The differences are strike in pronunciation are striking. I will work this into my novella Momentary Lapse of Reason which is set in current day Hong Kong.
Ha! You're right that frankness is a problem, because I want to extend a bit of professional courtesy to people who do a lot of very hard work in a very hard area.
But I will say that I feel that for the vast majority of Tang poems, there has never yet been a translation that both (a) gets the meaning right and (b) makes an attempt to seriously represent the *poemness* of it in English.
Starting with the meaning: Tang poems are genuinely hard to understand, and it requires a lot of knowledge of history, names and dates, and poetic conventions just to start to get a grip on what's going on. Historians do this work, and in the academic literature they sometimes write excellent glosses of poems, and sometimes appreciations of the poems. But they don't usually try to represent the Chinese poetry in English poetry.
People who attempt to turn Tang poetry into English poetry, including me, generally don't have the depth of knowledge to understand the poems ourselves. I spend hours and hours wading through glosses (mostly the glosses into modern Chinese, which are extensive and often very good), and reading history when necessary, to understand. I'm sure Hinton (a poet more than a historian) and others do the same. I will say that I've noticed a few errors of understanding in Hinton's work, but I'm not keen to criticise, because there are definitely errors of understanding in my work, too! I think I'm doing better than the translators before me - but that's precisely because they've done a lot of the hard work for me.
While I'm writing about it, the doyen of Tang poetry is a guy called Stephen Owen. His complete poems of Du Fu - which massively informed this translation - is an absolute monument of literary scholarship. And it's available for free online! https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781501501890/html?lang=en
But Owen doesn't try to produce poetic objects in English. The first four lines of his translation of this poem go:
Its high crest strides up over the gray vault, where fierce winds never cease.
Not having the mood of a free and easy man, climbing here brings instead a hundred cares.
He is translating literally, and following the line breaks of the source poem. It's accurate so far as the words go, but it doesn't constitute a poetic translation. There's nothing in Owen's version to tell you that it rhymes, for example; there's nothing that conveys the humour of Du Fu's self-deprecating complaint that he doesn't really want to climb the bloody thing.
So Owen succeeds in (a) understanding the meaning; but he doesn't do (b) representing the poem as poetry.
Now, representing classical Chinese poems as poetry is a bit controversial. It started off badly in the 19th century with Herbert Giles. Check out the opening to Giles' version of a different Du Fu poem:
The setting sun shines low upon my door
Ere dusk enwraps the river fringed with spring;
Sweet perfumes rise from gardens by the shore,
And smoke, where crews their boats to anchor bring.
I retain a sneaking affection for this kind of tosh, but you'll perhaps see that this is exactly how we teach people *not* to write poetry these days. It's not particularly accurate in terms of the content, and the form just feels icky.
Then Ezra Pound appeared and did his thing, which was twofold: (1) he commandeered Tang poetry for his own 20th century poetic movement; (2) he showed that you could write extremely moving versions of Chinese poetry without using hackneyed rhyme and meter, just with crystal-clear diction and a fine ear for the subtle rhythms of English.
Since then, many have followed in a Pound-like style, but few have succeeded in getting anything good out of it, because you have to be a Pound-like genius to make it really good.
Another problem is the inherent difficulty of translating the form of Tang poetry. Chinese forms don't have an equivalent in English. (This happens with classical European poetry, too: Latin and Greek poetry worked on vowel length, which isn't salient in the same way in English. Mostly translators just use stress - the canonical English poetic feature - to stand in for long vowels.) David Hinton does this really interesting thing where he makes all his lines the same length - because that's how they look in Chinese. It's a cool way to respond to what Chinese poems look like. I'm not a huge fan, because it's kind of synthetic, and leaves the wording of the poems a bit flat. It's an interesting idea - but it's an idea that comes from a foreigner looking at Chinese poems, and thinking, wow, that's interesting how they look very very rectangular on the page. It's taking a cross-cultural inspiration from form.
Finally, to what I'm trying to do. I approach every poem by first reading and understanding it with the help of the historians and scholars who know much better than me. Then, I try to think about what makes this a poem. What's the poetic spark at the heart of it? When you have a group of poems like these four, written together, as a kind of joint enterprise, I want to represent that in the translation. These four translations all perform the technical feat of maintaining a single rhyme (well, I think Chu Guangxi cheats and uses half-rhymes) over the whole poem. That's part of the identity of these poems, and it would be a crime to not represent it in the translation. That repeated rhyme makes the poems feel technically impressive as you're reading them, and they all do it. So that's what made me want to use intensive rhyme in the translation.
(In fact, my rhyming is more intensive than in the source text, because the English lines run longer, and if you only put rhymes where the source text has them, they feel a bit lost in English. So I inserted the couplet rhymes as well to make the whole thing feel more impressively rhym-y, which is how the source poem feels.)
I've written a small book here! Enough for now. But yes, I translate these poems because I don't think anyone's done them justice yet. I use rhyme because the source poems use rhyme, and it's one of the poetic resources we share. I'm not copying the rhymes of the source poems, but I'm trying to use rhyme in the same kind of way that the poet used it. I hope that's clear!
