Poetics of Emptiness: Transformations of Asian Thought in American Poetry

Prologue: Transformations of a Transpacific Imaginary

Prologue: Transformations of a Transpacific Imaginary 江雪 千山鳥飛絕 萬徑人蹤滅 孤舟簑笠翁 獨釣寒江雪 In his essay “The Poem behind the Poem,” the translator/anthologist Tony Barnstone offers an extended discussion of his experience translating the poem reproduced above, by the Tang poet Liu Zongyuan (柳宗 元, b. 773–d. 819). Before offering his translation, Barnstone leads his readers in what appears to be a guided meditation: “Let us take a minute to read it aloud, slowly. Empty our minds. Visualize each word.” His translation follows: A thousand mountains. Flying birds vanish. Ten thousand paths. Human traces erased One boat, bamboo hat, bark cape—an old man Alone with his hook. Cold river. Snow.1 Barnstone then comments: “Snow is the white page on which the old man is marked, through which an ink river flows. Snow is the mind of the reader, on which these pristine signs are registered, only to be covered with more snow and erased. . . . I like to imagine each character in ‘River Snow’ sketched on the page: a brushstroke against the emptiness of a Chinese painting—like the figure of the old man himself surrounded by all that snow.”2 Barnstone asserts that each line of the translation “should drop into a meditative silence, should be a new line of vision, a revelation. The poem must be empty, pure perception; the words of the poem should be like flowers, one by one opening, then silently falling.”3 Michelle Yeh, a wellknown scholar of modern Chinese poetry, might notice, as I would, that 2 / prologue Barnstone’s poetic diction offers a particular lens through which we are invited to view the “poem behind the poem.” As Yeh has pointed out, the poem can as easily be read as an expression of possible class tensions (an old man unbearably cold in a bitter landscape).4 Furthermore, we are not to look at how the poetic form may conform to state-sponsored aesthetics, or how, as Lucas Klien has argued, the poem’s prosodic effects might undermine its outward appearance of quietude.5 Instead, Barnstone chooses to emphasize a loosely philosophical language that is hard to pin down: What does it mean that a poem must be “empty”? How are we to imagine this so-called “pure perception”? According to Michelle Yeh, Barnstone likes to imagine things. In her short essay, “The Chinese Poem: The Visible and the Invisible in Chinese Poetry,” she argues that, “implicit in the Anglo-American perception of the Chinese poem is a particular kind of correlation between stylistics and epistemology (namely Buddho-Daoist).” And it is this correlation that she finds questionable.6 For Yeh, Barnstone not only imagines the snowy scene, he also imagines that classical Chinese poetry is the embodiment of a loosely Buddho-Daoist worldview and that the translator ’s task is to channel this worldview, to transfer its epistemological and ontological orientation to the reader, not through a discursive “explanation ” but through English verse which enacts it. Yeh finds this reductive reading of classical Chinese poetry problematic because it limits other possible meanings and reading frames, and while I share Yeh’s point of view, I think that one cannot dismiss these “Buddho-Daoist” claims. Instead, we need to focus on these claims, as a specific domain of heterocultural poetics conditioned by a history of transpacific intertextual travels. Reductive—yes—but important nonetheless.7 Of course, Barnstone is only one of a host of American translators, poets, and critics who naturally assume a particular correlation between East Asian philosophy and poetry—what in shorthand I am dubbing a “poetics of emptiness.” Clearly, the generations of American poets who have turned to Chinese poetry have also turned to this imagined geography —a “transpacific imaginary,” or nexus, of intertextual engagements with classical East Asian philosophical and poetic discourses. By using the term “imaginary,” I do not want to imply a dichotomy between imagination and reality. I do not want to imply that these poets have simply “imagined,” that is, made up, or projected, an “Asian fantasy ” into their poetic practices (although this may be also applicable at times). Instead, I want to present their ability to bring into view what are, prior to their imaging, merely potential heterocultural configurations. prologue / 3 In other words, I want to privilege and yet complicate the positive denotation of “imagination” as the ability to deal with reality through “an innovative use of resources”—as in, she handled the problems with great imagination. Yet...