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THE POEMS OF SU TUNG-P'O: CATCHES AND LOSSES IN THE NET OF TRANSLATION Gordon T. Osing 1 The following represents a work of scholarship or criticism not so much as an experiment, an attempt anyway, at rendering the poems of Su Tung-p'o as poems in English. The project was initiated in the winter of 1986-87 while I was teaching as an exchange professor at Huazhong Normal University in Wuhan, Hubei Province, in the People's Republic of China. My post-graduate student Min Xiaohong came to me with her own enthusiasm for the great Sung Dynasty poet and suggested we try our hand at putting the poems into English. I had a desire to learn what I could about the poetics of Classical Chinese poetry and rather liked the literary personality of Su Shi for his very human feelings and his frankness. Later I learned to respect his masteries and uses of old poetic forms to contain those lively matters. Of course, this sort of thing has been done, numerous times, and by people with scholarly credentials more real than mine. (Theirs could hardly have been less.) But there were interests that drew me to the project anyway. In fact, I had not been always satisfied with the renderings of Chinese poems in English. They seemed self-consciously sparse, like some kind of austere free verse, bad Sandburg in other words. Even Ezra Pound's renderings, confessedly largely reinvented, seemed to be lacking some sense of the Chinese artist's loyalty to received forms, his participation in the ongoing historical salon of the art form and the culture. It seemed to me the Classical authors played their poetic games inside a small and demanding space, in spite of the variety of their expressions and achievements. Three things drew me to try my hand at it anyway: Min Xiao-hong is bright and nearly bi-lingual and related to me with unusual openness and frankness and could tell me when I hit and why I didn't hit the marks with my phrasings; I felt I had certain advantages because I am a poet myself; I had the freedom to invent equivalent poems, taking some chances and reworking the syntactical parts of the originals rather than being obligated to capture a word for word literal translation. That kind of work struck me as resulting in what we used to call in classical GORDON T. OSING languages classes the invention of a pony, not the same thing at all as a finished artifact. Perhaps such a pony can be the internal skeleton of finished work, and certainly it is a necessary intermediate stage of translating. But the essential matters surround the question: Which does one want, finally, a set of rough cultural evidences or a work possessing an attendant polish like the original? Min Xiao-hong had begun bringing me Su Shi poems on rainy Sunday afternoons , and it rains a lot in the winter/springtimes in Hubei Province. Her former professor at Huangang Teachers University, Huang Hai-peng, is a Su Shi scholar and helped her make a selection of the poems generally considered the best if not most central to his artistic career. He and she worked up fifty poems, printing beneath the original characters a character by character (or phrase by phrase) English pony. They set in the pinyin for each Chinese character, to assist the Western reader who might wish to try his hand at reading the poems out loud. To these he and she added notes for each allusion to a historical or mythological or cultural matter and a set of remarks guiding the reader to broader 'readings' of the poems, called 'appreciations.' One attraction of the project for me was prosopopoeic. I wanted to make Su Shi live in English as immediately and humanly as he lives in his original poems. I hasten to add that I have worked in and around translation projects enough to know that total victory in translation is next to impossible. The best translations fall short, interestingly, or daringly, or cleverly, in brief, in terms that feature one or several aspects of the original but do not fully embody it. I could see early on in our project that that would be the case with our work. That's why I prefer to talk about equivalent poems, or transliterations, or even reinventions, rather than close translation. Especially Chinese poetry is made by representational means and a...

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