Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

ON THE CATHAY TOUR WITH ELIOT WEINBERGER’S NEWDIRECTIONS ANTHOLOGY OF CLASSICAL CHINESE POETRYBy Steve BradburyIn April 1915, when fourteen translations by EzraPound, for the most part from the Chinese of Li Po,appeared in a one-shilling chapbook in heavy tan paperwrappers with the title CATHAY, they set in motion avogue for Chinese poetry in free verse translation thatsoon swept away the rickety cottage industry of Victoriantranslators of this verse tradition like a “Schumpeteriangale.” 1 Pound’s inspired abandonment of rhyme andmeter in favor of free verse or, as he preferred to call it,vers libre, proved so appealing to readers and expedientfor subsequent translators, literary and academic alike,that the vogue eventually turned into a tradition that is,today, as firmly established as a four-lane highway. 2However one may feel about the “inventor of Chinesepoetry for our time,” as T.S. Eliot once famouslyremarked of the author of Cathay, it is difficult to denythat the modern turn to free verse led to some of the besttranslations of the last century and that they in turn havelured thousands of readers to tour one of the world’sgreat classical verse traditions.As with any tour, however, one is well advised to becautious before racing to the conclusion that the sites onesees are necessarily reflective of the cultural traditionthey represent. Of course, many translations on the“Cathay Highway” do provide a faithful representationof what their source poems say by way of assertion —and well they should, for only the prose poem affords thetranslator greater freedom as a medium of poetic expression.But even the best free verse translations give littlesense of the prosodic nature or auditory effects of theirsources — nor could they, for the forms of the classicalChinese verse tradition define themselves by the veryconventions that free verse defines itself against: fixedrhyme and meter. 3 Virtually all classical Chinese poetryrhymes, usually on the even lines, and although meter isa somewhat problematic term to use in the context of apredominantly monosyllabic tonal language like Chinese,as the late James J.Y. Liu perceptively observed,variation in tone involves not only modulation inpitch but contrast between long and short syllables.In the latter respect, Chinese verse resembles Latinquantitative verse, while the modulation in pitchplays a role in Chinese verse comparable to that ofvariation in stress in English verse. 4Despite its ideographic reputation, classical Chinesepoetry, like the poetry of virtually every verse traditionwhose roots extend into a preliterate era, “demands to berecited, heard, even memorized for its true appreciation.Shaping the words in one’s mouth is as much a part ofthe pleasure as hearing the sounds in the air.” 5 While noone knows exactly how the classical verse sounded whenit was written, the same can be said of Elizabethan verse.Changes in the Chinese language have not been so greatas to destroy the pleasure of reciting or hearing thepoems of Li Po, for example, any more than changes inthe English language have destroyed the auditory pleasuresof Shakespeare’s sonnets. Even in the relativelyremote dialect of Mandarin, most of the T’ang poemsstill rhyme, and their tonal cadences are so engaging thatChinese children memorize them with an enthusiasm thatWestern children tend to reserve for nursery rhymes andplayground songs. 6Sinologists have often pointed out that the sound andshape of the classic poems are half their meaning, butthey have never managed to drive this point home in theone place it really matters for the general reader: thepleasure of the reading moment. And since none of thegreat formalist poets or poet-scholars ever rose to theoccasion — What might a shilling chapbook of Li Popentasyllabic octaves rendered in ottava rima by W.B.Yeats or Daryl Hine, for example, have done to enlargeour appreciation of this verse tradition? — there is reallynothing in English translation that even suggests thatclassical Chinese poetry was written within and against aformalist tradition apart from the deservedly forgottenversions of the Victorian translators, none of whom werepoets, and a handful of more recent efforts that show solittle feeling for form or are so feeble or obnoxious inother regards as to leave one with the impression that, ifChinese poets didn’t actually write in free verse, well,American translators have probably been doing them afavor.Translation Review 39