Finally, two translators who really inspire me:
Brendan O'Kane, also working from Chinese, doesn't generally use rhyme, just gets it right: https://www.burninghou.se/
Thank you! I'll be using those links you provided. Translating is much more difficult than I realized. Do all Chinese poems rhyme? Hinton doesn't rhyme his English translations. In one of his books, he translated each Chinese word underneath it and also explained the elements of each word. I liked reading the poems this way. When I read his real translation, I was astounded by the ways he changed the poem. By now, I enjoy his translations and forget he's co-creating with Tu Fu, for example. Are there any poets, writing in English, reminiscent of ancient Chinese poetry? I don't know Pound's work, but I think he was translating, from what you said. Thank you again.
"Do all Chinese poems rhyme?" Yes, mostly. Rhyme was a very standard part of classical Chinese poetry, just as in western traditions. Many classical Chinese poems were originally intended to be song lyrics, and included important rhyming elements.
"Are there any poets, writing in English, reminiscent of ancient Chinese poetry?"
This is a great question. I have to say, I'm not sure. The interests of modern English poets are very different to poets a thousand years ago.
I dunno! I mean, the great Tang themes were: parting, landscape and the seasons, political promotion, frustrated love (particularly women's love for men). It's striking how many of these themes are not relevant to modern life. I mean: parting? We have phones these days! Lanscape and the seasons - these themes are eternal, but our connection to nature and the land is much weaker, now that most of us live in cities. Political promotion?! The lives of artists and professionals have diverged too violently for this to be a thing any more. Frustrated love - this still exists, but the Tang mode was men writing in women's voices, and that's understandably less fashionable in an age when women can write for themselves.
So... I'm not sure I can really say any writer today is writing like the Tang poets. Every now and then, something cuts through the ages, but I feel like poetry today is very different from Tang times.
The differences are strike in pronunciation are striking. I will work this into my novella Momentary Lapse of Reason which is set in current day Hong Kong.
Phil, Is the rhyming your idea? Also, I've been wondering about your opinion of other translators' work, like David Hinton. Do you mind being frank?
Ha! You're right that frankness is a problem, because I want to extend a bit of professional courtesy to people who do a lot of very hard work in a very hard area.
But I will say that I feel that for the vast majority of Tang poems, there has never yet been a translation that both (a) gets the meaning right and (b) makes an attempt to seriously represent the *poemness* of it in English.
Starting with the meaning: Tang poems are genuinely hard to understand, and it requires a lot of knowledge of history, names and dates, and poetic conventions just to start to get a grip on what's going on. Historians do this work, and in the academic literature they sometimes write excellent glosses of poems, and sometimes appreciations of the poems. But they don't usually try to represent the Chinese poetry in English poetry.
People who attempt to turn Tang poetry into English poetry, including me, generally don't have the depth of knowledge to understand the poems ourselves. I spend hours and hours wading through glosses (mostly the glosses into modern Chinese, which are extensive and often very good), and reading history when necessary, to understand. I'm sure Hinton (a poet more than a historian) and others do the same. I will say that I've noticed a few errors of understanding in Hinton's work, but I'm not keen to criticise, because there are definitely errors of understanding in my work, too! I think I'm doing better than the translators before me - but that's precisely because they've done a lot of the hard work for me.
While I'm writing about it, the doyen of Tang poetry is a guy called Stephen Owen. His complete poems of Du Fu - which massively informed this translation - is an absolute monument of literary scholarship. And it's available for free online! https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781501501890/html?lang=en
But Owen doesn't try to produce poetic objects in English. The first four lines of his translation of this poem go:
Its high crest strides up over the gray vault, where fierce winds never cease.
Not having the mood of a free and easy man, climbing here brings instead a hundred cares.
He is translating literally, and following the line breaks of the source poem. It's accurate so far as the words go, but it doesn't constitute a poetic translation. There's nothing in Owen's version to tell you that it rhymes, for example; there's nothing that conveys the humour of Du Fu's self-deprecating complaint that he doesn't really want to climb the bloody thing.
So Owen succeeds in (a) understanding the meaning; but he doesn't do (b) representing the poem as poetry.
Now, representing classical Chinese poems as poetry is a bit controversial. It started off badly in the 19th century with Herbert Giles. Check out the opening to Giles' version of a different Du Fu poem:
The setting sun shines low upon my door
Ere dusk enwraps the river fringed with spring;
Sweet perfumes rise from gardens by the shore,
And smoke, where crews their boats to anchor bring.
I retain a sneaking affection for this kind of tosh, but you'll perhaps see that this is exactly how we teach people *not* to write poetry these days. It's not particularly accurate in terms of the content, and the form just feels icky.
Then Ezra Pound appeared and did his thing, which was twofold: (1) he commandeered Tang poetry for his own 20th century poetic movement; (2) he showed that you could write extremely moving versions of Chinese poetry without using hackneyed rhyme and meter, just with crystal-clear diction and a fine ear for the subtle rhythms of English.
