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China Figures - New Songs from a Fade Terrace: An Anthology of Early Chinese Love Poetry, Translated with Annotations and an Introduction. By Anne Birrell. George Allen & Unwin: London, 1982. Pp. xxx, 374. Chronological Table, one map. £15.95.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
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References
1 Graham, A. C. (sel. and trans.), Poems of the Late T'ang (reprinted with additional Preface, Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 29.Google Scholar
2 All that is perhaps lacking, in this admirably concise and extensive apparatus, is a more detailed map shewing the locations of cities and natural features (mountains, rivers, etc.) mentioned in the text; and some more specific if brief overview of the connections between these songs and their singing modes and the contemporary musical forms and practices. Even the tentative reconstruction of a musical context would doubtless be difficult, given that so little music from this early period has survived. But Dr Birrell has many scattered notes and comments on tunes and instruments and on musical aspects generally, and a brief conspectus of the evidence and its likely implications would be a great advantage.
3 See Miao, R. C., ‘Palace-style Poetry: The Courtly Treatment of Glamour and Love,’ in Miao, R. C. (ed.), Studies in Chinese Poetry and Poetics, 1 (San Francisco, 1978), 1–42.Google Scholar
4 Jade Terrace, Appendix, p. 342.Google Scholar
5 Watson, Burton, Chinese Lyricism; Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century, with translations (New York and London, 1971), p. 2.Google Scholar
6 Pound, Ezra, Selected Poems, sel. Eliot, T. S. (London, 1928), p. xvii.Google Scholar
7 Graham, , Late T'ang, p. 13.Google Scholar
8 Waley, Arthur (sel. and trans.), One Hundred & Seventy Chinese Poems (London, new edn, 1962), p. 7.Google Scholar
9 Earl Miner has argued that Pound's interest in, and adoption of certain techniques from, the Japanese seasonal haiku may have preceded his Chinese interests and may account for certain features of his writing normally attributed to Chinese influence; see his ‘Pound, Haiku and the Image,’ Hudson Review, IX (1956–1957), 570–84Google Scholar. But again the Japanese tradition implies for the uses of imagery a strongly predetermined context, consonant with the formal determinants of the genre: ‘Since the Japanese are intimately familiar with the flora and fauna of each season, and since each reference to a plum tree in blossom or to a crying pheasant is bound up with centuries of religious symbolism and poetic practice, this “rule” of haiku is anything but arbitrary and constraining’ (p. 570).Google Scholar
10 There is a full, if insidiously Poundian, account in Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era (London, 1972), pp. 192–231Google Scholar, and a more convincingly measured interpretation in Miner, Earl, The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton, 1958), pp. 127–34.Google Scholar
11 Pound, Ezra, Gaudier = Braeska; A Memoir … (London, 1916), p. 97.Google Scholar
12 Yip, Wai-lim, Ezra Pound's Cathay (Princeton, 1969), pp. 56, 164–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kenner, , Pound Era, p. 197Google Scholar. In his ‘Opening Paragraphs on Ernest Fenollosa’ prefixed to ‘Noh’ or Accomplishment; A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound (London, 1916),Google Scholar Pound fully admitted that ‘The art of allusion, or this love of allusion in art, is at the root of the Noh’ (p. 5).Google Scholar
13 Kenner, , Pound Era, pp. 204–5.Google Scholar
14 Karlgren, Bernhard, Sound and Symbol in Chinese (Hong Kong, rev. edn, 1962), p. 85.Google Scholar
15 See Jakobson, Roman, ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,’ in Jakobson, R. and Halle, M., Fundamentals of Language (The Hague, rev. edn, 1971Google Scholar); Lodge, David, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (London, 1977Google Scholar); Culler, Jonathan, The Pursuit of Signs, Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London, 1981), Chapter 10. The use of these figural terms in recent linguistic and structuralist analysis does not yet rest on stable definition. It would be relevant to note here that the uninstructed reader of Dr Birrell's translations, inattentive to her notes, might take the figures of comparison in these poems to be rather flat and lifeless metaphors, rather than formal patternings based on adept metonymy.Google Scholar
16 The Note which he supplied to his translation in Cathay of Li Po's Yü Chieh Yüan, ‘The Jewel Stairs' Grievance’, shews that he very fully grasped the subtlety of allusional composition; see Pound, Ezra, The Translations, introd. by Kenner, Hugh (London, 1953), p. 194Google Scholar, and the fuller comment in his ‘Chinese Poetry,’ To-Day, Vol. III, No. 14 (1918), pp. 55–6Google Scholar; but until the patterns of metaphor within the evolving Cantos began to comprise an internally allusive system of their own, I believe that Pound rejected metonymy and claimed Fenollosa's support for this. A diametrically opposite view is advanced by Nänny, Max, ‘Context, Contiguity and Contact in Ezra Pound's Personal,’ ELH, 47 (1980), 386–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Following Schneidau, Nänny correctly recognizes Pound's turning away from traditional metaphor; but wrongly I think then argues that this carried Pound towards a context-ordered poetic. But inventing radically new contexts, or sharply disordering and reducing old ones, strongly curtails dependence on previous context; when such autonomous metaphors are themselves combined, the effect is initially metaleptic rather than as Nänny describes it.
