits a pattern now: O O L L O L L! L O O O O L L! L L O O L L O L L L L O L L! This still doesn't fit any of them. Even with the 1-3-5 rule. What's going on? Was Li Bai just a bit poo poo? Well if we look carefully, this is very close to pattern 2a. The rhyme scheme is correct, and line 3 is a perfect match. There are five characters with the 'wrong' tones. Gonna commit a forums crime here and break out a spreadsheet:  Maybe Li Bai chose those wrong tones deliberately for effect. There might be some themes we can pick out. Underlining the bits that are 'wrong': PURPLE - In the West, purple has imperial connotations since it was a pain in the arse to squeeze it out of Phoenician sea-snails. In the Tang dynasty, it was favoured for clothing by higher-ranking courtiers. The off tone here perhaps highlights the striking visual image of purple smoke and does double duty as a poignant reminder of the poet's lost status. The sun is shining on Lushan, and Censer Peak becomes what it was named for, an incense burner - both aid to meditation and object of imperial opulence. An Lushan's purple is being born. WATCH|GUARD, DOUBT|SUSPECT, IS - these are, essentially, all the words in the poem that imply Li Bai's perspective or presence. And all of them have the wrong tone. Doesn't seem like Li is in his happy place. NINE - the first tone in 'ninth sky' (like 'the highest heaven') is wrong, closing the poem with a beautiful but - imo - unsettling image of heaven crashing to earth, delivered with an ominous, jarring pitch. Now maybe that's all bullshit, this is amateur hour after all. But to me it seems that Li Bai is using the 'chains' of regulated verse like whips - demonstrating his mastery of the rules and expectations by breaking them a little with startling effect. He creates tons of contour and contrast by the use of tone, while also sneaking in hidden meanings and using runs of falling pitch to create a melancholy air. Note as well how he uses double-meanings - the three thousand feet/three thousand musical notes of the waterfall double creating an almost synaesthetic sight-and-sound experience, the 'purple haze' shrouding his own uncertain future, the mountain and the man, the general downward movement of the poem. Li Bai was a genius, and it's remarkable how much you can find in so few of his characters. e: corrected usual badly-placed typos, & added smth i forgot Shogi fucked around with this message at 21:27 on May 22, 2023 |
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May 21, 2023 00:54
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s_k_a_m_ posted:i just want to say, i have nothing to add to this thread, but i appreciate all the posts.  picked up some fully sick poetry books as a result of this thread. cool stuff.
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May 21, 2023 23:15
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Insanite posted:
another victim helpless before 3000 years of failed exams and crying about plum blossoms, you hate to see it Report back with any favourites! Meanwhile, a little Song: Towards the end of the Tang dynasty, poetry started one of its shifts in form and content. So much emotional and philosophical matter had been mined from regulated verse that its conventions had become a prison - how could you climb out of the depths of Du Fu's footsteps? With poets looking for new ground, contemporary refinement was blended with the most ancient Chinese style as found in the Book of Songs to create ci lyric poetry, a form that would be perfected in the appropriately-named Song dynasty. Huge amounts of regulated verse continued to be written - and now printed - but often with a more direct, colloquial style and more of a social focus. Mei Yaochen particularly strove for an unaffected style that spoke sincerely to common experience. He wrote that "today, as in ancient times/it's hard to write a simple poem." He experienced a lot of hardship in his life and has some brutally excellent poems about grief, though I'll skip them for now. Mei Yaochen, tr. Kenneth Rexroth posted:An Excuse For Not Returning the Visit of a Friend Mei Yaochen, tr. Barnstone/Chou posted:The Potter Mei Yaochen, tr. David Hinton posted:Eyes Dark Ci poetry used the melodies of popular songs as patterns for the rhyme and tone schemes, allowing unequal numbers of characters per line and opening lots of new possibilities. Liu Yong was a genuine failson from a Confucianist perspective, hailing from a very influential family and spending most of his life writing ci for sing-song girls while failing his exams over and over again. He was extraordinarily popular ("wherever water is drawn from wells you find people singing Liu Yong's songs") but what money he did make slipped through his hands. Liu Yong, tr. Michael Farman posted:Partridge Omen Li Qingzhao is probably China's most famous woman poet, just about eclipsing the also very accomplished epigrapher and poet she married. She's considered one of the best of all ci poets and has been the subject of comparison studies with Sappho. Li Qingzhao, tr. Jiaosheng Wang posted:Tune: A Sprig of Plum Blossom
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May 23, 2023 22:59
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Can someone go into the whole exam system? I always imagine it in modern terms, like studying for the SATs or something but I know it had a much bigger impact.
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May 24, 2023 00:14
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