Sustenance: A Life in Translation

I was introduced to classical Chinese poetry by Kenneth Rexroth and the Beat poets in the late 1950s, especially by Rexroth’s immensely popular One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, which included thirty-odd poems translated from Tu Fu, whom Rexroth called “the greatest non-epic, non-dramatic poet in history.” I drew inspiration from what I learned of Han Shan in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and Gary Snyder’s translations, and from the poets in Robert Payne’s The White Pony, Witter Bynner’s translations, and of course those of Arthur Waley.

Later, after four years in the u.s. Marine Corps, two of which were spent in Japan, where I began Zen practice and learned some rudimentary Japanese, I came to Ezra Pound’s adaptations of the notebooks of Ernest Fenollosa, published as Cathay in 1915. In an essay in the second edition of A Poet’s Work, “On the Making of Ezra Pound’s Cathay,” I discuss the origins and development of this little volume of only fourteen poems, claiming it to be the single-most influential volume of poetry in this century. Here, I’d like to elucidate a few of this book’s problems because they present some of the dangers of translating without knowledge of the original.

Fenollosa knew little Japanese and almost no Chinese. His informants were two Japanese professors, Mori and Ariga, neither of whom was fluent in classical Chinese, and thus Li Po became known in the West by his Japanese name, Rihaku. This trilingual effort sometimes produced strange results, as in the poem “Separation on the River Kiang.” Pound retains Fenellosa’s Japanese pronunciation, ko-jin, which means simply “person,” mistakenly treating it as a personal name rather than recognizing the two Chinese characters ku jen. The kiang in the title means “river.” So Pound’s title becomes “Separation on the River River” rather than “Separation on the Yangtze River.” Nevertheless, Cathay opened the doors to American modernism. More than any other volume, it is responsible for the personal tone of much of this century’s shorter lyrical, imagistic verse.

When I began translating Tu Fu in the mid-1970s, I looked up each character and annotated each poem before attempting my own draft and then turned to translations by Florence Ayscough, William Hung, Rexroth, and others for comparative readings. What I found was often surprising.

Here is my translation of Tu Fu’s “New Year’s Eve at the Home of Tu Wei”:

Seeing the year end at a brother’s home, We sing and toast with pepper wine. The stable is noisy with visitors’ horses. Crows abandon trees lit by torches. Tomorrow morning I turn forty-one. The slanting sunset shadows lengthen. Why should one exercise self-restraint? I may as well stay drunk all the days of my life.

Rexroth, who is very good at locating the personal voice and situation of Tu Fu in his translations, makes no effort at recapturing the formal end-stopped couplets of the original even though the couplet is the fundamental unit of classical Chinese poetry and Tu Fu its greatest master. Choosing in its stead a typically loose line that may be a run-on, Rexroth’s version ends:

In the winter dawn I will face My fortieth year. Borne headlong Towards the long shadows of sunset By the headstrong, stubborn moments, Life whirls past like drunken wildfire.

Sometimes relying too heavily on Ayscough or the French translations of Hervey de Saint-Denys or Georges Margoulies, Rexroth is clearly led astray by the former in this instance. Ayscough’s translation reads:

At bright dawn my years will bridge four tens; I fly, I gallop towards the slanting shadows of sunset. Who can alter this, who can bridle, who restrain the moments? Fiery intoxication is a life’s career.

While Rexroth’s version makes a fine poem in English, Ayscough’s version carries considerable Victorian baggage. Neither poem, I believe, captures the spirit of Tu Fu very successfully. Tu Fu’s poem is not about “fiery intoxication.” It is not about life whirling past or about the pathetic...