Review: Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology, Translated and Edited by David Hinton

An Anthology of Poems, Translated and Edited by David Hinton

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Hardcover first published 2008; paperback published 2010

512 pp

Reviewed by Mark Molloy

The questions posed by anthologies – how to decide between breadth and depth; whether to accept the cannon as it is given, or to revise it by including previously excluded poets, etc. – are extensive, varied, and legitimate. But I will not address them here. The work of introducing Chinese poetry to Western audiences is still in its infancy; even the basic elements and authors remain largely unfamilaiar. So I will not ask what this book could have been, or should have been, but instead merely what it is. Is Classical Chinese Poetry, for what it is, a substantial work? Are the poems presented significant poems? Are the poets presented significant poets? Are the translations, if not accurate or comparable to the original (I don’t read classical Chinese so couldn’t say), at least persuasive in their own right? Are the historical backgrounders, biographical and critical commentaries, etc, informative and insightful? The answer to all of these questions is a firm Yes.

Encountering Chinese art and poetry can be disorienting to one accustomed only to Western forms of art and thought. To untrained eyes, the differences between the Eastern (in this case Chinese) and Western (in this case Greco-Roman derived) arts and – for lack of a better word – “worldviews” can feel very real. Indeed, they are very real. These differences are primordial in origin, predating recorded history, having arisen (presumably) largely due to geographic and environmental differences during the human migration(s) out of Africa, tens of thousands of years before recorded history began, and in the centuries and millennia that followed. But, compared to the explosion of cultural diversity that was to follow, these differences were embryonic at the time, even up till and through the early years of recorded history.

One can tell reading the oral poems that lead off this volume that they are not Western poems. There are differences in the particulars; localities always produce them: references to particular Dynasties, for example. Also, Classical Chinese poems are shorter; this poetry is almost entirely devoid of long, “epic” poems. But the similarities among early poems of differing cultures are in other ways as pronounced as their differences. The poetry of the early Chinese oral “folk” and “state” poetries, while different in degree and form from oral Western poetries, are not yet fundamentally different in kind. The “folk” poems collected in this book find their Western counterparts perhaps most closely in the Exeter Book: “Sent off to Eastern mountains, / to war unending and no return, / I’m finally back home again, / … a lady readies for marriage, … / Her new marriage looks grand, / but what about the old one she shared with me?” The early “state” poetries collected here, despite the significant differences already apparent from Western poetries, resemble in content and worldview Beowulf or the works of Homer, Virgil, in their deification of rulers and their championing of war and the reigning Dynasty or tribe: “Our emperors brave and forceful, / nothing they will not overcome… / [our emperor] received the Mandate was due, right and due, / and its hundred blessings continue.” The earlier poems in this book, then, as with early classical poems elsewhere, are largely institutional poems that celebrate the ruling class, or folk poems that lament the horrors of war and poverty. In such texts we perceive traces of our shared origins.

But with advances in agriculture, metallurgy, mathematics, and perhaps most importantly with the advent of writing, world cultures set off on their separate, individual paths. The modern form Chinese culture would assume was determined largely by the writings of Confucius, Lao Tzu (most likely a synthesis of multiple historical figures), by Lao Tzu’s disciple Chuang Tzu, and later by the schools of Buddhism that reached China. Confucianism, concerned primarily with the proper functioning of the State, can be argued to have had a negligible influence on the form of Chinese poetry. It is, instead, with the entrance of Taoist cosmology – a materialist, secular ontology of Being, Non-Being, and Becoming – and, later, with its melding with the meditative emphasis of Ch’an Buddhism, that Chinese poetry (and culture as a whole) assumes the truly unique and resonant form that elevates it to one of the summits of human thought.

Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching is a predominantly philosophical work, though in verse, and not without substantial poetic merit (excerpts from it are included here). In it, Lao Tzu, meditating on the existence and origin of the Cosmos, postulated a cosmos of perpetual flux, where the opposing principles of Yin and Yang ebb and flow, guided by a sole law or “way” (Tao) which creates and sustains all things. The Buddha, living approximately contemporaneously – though in India, a world apart at the time – came to a conclusion similar to the idea of Yin and Yang, though without the idea of any law-like Tao to guide this process of change. For the Buddha, there is only impermanence. Everything that is, passes away. Moreover, parts are ultimately only parts; there is no reality to assemblages of parts. As such, selves – assemblages of perceptions and body parts – are not ultimately real. Orthodox Indian Buddhism was generally adamant on the idea that the objects of perception are not real, but in China that notion was tempered somewhat by the influence of Taoism and its conception of the One Tao, and there the emphasis shifts from the unreality of reality to the distorting affects of our perceptions upon the ultimately Real. Reality is thus real again. Profoundly so. Cleanse the perceptions, and one can perceive the Tao of all things. Meditation is thus viewed by Chinese Buddhists as a way to comprehend the monistic Tao of the cosmos, and our lack of separateness from it.