17 Pound, Ezra, The Translations, p. 190Google Scholar; I cite only the first stanza. See also Waley, , One Hundred & Seventy Chinese Poems, p. 24Google Scholar and Kenner's fractious comment (Pound Era, p. 195Google Scholar); Yip, , Ezra Pound's Cathay, pp. 130–8, 172–3, 186–7Google Scholar; Watson, , Chinese Lyricism, p. 23.Google Scholar
Pound followed tradition in ascribing this poem to Mei Sheng, but Dr Birrell prefers the more recent classification which assigns no named author to any of the Nineteen Old Poems.
18 Kenner notes part of this (Pound Era, p. 194Google Scholar); see also the Hanjade pendant in the shape of a dancing woman, BM 1947.7–12.492, illustrated in Rawson, Jessica, Ancient China; Art and Archaeology (London, 1980Google Scholar), fig. 192. The Homeric and biblical origins of willow-symbolism in the west are expertly traced by Rahner, Hugo, Griechische Mythen in Christlicher Deutung (Zürich, 1945), pp. 361–413Google Scholar, and further extended by Sternfeld, F. W. on ‘The Willow Song,’ in his Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1963), pp. 23–52.Google Scholar
19 Pound, Ezra, The Cantos (New York, 1970), p. 778.Google Scholar
20 Jade Terrace, p. 39.Google Scholar
21 The whole complex of motifs and figural interconnections is more fully described in, e.g., Frankel, H. H., The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady; Interpretations of Chinese Poetry (New Haven and London, 1976), pp. 95–103; but Dr Birrell's brief notes are quite sufficient to enable the reader of her translations to work out and observe all these ramifications.Google Scholar
22 There may have been a further oblique irony in the reduction of this girl's status through her connection with singing since this poem, so woven into the traditions of later courtly literature, was in origin probably accompanied by its music in the form of a popular ballad, intended to be sung.
23 Waley, , One Hundred & Seventy Chinese Poems, p. 23.Google Scholar
24 Watson also uses the term ‘cliché’ with the same uninspected dismissiveness (Chinese Lyricism, p. 91Google Scholar), and J. J. Y. Liu adopts a comparably pre-emptive contrast between hackneyed cliché and forceful freshness of imagery (The Art of Chinese Poetry (London, 1962), pp. 114–22, 133Google Scholar). But a metonymic usage can develop so as to favour the repetition and intertextual exchange of formalized comparisons, and to speak of cliché not descriptively but as a term of confident disparagement merely imports into a different literary tradition the demands generated by a preference for metaphoric discourse. Self-evidently some employments of cliché will be less successful than others and Dr Birrell's own discussion of this issue is a shade defensive and apologetic (pp. 16–18); but the Jade Terrace anthology is an instructive case-book in the wide and subtle potential of writing in which cliché plays an importantly positive part.
25 Jade Terrace, p. 173.Google Scholar
26 Thus what is visually present and presented can function only to intimate stronger desire for what is absent; the metonymic mode is potentially fraught with this irony, since the iconic part of the system which is present can be seen as estranged from that larger connected whole from which it is separated. This pattern accords well with the sexual dialectic of desire and frustration which, together with the asymmetry of the pairing bond, is the underlying master-trope of this anthology.
27 Jade Terrace, p. 256.Google Scholar
28 Watson, , Chinese Lyricism, p. 105Google Scholar; Frodsham, J. D. and Hsi, Ch'eng (sel. and trans.), An Anthology of Chinese Verse; Han Wei Chin and the Northern and Southern Dynasties (Oxford, 1967), pp. xxxviii, 123Google Scholar. For Hsieh Ling-yün's first-hand interest in the experience of hills and mountains, see Sullivan, Michael, Symbols of Eternity; the Art of Landscape Painting in China (Oxford, 1979), p. 26.Google Scholar
29 Acker, William (sel. and trans.), T'ao the Hermit; Sixty Poems by Too Ch'ien (365–427) (London and New York, 1952), p. 149Google Scholar. Many of Acker's renderings achieve a more natural inwardness of tone and movement than those of Dr Birrell, who carefully respects and conserves the resistance of her originals to such meditative lyricism.
