These two recent bilingual editions of Tang poetry are welcome additions to books of Chinese literature but it’s difficult to see how I can substantially add to the comments I have already made about the period (16 September on this blog) apart from refining some of the ideas that I explored in that post. This blogpost attempts to do that.
The Li Shangyin collection, edited and translated from the Chinese by Chloe Garcia Roberts, is a New York Review of Books edition and it is more highly mediated than the collection of Tang poetry I reviewed earlier. But to my taste it’s not adequately annotated. A lot more could have been done to explain esoteric referents that the poet uses in many of the poems.
The significance of things that were common in Li’s day is, naturally enough, remote today. Doubly so because this is not just a collection of classical poetry, it’s a collection of classical Chinese poetry. So, frankly more work is needed to clarify things. The poet lived from 813 to 858 and was, as the poets in the earlier reviewed collection were, a state functionary.
Li’s subject matter is singled out for comment by the translator in this edition but the poetry seems to be fairly typical of the Tang period from what I could see. The privileging of the natural world is again evident here, as it had been in the other collection I read. What is also clear in these poems is the fact of the present moment. In the absence of any form of narrative (which I had also remarked on with respect to the earlier collection) the predominant feeling in these poems is a kind of melancholy linked to the transitory nature of life.
You are caught in a matrix of sensations and you register impressions as you observe the natural world, but nothing very much takes place apart from your ephemeral impressions.
This kind of writing can be inspiring because it offers a distinctive outlook on life (and this point will be explored more in the review, below, of the second book being considered in this blogpost) but humans crave narratives and we produce them, apparently without even thinking, all the time in the course of our daily lives.
Just today, for example, it being a Friday when I wrote these words, there was a tweet in my feed by an Australian academic living in America about the Kavanaugh inquest. There had been so much news already this week, she said, that the news team in the studio could just go home without putting out more. This kind of memeification of personal moments, tying the individual’s perceptions of reality to larger debates going on in the public sphere, is frequent and unceasing on social media as people come to terms with things that they hear and see throughout the day. It is the narrative instinct at work that we see in theses artefacts of consciousness on Twitter and Facebook, and that we react to with surprise, anger, or approval. In poetry like Li’s, and like that of the hermit(s) whose work is described below, the moment is cut off from that larger narrative, even though we strive as readers to fix it in place in relation to something bigger and more meaningful. Being constantly deprived of that narrative focus is tiring and eventually frustrating.
In my mind, these poems are best not read all at once, but rather they should be sampled selectively one at a time, and preferably talked about with a friend. Left alone, the mind cries out for some sort of development, something on which the emotions can hang.
In the second collection under consideration, which is a collection by the hermit Hanshan (which is translated as “Cold Mountain”) you are again faced with the point of view of a single mind. There are no other points of view on offer, and while there is a certain credible aphoristic quality present, there is no dialogue. The tone is often ironic and tired in the face of the conventionality of the world, or concerned more with eternal things than the mundane subjects that animate the vignettes on offer. But there is again little argument although you are aware of the point of view of the narrator, who is a Buddhist, and his distinctive system of values, one which eschews material wealth in favour of other things.
Here, the development is very sparse indeed.
Not all of the poems are as reductive as the one included above here, but that poem seemed, to me, to state something central to the kind of poetics on offer in this collection, animated as they are by the distinctly Chinese form of Buddhism known as “Zen” (or “Chan”). The circularity and aridity of the movement from beginning to end has something emblematic that goes to the core, in my mind, of the vision being proposed here. Here’s another one that goes along similar lines:
This edition is a strange book as it is published by a religious imprint, so presumably you are supposed to glean meaning from the poems without much context placing the verses in the historical moment. The approval of the editors is unironic and patent, like shiny leather. The poetry in the book was recovered from obscurity via Japanese scholars of Zen Buddhism starting in the Edo period (1603-1868). Zen Buddhism was strongly influenced by Taoism.
The Li Shangyin collection, edited and translated from the Chinese by Chloe Garcia Roberts, is a New York Review of Books edition and it is more highly mediated than the collection of Tang poetry I reviewed earlier. But to my taste it’s not adequately annotated. A lot more could have been done to explain esoteric referents that the poet uses in many of the poems.
The significance of things that were common in Li’s day is, naturally enough, remote today. Doubly so because this is not just a collection of classical poetry, it’s a collection of classical Chinese poetry. So, frankly more work is needed to clarify things. The poet lived from 813 to 858 and was, as the poets in the earlier reviewed collection were, a state functionary.
