[blue_message] Three translations Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping

Thoughts While Night Traveling 旅夜書懷

Du Fu (712-770) 杜甫

Slender wind shifts the shore’s fine grass.

Lonely night below the boat’s tall mast.

Stars hang low as the vast plain splays;

the swaying moon makes the great river race.

How can poems make me known?

I’m old and sick, my career done.

Drifting, just drifting. What kind of man am I?

A lone gull floating between earth and sky.

  細草微風岸，危檣獨夜舟。星垂平野闊，月湧大江流。名豈文章著？官應老病休。飄飄何所似，天地一沙鷗。

Note on the Translation: In translating this famous regulated verse (律詩) poem by Du Fu, I had in mind a few basic principles that derived from the form in which it is written—a complex and beautiful short form that is in some ways the Chinese version of the sonnet. The regulated verse poem has 8 lines (and it can be easiest to think of it as four couplets) and this one is written in 5-character lines. The form has a tonal meter and a regular rhyme scheme in which every other line shares a single rhyme. The regulated verse poem also contains syntactical parallelism in the second and third couplets. A final element of the regulated verse poem is the caesura, or the implicit pause in meaning and rhythm after the first two syllables of each five syllable line. Chou Ping and I did a free verse version first, but in the revision process the poem was pushed to become closer to the original form. 1) We didn’t use the original rhyme scheme, but did revise to turn the lines into rhyming couplets, which seemed appropriate, given the structure of the poem. 2) We did our best to incorporate syntactical and ideational parallelism, where possible, notably in the first two couplets. 3) We tried to honor the notion of the caesura, without hammering it home through punctuation. Thus: Slender wind // shifts the shore’s fine grass. Lonely night // below the boat’s tall mast. Stars hang low // as the vast plain splays; the swaying moon // makes the great river race. How can poems // make me known? I’m old and sick, // my career done. Drifting, just drifting. // What kind of man am I? A lone gull floating // between earth and s I like the idea that, in general, the Chinese poem in English should sound closer to Emily Dickinson than to Walt Whitman, and therefore we used what I call the “power word” theory of translation, in which as much as possible we translated to maintain the key nouns, verbs and adjectives and to minimize less powerful elements of speech (articles, prepositions, pronouns), with the ideal of converting a 5-character Chinese line into a 5-7 word line of English poetry. In English translation, the lines are in terms of word count: 7, 7, 8, 8, 6, 7, 9, 8. I’ve argued over the years that Chinese poetry should when possible be brought across into English with at least a nod to the meter, rhyme, and syntactical structures of the original, and not simply as a form of imagistic free verse, but of course that is easier to say than it is to do. My translation practice is to take the opportunity to maintain elements of the original form when that opportunity presents itself, but the majority of my work in translating Chinese is more concerned with voice and image and rhetoric than it is with sound.
[/blue_message]

Pages: 1 2 3

The Shih Ching , usually translated as either The Book of Songs or the Classic of Poetry, is the first great collection of Chinese poetry. Tradition says that it was edited into its present form by the Sage of Sages, Confucius himself. In fact the book was assembled before, during, and after the life of Confucius. Its more than three hundred poems include fragments of works as old as the Shang Dynasty (traditional; dates 1766-1154 BCE) as well as “contemporary” poems from the Chou feudal states written or spoken by both aristocratic court figures and just plain “folks”. A great deal has been said about the origin of many, if not the majority of the poems as oral “folk” art, but it is clear from the artistry of the written language in which they have been handed down that, like the scribes who improved upon the originally oral poetry attributed to “Homer” in the West to create the Iliad and the Odyssey, the people who converted Chou folk songs and court verses into poetry in written Chinese characters clearly thought of themselves as (and were) artists. So the characters used to render simple and direct lyrical utterances of the illiterate peasant folk often honor them with carefully chosen written vocabulary: the heart and soul of folk art remains clearly present, but literary subtleties are introduced. The scribes who created the Shih Ching were poets, not tape recorders. They chose the best of what existed, and they honored it with their own art.

In its present form, the Shih Ching consists of three major sections, the Kuo Feng, or Odes of the States, comprising 160 of the 300 are generally but not always folk songs. The Ya (Elegant Verses) subdivided with no obvious criteria into greater and lesser, include poems 161-265, and the Sung or Temple Odes high ritual songs and bits of dynastic myth, include poems 266-305. The present selection is comes, all but a single longer poem on drinking and its positive and negative consequences from the “Lesser Elegants”, all come from the Kuo Feng Sections.

Knowledge of the Shih Ching poems was a necessity of diplomatic practice around the time of Confucius, when it was a common practice to deliver or at least support the delivery of diplomatic messages among the feudal domains (the “States or Guo of the Guo Feng) by oral presentation of relevant lines from the Classic. From the Han on many of the poems where imbued with very specific allegorical interpretations, but it is clear that later poets, who memorized the book word for word, used it as allusive material in their own poems at least as often for its plain “folk” messages as for its orthodoxly approved allegorical ones.