The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry: From Ancient to Contemporary, The Full 3000-Year Tradition (Barnstone & Ping, 2005)

Introduction:

CHINA IS A NATION CREATED BY ITS THOUSANDS OF POETS, who have imagined and extended and redrawn its boundaries as well as the contours of its landscape from year to year, from dynasty to dynasty. For millennia, poetry has played an essential role in shaping its collective consciousness and maintaining the continuity of Chinese civilization. Neither time nor space nor linguistic change restrict free communication in the nation because of the nature of the Chinese written language: a system of pictographs and ideographs that convey their meaning, divorced from their sounds, which, after all, vary according to the time period, the region, and the city or provincial dialect. So when a contemporary Chinese recites a poem written in the Tang dynasty (618–907), the poem remains pure, its meaning virtually constant, even though more than a thousand years have elapsed and the poet’s modern speech would be unintelligible to the original author. But the original meaning does not remain intact, of course, since reception, audience, and aesthetics vary according to reader and period, and allusions and expressions that were common in one era might become strange in another. Regional and temporal change in pronunciation also affect the reception of the poem, because Chinese poetry typically uses rhyme and, particularly after the fifth century, has often used tonal prosody (similarly, in the English tradition Chaucer was until recently considered an irregular prosodist, because later generations did not understand how to sound out Middle English). To understand how the Chinese have imagined their poetry, it may help to go back to the earliest Chinese verse and trace its development to its maturity in the Tang dynasty, and then to pursue it further as verse is transformed in later dynasties.

Notes

Wang Wei’s poetry is spare and clean … ‘his pictures are poems and his poems pictures’

“The poetry of Wang Wei … is often spare and clean … Each character resonates in emptiness like the brief birdcalls he records in one of his poems. The inventor of the monochrome technique, Wang Wei was the most famous painter of his day. In his work, both painting and poetry were combined through the art of calligraphy—poems written on paintings. As Shu Shi said of him, ‘His pictures are poems and his poems pictures,’ and as Francois Cheng has pointed out, painting and calligraphy are both arts of the stroke, and both are created with the same brush. I like to imagine each character in ‘River Snow’ sketched on a page: a brushstroke against the emptiness of a Chinese painting—like the figure of the old man himself surrounded by all that snow.” (Barnstone & Ping, 2005: preface)

“Written on a Rainy Autumn Night After Pei Di’s Visit”, by Wang Wei

“The urgent whir of crickets quickens.” (Barnstone & Ping, 2005: preface)

In classical Chinese painting, it is the white space that defines which forms emerge

“In classical Chinese painting the white space defines what forms emerge, and in Buddhism emptiness is wholeness. The perfect man’s mind, according to Zhuangzi, is empty as a mirror, and according to the Daoist aesthetics of Chinese painting, each stroke of the brush is yin (blackness, woman) upon yang (light, whiteness, man). All the empty space reacts to one brushstroke upon the page. Each additional stroke makes the space adjust itself into a new composition, in much the way each great poem makes all of literary history readjust itself, as T S. Eliot wrote. To make a Chinese poem in English we must allow silence to seep in around the edges, to define the words the way the sky’s negative space in a painting defines the mountains.” (Barnstone & Ping, 2005: preface)

Poems in translation must be read in conversation with other poems

“… I think the poem in translation must carry on a conversation with other poems in order to discover itself.” (Barnstone & Ping, 2005: preface)

Chinese poetry in English has deviated deeply from the form, aesthetics, and concerns of the Chinese originals and that this is the result of willful mistranslation by modernist and postmodern poet-translators

“I have argued elsewhere that Chinese poetry in English has deviated deeply from the form, aesthetics, and concerns of the Chinese originals and that this is the result of willful mistranslation by modernist and postmodern poet-translators. In the first decades of the last century, Chinese poetry was a powerful weapon in the battle against Victorian form. It was brought over into English in forms resembling the free verse that it helped to invent. Rhyme and accentual meter were quietly dropped from the equation because—unlike Chinese use of parallelism, caesura, minimalism, implication, and clarity of image—they weren’t useful in the battle for new poetic form. However, we are now in a new century and need no longer be constrained by past literary conflicts. While the elimination of rhyme and meter from translations of Chinese poetry has created a distinguished English-language tradition of “Chinese” free verse— one that has influenced successive generations of American poets— it has also denied the poem its right to sing.” Barnstone & Ping, 2005: preface)

Wang Wei was the ‘great Tang dynasty poet of pastoral Buddhism’

“Wang Wei, the great Tang dynasty poet of pastoral Buddhism.” (Barnstone & Ping, 2005: Part 3: Six Dynasties Period)