Since then, many have followed in a Pound-like style, but few have succeeded in getting anything good out of it, because you have to be a Pound-like genius to make it really good.
Another problem is the inherent difficulty of translating the form of Tang poetry. Chinese forms don't have an equivalent in English. (This happens with classical European poetry, too: Latin and Greek poetry worked on vowel length, which isn't salient in the same way in English. Mostly translators just use stress - the canonical English poetic feature - to stand in for long vowels.) David Hinton does this really interesting thing where he makes all his lines the same length - because that's how they look in Chinese. It's a cool way to respond to what Chinese poems look like. I'm not a huge fan, because it's kind of synthetic, and leaves the wording of the poems a bit flat. It's an interesting idea - but it's an idea that comes from a foreigner looking at Chinese poems, and thinking, wow, that's interesting how they look very very rectangular on the page. It's taking a cross-cultural inspiration from form.
Finally, to what I'm trying to do. I approach every poem by first reading and understanding it with the help of the historians and scholars who know much better than me. Then, I try to think about what makes this a poem. What's the poetic spark at the heart of it? When you have a group of poems like these four, written together, as a kind of joint enterprise, I want to represent that in the translation. These four translations all perform the technical feat of maintaining a single rhyme (well, I think Chu Guangxi cheats and uses half-rhymes) over the whole poem. That's part of the identity of these poems, and it would be a crime to not represent it in the translation. That repeated rhyme makes the poems feel technically impressive as you're reading them, and they all do it. So that's what made me want to use intensive rhyme in the translation.
(In fact, my rhyming is more intensive than in the source text, because the English lines run longer, and if you only put rhymes where the source text has them, they feel a bit lost in English. So I inserted the couplet rhymes as well to make the whole thing feel more impressively rhym-y, which is how the source poem feels.)
I've written a small book here! Enough for now. But yes, I translate these poems because I don't think anyone's done them justice yet. I use rhyme because the source poems use rhyme, and it's one of the poetic resources we share. I'm not copying the rhymes of the source poems, but I'm trying to use rhyme in the same kind of way that the poet used it. I hope that's clear!
Finally, two translators who really inspire me:
Brendan O'Kane, also working from Chinese, doesn't generally use rhyme, just gets it right: https://www.burninghou.se/
A. Z. Foreman, outrageously brilliant multilinguist, translates from every language, with some beautiful translations of Tang poems as well: https://www.youtube.com/@a.z.foreman74 https://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/
Thank you! I'll be using those links you provided. Translating is much more difficult than I realized. Do all Chinese poems rhyme? Hinton doesn't rhyme his English translations. In one of his books, he translated each Chinese word underneath it and also explained the elements of each word. I liked reading the poems this way. When I read his real translation, I was astounded by the ways he changed the poem. By now, I enjoy his translations and forget he's co-creating with Tu Fu, for example. Are there any poets, writing in English, reminiscent of ancient Chinese poetry? I don't know Pound's work, but I think he was translating, from what you said. Thank you again.
"Do all Chinese poems rhyme?" Yes, mostly. Rhyme was a very standard part of classical Chinese poetry, just as in western traditions. Many classical Chinese poems were originally intended to be song lyrics, and included important rhyming elements.
"Are there any poets, writing in English, reminiscent of ancient Chinese poetry?"
This is a great question. I have to say, I'm not sure. The interests of modern English poets are very different to poets a thousand years ago.
Every now and then, themes collide. Here's a poem I l ove, that does seem very relevant to Tang themes: The Mirror Orchid, by Pascale Petit ( https://www.tumblr.com/kiekua-blog/475277644/%E7%AC%AC%E5%9B%9B%E5%B1%8A%E6%9C%AA%E5%90%8D%E9%AB%98%E6%A0%A1%E8%AF%97%E6%AD%8C%E5%A5%96%E8%8E%B7%E5%A5%96%E5%90%8D%E5%8D%95-%E5%86%AF%E7%9B%B8%E9%83%A1%E6%9D%A8%E5%A4%A7%E8%BF%87%E5%8C%97%E4%BA%AC%E5%A4%A7%E5%AD%A606%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87%E6%9C%AC )
I dunno! I mean, the great Tang themes were: parting, landscape and the seasons, political promotion, frustrated love (particularly women's love for men). It's striking how many of these themes are not relevant to modern life. I mean: parting? We have phones these days! Lanscape and the seasons - these themes are eternal, but our connection to nature and the land is much weaker, now that most of us live in cities. Political promotion?! The lives of artists and professionals have diverged too violently for this to be a thing any more. Frustrated love - this still exists, but the Tang mode was men writing in women's voices, and that's understandably less fashionable in an age when women can write for themselves.
So... I'm not sure I can really say any writer today is writing like the Tang poets. Every now and then, something cuts through the ages, but I feel like poetry today is very different from Tang times.
I'm moved by the Taoism and Buddhism expressed in their poems and this perspective influences my poems.
I see why he's your favourite. This poem could only have been written by Du.