30 Jade Terrace, p. 143Google Scholar; compare also Lu Yün's letter-poems (pp. 94–5) and Shuo's, Liu ‘Bright moon white’ (p. 107Google Scholar). Hsiao I (Emperor Yüan of the Liang) sums up the social motif which pre-empts solitary contemplation: ‘I regret love's end: to meet becomes to part’ (p. 257).Google Scholar
31 See Birrell's, Dr Introduction, pp. 19–20Google Scholar, and Frankel, , Flowering Plum, pp. 86–7.Google Scholar
32 Jade Terrace, p. 361Google Scholar; and see Jenner, W. F. J., Memeries of Loyang; Yang Hsüan-chih and the Lost Capital (493–534) (Oxford, 1981), pp. 50–1.Google Scholar Jenner's brief discussion (p. 137) contrasting the ill-fated northern capital with the Liang Dynasty's capital at Chien-k'ang argues that the brilliant southern court was maintained not so much by strong imperial control as by a flourishing commercial and trading base. An implicit counterpointing between allusions to these two capitals is a running motif in the Jade Terrace collection.
33 Jade Terrace, pp. 64–5.Google Scholar
34 Jade Terrace, p. 295Google Scholar. The tortuous intricacies and rivalries of the Emperor Wu's imperial household, which during his reign included six principal consorts of which A-chiao (Empress Ch'en) was the first, are summarized in Table 2 of Loewe, Michael, Crisis and Conflict in Han China; 104 BC to AD 9 (London, 1974), facing p. 64.Google Scholar
35 Jade Terrace, p. 25Google Scholar. See Frankel, , Flowering Plum, Chapters 11 and 12Google Scholar; Watson is rather censorious about what he sees as the mechanical over-dependence on the device by the Six Dynasties poets (Chinese Lyricism, pp. 102–3Google Scholar). The importance for western poetic discourse of figurations involving parallelism has been argued by recent structuralist critics; see, e.g., Ruwet, N., ‘Parallélismes et déviations en poésie,’ in Kristeva, J. et al. (comps.), Langue, discours, société: Pour Emile Benveniste (Paris, 1975), 307–51.Google Scholar
36 Chih, Ts'ao, ‘The deserted wife’; Jade Terrace, p. 70 (and see also p. 13Google Scholar). This source of bitterness for Ts'ao P'ei's consort is invoked with tacit irony in his later poem, ‘Your poor wife’ (p. 236), where he gives her the words: ‘My cradled lute's singing strings release clear autumn notes’. Thus to hold a lute (p'i-p'a) in one's lap was a received formula (compare pp. 126, 179, 252); but here it figures the missing child who is never directly mentioned.Google Scholar
37 See Chün, Wu, ‘I long for Liaotung’Google Scholar (Jade Terrace, p. 160Google Scholar) and Loewe, , Crisis and Conflict, p. 51; Loewe implies that the Empress Ch'en's fault was failure to bear the Emperor a son, rather than not to give him any children, so that Dr Birrell's contrary assertion on p. 306 may need to be corrected.Google Scholar
38 This tendency to slightly laconic rhythms and tonal dryness contrasts favourably, however, with the smoothed consistency of Waley's versions, and the ‘literary’ flutter which characterizes the translations of Frodsham and Ch'eng Hsi (Anthology of Chinese Verse). This latter collection includes many Jade Terrace poets, and some of the same poems; but Frodsham finds ‘Palace Poetry’ mostly too languid for his taste, despite his own penchant for a languid, over-ornate vocabulary and over-determined sentence construction. Dr Birrell's sparse and mostly paratactic syntax suits her approach well, since she had reduced accommodating interpretation (within the translations themselves) to a bare minimum. And a largely metonymic mode may have less need of an elaborately subordinating or fully-determined syntax, since the activity of reference and meaning implied by the figures is located not so much in what is transcribed as in the coded implications lying outside the text.
