Translating: Mei Yaochen

Mei Yaochen, tonight's featured poet

Untitled (Thoughts of a 30 Year-Old Man in Ancient China)

Suddenly I wake to find my oak of wisdom has grown thin.
Lazy, I open the precious mirror to put on my face.

With the approaching wind, I fear exhaustion will make me quit,
Like herb of yi-shan, my song of fear grows long.

Green cassia perfumes my airy clothes,
Magic tallies adorn my silken bookbag.

The Western neighbor rhapsodies in vain!
Indissoluble, I arrive at my lord's side.

斗觉琼枝瘦，慵开宝鉴妆。临风恐倦去，倚扇怯歌长。

绿桂熏轻服，灵符佩缥囊。西邻空自赋，不解到君旁。

(Translation under construction)

I've been meaning to study Chinese poetry again formally and now a most wonderful opportunity has come: someone wants to pay me to translate a few poems! Why I want to translate Chinese poetry:


This first poem is by Mei Yaochen 梅尧臣 (1100s, to 1130-something, I think) one of the few poets of the Northern Song dynasty who was celebrated as truly great, and who mastered the supposedly Tang-dynasty art of regulated verse: four closely parallel couplets with intricate internal and external structures of rhyme, theme, parallelism of image and action, and so on. There are many guides to reading such poems, and a few readers seem truly to love them, but I confess that after a brief affair in the years 2002 and 2003, I can really not see the art in them, at least from the point of view of the modern English reader. From this end of things, the poems are evil little games played against one by the Chinese tradition. Nothing means what it seems to mean on the surface; ever noun and verb and image and sound is some kind of allusion, some sliver of an old text that serves to wink at the viewer if he knows it, and stare dully at him if he doesn't.

How could poetry like that ever appeal to any English reader?

Well, for one thing, there are English readers who study the Chinese language. I am of course one such reader. For us, the poem can be a nice game where you write out each character's English gloss and simply stare at the whole array of words to see if you can make some sense of it:

When that immediately doesn't work, you turn to a nice dictionary like dict.baidu.com and Google, and you begin to hack away at the often completely mysterious allusions. As it happens, this poem comes from Mei's early years when he was highly influenced by a particularly allusive bunch -- Prof. Michael Fuller describes them as "insiders." So it's not surprising that this poem is dense with strange allusions, viz.:

琼枝 qiong zhi, a character for a jade pendant of some sort, and the character for "branch." But this word refers to neither of those things; it is the name of a mythical tree, apparently. But the tree also isn't what is referred to here, but most likely is a metaphor for the talent of the worthy official 喻贤才; hence my sheepish "oak of wisdom." Our poet wants to do well in his job.

And so it goes, making each term and then each line a long adventure that a certain kind of reader might find not find tiresome for awhile.

A second class of reader is the reader who does not know Chinese, but perhaps wishes to read Chinese poetry because he or she hopes to catch sight of Chinese aesthetic principles: parallelism will shine through, as will images of plants, animals and people, often quaint and splendid in their variously exotic forms. I hope to write for this last group of people certainly. As a translator for them, I have a chance to shape their reception of what they perceive as Chinese in poetic arts. I will try not to be stuffy or orientalist if possible.

Finally, there is the holy grail: readers of English poetry. These people aren't picky when it comes to nationality -- they'd love to see decent poetry from China, in English. But they want form, humor, meta-awareness of the craft of poetry and all its foibles and tensions. I don't expect to be able to reach these readers right away, if ever at all. But hey, it's something to keep in mind while we practice, right?