Chinese poetry , too, is based upon these ideas, and centered around the fundamental themes that arise from them: “the emptiness of absence” and “mirror presencing of ten thousand things. ” Difficult to paraphrase, each refer to the human mind’s ability to merge with the greater cosmos.  The emphasis on perception itself – “the very fabric of Chinese poetry,” Hinton writes – classical Chinese poetry quickly developed into one of “[concrete language and] imagistic clarity.” One cannot overstate how completely this fact shaped classical Chinese poetry. Consider:

“…I keep to the inner pattern, deep in meditation,

and nurturing this Way, never wander amiss.

Mind now a twin to stark late autumn trees…” – Hsieh Ling-Yün (385 CE – 433)

-

“Autumn begins unnoticed. Nights slowly lengthen,

and little by little, clear winds turn colder and colder,

summer’s blaze giving way. My thatch hut grows still.

At the bottom stair, in bunchgrass, lit dew shimmers.”  - Meng Hao-Jan (CE 689-740)

-

“In our idleness, cinnamon blossoms fall.

In night quiet, spring mountains stand

empty. Moonrise startles mountain birds:

here and there, cries in a spring gorge.” – Wang Wei (701 CE – 761)

-

“Mountains all azure-green,

the river all boundless away,

Lone-Spires loom up out of the water, Greater beside Lesser,

and the road ends among fallen cliff-walls, gibbons and birds

scattered away, then nothing but trees towering up into sky…”  - Su Tung-P’o (1037 CE – 1101)

-

“I can’t forget that river pavilion as the sun sank away,

so profoundly drunk we didn’t know the way back home.

Out on a boat returning late, making such love

we happened into depths of blooming lotus,

and flailing through

flailing through,

startled up a sudden shoreline full of wild-winged gulls and egrets. ” Li Ch’ing -Chao  (ca. 1084 CE – 1150)

Whereas Western works of literature are generally dramatic, character-based, temporal narratives of events occurring in the external world, Chinese poetry is, instead, largely deity-free, story-free and – aside from the first-person speaker – largely character-free, meditative lyric. Whereas in Western poetry and literature there is great emphasis on symbolism, allusion, etc., here – with the exception of specific historical places and things that happen to be mentioned, and of course the very monolithic form of the poems as a whole – there is nothing here for a Westerner to struggle to understand, as there is in say Spenser, Eliot, Hill, or most other Western writers, to one degree or another. Clarity and stillness are what is fundamental to these poems: perception, life and the natural world are all reduced to their common phenomenological basis. As Hinton notes, these poems “turn on the sparest of images: a bird’s cry, a splinter of light on moss, an egret’s wingbeat.”

“Mature” classical Chinese poetry then – which is to say that written after T’ao Ch’ien and Hsieh Ling-Yun – is radically different in both form and content from classical Western poetry – at least until the twentieth century, when many Western poets began the serious study of Chinese poetry. Pound, Kenneth Rexroth and Charles Wright come to mind, though the list of 20th Century English language – and certainly American poets – influenced by Chinese poetry after, say, Pound’s translations, is probably identical the total list of 20th Century English language and American poets writing after Pound’s translations.

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As an anthology, Classical Chinese Poetry is first and foremost a collection of poems, and Hinton’s selections are excellent. Undoubtedly partially as a result of his own work as a poet, Hinton understands poetry qualitatively, and has thus been able to gather together poems of truly exceptional merit. His commentary on the schools and authors treated in this book also display this understanding and appreciation. Of Tu Fu, arguably the greatest of Chinese poets, Hinton writes: “poised between black despair and exquisite beauty, his was a geologic perspective, a vision of the human cast against the elemental sweep of the universe.” The poems and scholarly discussions throughout Classical Chinese Poetry are suffused with this enthusiasm for, and grasp of, qualitative differences – something, in this reviewer’s opinion, that a thorough and honest engagement with art cannot do without.

But, as any scholarly work must, Hinton’s selection of poems goes beyond mere aesthetic preferences to display a real grasp of historical import. Consider the poems quoted below, which display, respectively, examples of: early female expression (or , perhaps,  pornography); anti-war sentiment; anger at wealth inequality; prescient scientific ideas that seem to anticipate those of modern science (in the particular case quoted below, Charles Lyell, by a thousand years); poems by poets about other poets; and, of course, apropos today, laments on the end of empire:

“Tunic gathered loose and sash untied,

I put on eyebrows and go to a window.

A gauze skirt’s grace is light and airy:

if it slips open, blame a spring breeze.” – Lady Midnight song (c. 4th Century CE

-

“ten million soldiers are sent away, and not one comes back alive.

…

I stole away, found a big rock, and hacked my arm till it broke.”  - Po Chü-I (772 CE – 846)

-

“Riding proud in the streets, parading

horses that glisten, lighting the dust…

imperial favorites…

they’ve eaten to their hearts’ content,

and happily drunk, their spirits well.