39 Jade Terrace, p. 99.Google Scholar
40 Some later commentators have in turn noted a possible interest by Li Ho in the ‘Palace Poetry’ of some three hundred years earlier; see Frodsham, J. D. (trans.), The Poems of Li Ho (791–817) (Oxford, 1970), p. li.Google Scholar
41 Graham, , Late T'ang, p. 139Google Scholar. The originating precedent within the anthology is ‘Without a word’ (p. 40Google Scholar), no. 10 of the Nineteen Old Poems. The theme is still being invoked and reworked by the Palace Style poets; see Kang's, Hsiao ‘Seventh night’Google Scholar (Jade Terrace, p. 197) and the poem of the same title (p. 222Google Scholar) by Hsin, Yü, a younger associate of Hsiao Kang's literary court (pp. 4–5).Google Scholar
42 Jade Terrace, p. 253.Google Scholar
43 To extricate such sonic patterning from what is after all only a translation may seem merely fanciful. But Dr Birrell's ear is exactly tuned to the prevailingly-implied melodies: Chang Shuai's poem is a condensed version of the traditional drinking-party theme, and in Chih's, Ts'ao ‘My sad fate’ (pp. 237–8) we can find the conventionally concluding reference to dew on the early-morning grass spelled out in direct speech.Google Scholar
44 Yip, Wai-lim (sel. and trans.), Chinese Poetry; Major Modes and Genres (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1976), p. 11Google Scholar. The pictographic and anti-phonetic bias of Pound's theory of the Chinese character has been steadily rejected and confuted, both by scholars and by poets; see, e.g., Boodberg, Peter A., ‘“Ideography” or “Iconolatry?”’ (1940), Selected Works, comp. Cohen, A. P. (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1979), pp. 407–29Google Scholar, and the tributes to Witter Bynner by Kenneth Rexroth in his An Autobiographical Novel (New York, 1966), pp. 318–19Google Scholar and American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1971), pp. 43–4Google Scholar. Some possible origins for the repudiation by Fenollosa and Pound of phonetic compounds are suggested by Johnson, Scott, ‘The “Tools” of the Ideogramic Method,’ Paideuma, 10 (1981), 525–32Google Scholar. Yet the description of Chinese poetry as ‘the acting-out of visual objects and events’ (Yip, , Chinese Poetry, p. 23) stubbornly persists, despite such an unvisual couplet as that which opens the first poem by the anthologist himself (Hsü Ling) in Dr Birrell's translation:Google Scholar
‘Today, your being so considerate Offends, but less than had it been spring’ (p. 226).Google Scholar
Prosodie and verbalistic pattern-systems such as antithetic parallelism, extended hendiadys, rhyming and punning again point to the medium and substance of Chinese poetry as primarily logographic; and (with the exception of rhyme) all these formalisms are conserved by Dr Birrell in her approach to translation: ‘Thus metre, rhyme, parallelism, and imagery form the basic structure of the poem, carrying the burden of meaning’ (Introduction, p. 24).Google Scholar
45 See for example the translations from Wang Seng-ju; Jade Terrace, pp. 165–70.Google Scholar
46 Jade Terrace, p. 285.Google Scholar
47 See Yün, Liu, ‘Despair at Eternal Gate Palace’ (p. 146), imitated by Fei Ch'ang in his poem of the same title (p. 176Google Scholar); the connection between the water-clock and tears of grief is patent in ‘Night visit to Cypress Studio’ by I, Hsiao (p. 203).Google Scholar
48 Jade Terrace, p. 317; see also pp. 191, 283.Google Scholar
49 Compare, for instance, the subtlety of rhythm, and also the slight loosening of formal control, in Rexroth's version of Yüeh's, P'an ‘I mourn her passing’, One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese (New York, 1970), pp. 31–2Google Scholar. What Dr Birrell in her version (Jade Terrace, pp. 82–3Google Scholar) gains in avoidance of pathos she in part loses by suppression of eloquent feeling: the profound melancholy noted by Frodsham in P'an Yüeh's work as ‘unsurpassed in Chinese verse’ (Frodsham, and Hsi, Ch'eng, Anthology of Chinese Verse, p. 86Google Scholar). The relation of eloquence to control in the utterance of feeling, itself raised as a question in this poem, is powerfully discussed in Chi's, LuWen fu (‘Essay on Literature’) of A.D. 300Google Scholar; see Section 11, ‘of inspiration’ in Shih-Hsiang, Chen, Literature as Light Against Darkness (National Peking University Semi-centennial Papers, 11; Peiping, 1948), p. 68Google Scholar; but a Jade Terrace ‘Essay on Literature’ would doubtless have nominated rather different priorities.