Li’s subject matter is singled out for comment by the translator in this edition but the poetry seems to be fairly typical of the Tang period from what I could see. The privileging of the natural world is again evident here, as it had been in the other collection I read. What is also clear in these poems is the fact of the present moment. In the absence of any form of narrative (which I had also remarked on with respect to the earlier collection) the predominant feeling in these poems is a kind of melancholy linked to the transitory nature of life.
You are caught in a matrix of sensations and you register impressions as you observe the natural world, but nothing very much takes place apart from your ephemeral impressions.
Today a pineThe immediate sensation of the physical world circumscribes your horizons, limiting the scope of your imagination and rendering your feelings as mere sensations that fly past the periphery of your consciousness. The lack of even superlunary beings leaves the poet bereft of a certain potential for the creation of meaning. There is also no significant other in the mundane universe to bounce off. And there is no certain consequence for any perception, just the passing of the moment into a kind of oblivion that is fortuitously avoided through writing.
On the ravine floor,
Tomorrow a cork tree
On a mountain peak.
This kind of writing can be inspiring because it offers a distinctive outlook on life (and this point will be explored more in the review, below, of the second book being considered in this blogpost) but humans crave narratives and we produce them, apparently without even thinking, all the time in the course of our daily lives.
Just today, for example, it being a Friday when I wrote these words, there was a tweet in my feed by an Australian academic living in America about the Kavanaugh inquest. There had been so much news already this week, she said, that the news team in the studio could just go home without putting out more. This kind of memeification of personal moments, tying the individual’s perceptions of reality to larger debates going on in the public sphere, is frequent and unceasing on social media as people come to terms with things that they hear and see throughout the day. It is the narrative instinct at work that we see in theses artefacts of consciousness on Twitter and Facebook, and that we react to with surprise, anger, or approval. In poetry like Li’s, and like that of the hermit(s) whose work is described below, the moment is cut off from that larger narrative, even though we strive as readers to fix it in place in relation to something bigger and more meaningful. Being constantly deprived of that narrative focus is tiring and eventually frustrating.
In my mind, these poems are best not read all at once, but rather they should be sampled selectively one at a time, and preferably talked about with a friend. Left alone, the mind cries out for some sort of development, something on which the emotions can hang.
In the second collection under consideration, which is a collection by the hermit Hanshan (which is translated as “Cold Mountain”) you are again faced with the point of view of a single mind. There are no other points of view on offer, and while there is a certain credible aphoristic quality present, there is no dialogue. The tone is often ironic and tired in the face of the conventionality of the world, or concerned more with eternal things than the mundane subjects that animate the vignettes on offer. But there is again little argument although you are aware of the point of view of the narrator, who is a Buddhist, and his distinctive system of values, one which eschews material wealth in favour of other things.
Here, the development is very sparse indeed.
Fulfilling means fulfilling the spirit,The Chinese original is also given in this edition, and you can see the way the five-character blocks are set up in a rectangle, the totality of the poem forming a single piece of text that can be understood as a standalone unit of signification. I’m not sure how the poetics operate in this kind of scheme but it looks like each poem has a physicality that makes it seem to be inevitable, with the prescribed number of characters lining up to form the whole.
this is called being fulfilled.
Transforming means transforming the form,
this is called being transformed.
If we fulfil the spirit and transform the form,
we can reach the stage of an immortal.
Not fulfilling the spirit means no transformation,
no escaping death and suffering in the end.
Not all of the poems are as reductive as the one included above here, but that poem seemed, to me, to state something central to the kind of poetics on offer in this collection, animated as they are by the distinctly Chinese form of Buddhism known as “Zen” (or “Chan”). The circularity and aridity of the movement from beginning to end has something emblematic that goes to the core, in my mind, of the vision being proposed here. Here’s another one that goes along similar lines:
A good-looking manThe essential lesson of the piece is clear, and it goes to something that is central to the Buddhist ethos on offer in these poems, but the sterile nature of the composition is not evocative of anything that transports the individual out of a world of care. It is a dry and austere mode of living that is presented to the reader. There is little hope of improving your life, and there are few consolations for the solitary traveller apart from a certainty of the essential nobility of material poverty, and certainly no hope of transcendence.
who had mastered all six arts
went to see the south, but was driven back to the north.
He went to see the west, and was chased toward the east,
so he wandered a long time, drifting like water weed,
and flying about like mugwort without taking a rest.
I ask what kind of thing he is –
his family name is poverty; suffering is his given name.
This edition is a strange book as it is published by a religious imprint, so presumably you are supposed to glean meaning from the poems without much context placing the verses in the historical moment. The approval of the editors is unironic and patent, like shiny leather. The poetry in the book was recovered from obscurity via Japanese scholars of Zen Buddhism starting in the Edo period (1603-1868). Zen Buddhism was strongly influenced by Taoism.
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