There’s drought south of the Yangtze:

in Ch’u-chou, people are eating people.”  - Po Chü-I (772 CE – 846)

-

“Wave and sand

mingling together day after day, sifting through each other

without cease: they level up mountains and seas in no time.”  - Po Chü-I (772 CE – 846)

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“Done advising emperors, hair white – no one cared about

old Tu Fu, his life scattered away across rivers of the west,

chanting poems. He stood on this tower once, and now he’s

gone. Waves churn the same isolate moon. Inexhaustible

through all antiquity, this world’s great dramas just rise

and sink away. Simpleton and sage alike return in due time.

All these ice-cold thoughts, who’ll I share them with now?

In depths of night, gulls and egrets lift off sand into flight.” – Lu Yu (1125-1210)

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“Mist mantling cold waters, and moonlight shoreline sand,

we anchor overnight near a wine house entertaining guests.

A nation lost in ruins: knowing nothing of that grief, girls

sing “Courtyard Blossoms.” Their voices drift across the river.” – Tu Mu (803 – 853)

Hinton’s critical perception of the nuanced innovations of the various authors and schools is exemplary. Writing of the experimental poetries that developed in the aftermath of a civil war that devastated China, for example, he dissects their styles, describing a “radically new poetry of bleak introspection,” with its “intense interiority,” “phantasmagoric” “nonlogical juxtapositions and imagistic fragmentation,” “hermetic ambiguity” and “quasi surreal and symbolist techniques.”

Consider also his analysis of the role Classical Chinese – the literary language of the educated elite (as opposed to China’s vernacular languages) – had on the nature of Chinese poetry. Classical Chinese, Hinton points out, is most prominently different from Western languages in two senses. First, Classical Chinese is graphic in form. Letters are not used to abstractly “spell out” words. The characters themselves, however abstractly, pictorialize the words they signify. Classical Chinese thus “retains direct visual connection to the empirical world.” The second pronounced way Classical Chinese differs from Western language is that its grammar is kept to an extreme minimum, which allows for an openness and ambiguity well suited to poetry. Hinton describes it thus: “grammatical elements are minimal in the extreme, allowing a remarkable openness and ambiguity that leaves a great deal unstated: prepositions and conjunctions are rare, leaving relationships between lines, phrases, ideas and images unclear; the distinction between singular and plural is rarely and indirectly made; there are no verb tenses, so temporal location and sequence are vague; very often the subjects, verbs and objects of verbal action are absent. In addition, words tend to have a broad range of possible connotations.” To add to these potentials for ambiguity, and here’s a real doozy for Western readers: unlike western languages, Classical Chinese can be read in any direction.

Hinton’s sense of prosody and ear for the music of language are also highly refined. Consider his translation of the leading experimentalist Meng Chiao: “…Ageless teeth / cry a fury of cliffs, cascades gnawing // through these three gorges, gorges / full of jostling and snarling, snarling.” If the nature of poetry is in any way tied to its sound, the renderings in this volume must be regarded events of the highest poetic order.

Far more than a mere anthology of Chinese poetry, Classical Chinese Poetry can also serve as an (albeit brief) introduction to Chinese political and philosophical history. The entire political history of the country is traced in this book, to help better illuminate the poems within: from the earliest recorded history of China as a (monotheistic) theocratic state, through the rise of the early Shang and Chou dynasties; through the corresponding revolutionary political and philosophical upheavals of Confucianism and Taoism, and the corresponding rise of secular humanist culture; through the rise of Chinese landscape painting and calligraphy; through the development of the thereafter dominant “fields and gardens” and subsequent “rivers and mountains” landscape schools; through the T’ang Dynasty, widely considered the “pinnacle” of Chinese civilization, when “the government was admirable and the country was at peace…, the common people prospered, and the most dramatic cultural renaissance in Chinese history was under way”; from the immense heights of Wang Wei and Tu Fu through the more introspective and experimental second phase of Tang dynasty (when Chinese poetry assumed forms that would not have been unfamiliar to Mallarmé or Ashbery); through all the internecine conflicts between dynasties up to the Sung Dynasty and the final flowering of classical Chinese poetry. Of all of this Hinton provides a condensed but as authoritative as possible (given the space limitations) survey.

Certainly, one can fault Classical Chinese Poetry if one wishes to, and one can do so with good reason.  There are voices outside of the established cannon that deserve to be heard, alternative historical narratives to trace, and Classical Chinese Poetry barely touches upon these. The voices presented here are not the only voices in Chinese poetry, nor are they necessarily the best. Instead they are the voices that history privileged during a time when an and tradition came into maturity, and for this reason alone (and there are others), the authors presented here deserve to be heard. The work of the introduction of Chinese literature into English is still, a century or more after it’s introduction, in its infancy. Even a figure as important as Tu Fu is barely known to the Western world. Any introduction to Chinese poetry, especially one of this quality, should be welcomed as providing a window into a culture previously closed to us. May the works that follow it explore and illuminate alternative traditions and voices for the public with a mastery comparable to that which Hinton exercises here.