Li T'ai-po: Gesammelte Gedichte (review)

The translation of poetry from Classical Chinese into Western languages has always been approached from different perspectives. The cultural and aesthetic differences that one has to overcome in order to bestow evidence of the work of translation have always involved conflicting approaches to the language of poetry. Whereas literary translation inevitably falls back to the intrinsic aesthetic values of the translators' (native) language, a translation intending to make certain semantic structures of the original text understandable often not only lacks a poetic sense but also neglects other elements of the text—elements that could be considered no less constitutive than those selected for the purposes of the translator. Obviously, establishing an awareness in a Western language of the essential elements of Classical Chinese poetry is a difficult task.

Two eminent sinologists of the twentieth century—Arthur Waley (1889-1966) and Erwin Ritter von Zach (1872-1942)—devoted much effort to this task, and, far more successfully than many others, they managed to escape the dangers inherent in either of the two mainstream approaches to translation mentioned above, although both of them tended more or less toward one of these approaches.

Not only did Waley's literary translations exercise considerable influence on the famous poets of his age like Ezra Pound and Bertolt Brecht, but they are still highly esteemed among sinologists of our own day. His books on Li Bo, Bo Juyi, and Yuan Mei and his contributions to anthologies containing various examples of classical poetry, translated in a sensitive, well-structured poetic style, still serve as introductions to students and as a source of inspiration to many a contemporary translator.

As for von Zach, except for his translations of the Wen xuan and the poems of Yu Xin, Han Yu, and Du Fu published by Ilse Martin Fang and J. R. Hightower in the 1950s, his work still remains scattered for the most part in sinological and non-sinological magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. This is not the place to reopen a discussion on his moral integrity, namely concerning his frequent polemical attacks against established sinologists in Europe.¹ In any case, from a modern standpoint, personal quarrels do not necessarily justify the suppression of unrecognized achievement by an individual like von Zach, especially in a discipline like sinology, which does not have too many experts of similar ability.

Hartmut Walravens has already published five of a projected thirty volumes containing Li Bo's Collected Poems, as translated by von Zach. Von Zach's translations of Li Bo seem to be the least voluminous part of his own work, thus far coming down to us only in periodical publications. The first ten volumes can be found in Asia Major, while the subsequent volumes were published away from the sinological public in the journals of German-speaking minorities in Java (formerly Batavia), De Chinesisch Revue (volumes 11-15) and Deutsche Wacht (volumes 16-30). For this reason only the volumes that first appeared in De Chinesisch Revue are now collected in the book under review here, which also contains a detailed overview on the contents of the complete Li Bo translations. The subsequent fifteen volumes are to be published soon, according to the editor in his short preface.

I would like to outline the special quality of von Zach's method of translation, and I think this could best be done by first describing his general intent and then illustrating it by comparing his work with an example from Arthur Waley.

Devotion to the texts themselves characterizes von Zach's personal approach to translation. Neither abstract theories nor any other kind of aesthetic or philological bias is guaranteed to overcome the lack of empirical knowledge of a language...