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Editor's Note: Splendid's Bookshelf promises a consistent guide to the best in independent
and small press publishing. Thousands of books are released each year by
presses representing communities and viewpoints not always found in your
local MegaBookMart. Each month, Bookshelf will spotlight a different press,
with reviews of fiction, poetry, cultural writing and more, providing a
valuable guide for those interested in expanding their reading horizons.
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I hold sixteen centuries in my hand, trying to understand its continuity of language, artistic tradition and culture. I'm a Californian; a ninety-year-old building we own in Berkeley is considered "historic". But I grew up in rural New England, and as a child walked one fall day with my father far into the woods to an old cellar trace. There, I put my hand on the slumped ruin of a chimney and fireplace that my ancestor had built, stone by stone, three times that many years ago. Still not long, by Chinese standards.
I range back a thousand years to Beowulf, a single moldering manuscript of which was resurrected for scholarly study about the same time my farmer forbear heaped up those stones. But it's hewn in an alien, if ancestral, language, not an English I can comprehend. Its characters are driven by passions and beliefs I can scarcely fathom. To tell the truth, culture and fashion reinvent themselves so wildly in our society that Wordsworth or even Wallace Stevens can feel nearly as remote as Beowulf.
I turn the ninety pages of Arthur Sze's slender, beautiful The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese -- the smooth, acid-free paper, the rough brown cover of the "uncorrected proof" I have been sent for review, the hundreds of years of Chinese poetry it contains -- and give up, a little, on trying to understand a tradition this old. It may be that for me, as a westerner, this tradition will remain as lovely, as immediate and as incomprehensible as a redwood tree.
The first poems in these pages are by T'ao Ch'ien, from around the year 400 AD.
The distant village is hazy, hazy, and
slender, slender, the smoke hanging over the houses
The last poem, "Red Rain" by Yen Chen, is from a commune in the Mao years, and holds the same watercolored, suspended image of rain over a village. T'ao Ch'ien could have read the brush strokes and understood the sentiments in a moment. A tractor and a combine at the village gates would have puzzled him, surely, but nothing else.
Jane Hirshfield has written beautifully about translation from 9th Century Japanese in The Ink Dark Moon. Arthur Sze gives another, equally remarkable glimpse into the translation of a near-contemporaneous T'ang Dynasty poem in his introduction. He first lays out the characters, their sounds and meanings. Then he walks us through a draft translation, complete with meticulously annotated corrections and restructurings. In the accompanying text, he speaks eloquently to the poetics of the piece, and to the sometimes years-long process of creating an acceptable translation. And he cautions us with a wry reference to an Italian phrase traddutori/traditori: translators/traitors.
I'm no student of Chinese, but Sze's translations feel right-straightforward, understated, delicate as flowers.
Sze, not incidentally a Manadrin speaker, teaches creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico, and has received the Lannan Award and the Marshall Poetry Prize, among numerous other distinctions.
One of my favorite poems in the book is from the redoubtable Li Po (701-762), "Drinking Alone with the Moon", a poem of exile. The poet drinks wine in his garden. He invites the moon, and then turns so that his shadow joins them as a third:
I sing, and the moon wavers.
I dance, and the shadow stumbles.
When sober, we were intimate friends;
now drunk, each of us separates.
Another poem that seems utterly accessible was inscribed on one of the poet Pa-Ta-Shen-Jen's (1626-1705) mountain paintings. It's titled "Bright Lights and Cloud Shadows":
With no place where clouds are not flying,
how did a worldly thought come to mind?
A mourning poem by Wen I-To (1899-1946), "Perhaps," brings to mind Edna Saint Vincent Millay while remaining exquisitely Chinese. Here is one stanza:
Don't let the sunlight open the curtain onto your eyes.
Don't let a cool breeze brush your eyebrows.
Ah, no one will be able to startle you awake:
I will open an umbrella of dark pines to shelter your sleep.
Another poem of death by Wen weds Eastern and Western sensibilities even more profoundly. Its final stanza:
Now the crowing of a cock hastens a heap of ashes.
A gust of dark wind gropes at my mouth.
Ah, the guest is right in front of me!
I close my eyelids then follow him out.
Other poems, like this by Wang Wei (701-761) move me, yet appear full of symbols whose meaning I can only guess:
The boy has not swept up the fallen petals.
Orioles singing,
the mountain hermit is yet sleeping.
In this book Arthur Sze, an American poet with deep roots in Chinese tradition, has not tried to instruct us in Chinese poetry, its conventions and its history. Rather he has set out poems he found personally compelling, written by the great masters of an ancient tradition. For sure, at the back, the book has brief biographical notes on each poet. It's nice to know that Li-Ho galloped each morning on horseback, dashing off poems, or to have the legend of Li-Po's death by moon recalled, but this is a book of poetry, not history. It invites us to sit down before this tree that has flourished for most of two millennia, a redwood of poetry, leaf and branch, another kingdom. So come and sit. Listen to Li-Po: I will meet you; ignore the long distance.
-- Bill Noble is a poet and fiction writer in Marin County, California. His joint manuscript with poets William Keener and Michael Day, Three Crows Yelling, won the 1999 National Looking Glass Award. He is fiction editor at the online magazine Clean Sheets.
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About the Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
The past quarter century has witnessed the greatest blossoming of American
poetry in history, along with the first translations of some of the world's
classic literature. During this time, Copper Canyon Press has remained
dedicated to publishing poetry in a wide range of styles, and from the full
range of the world's many cultures. As the premier publisher in the United
States devoted exclusively to poetry, Copper Canyon has been honored to
publish so many talented poets from multifarious backgrounds and cultures,
including Pablo Neruda, Thomas McGrath, Lucille Clifton, Carolyn Kizer, W.S.
Merwin, Su Tung-p'o, Hayden Carruth, Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, Olga
Broumas, David Lee and many others.
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