Written in Exile.
Liu Tsung-yüan, translation by Red Pine.
Copper Canyon Press. 2020. 256 pp.
ISBN 978-1-55659-562-2.
This whole situation had come to be because I'd sat down one day in front of my recruiter and informed her that I wanted a job as close as possible to my house—ideally, something along the lines of sitting all day in a chair, overseeing the extraction of collagen for use in skin products.
The present doodle-gotten-out-of-hand is a translation of most of the poems of the early ninth century Chinese poet Liu Tsung-yüan. As usual, the original Chinese text is adjacent to the English translation. Both have the same number of end-stopped lines. As usual, each poem or short series of poems is followed by a brief note giving it context and explaining the references the non-specialist is unlikely to realize.
Liu Tsung-yüan needed a translator. He had yet to have a popular edition of the poems. The reason for this fact is not clear. It certainly is not that his poems fell short in the least. In fact, they had the special attraction that they were written in an innovative style harking back from the T'ang to the Classical Age.
Actually, Liu is known foremost as a writer of innovative prose. It is the prose that has been brought before the public. Limited samples are included among the poems here in Written in Exile. While I cannot speak for the details of the translation (not knowing Chinese), the clear impression is that these are much more natural than other T'ang poems. Among their attractions, they are rhythmically looser then T'ang poems are as the rule.
As always with Chinese translations, I look to other translations of the same poems in order to gauge the quality of Red Pine's work. (Not that it is strictly necessary given the notable respect from his fellow translators.) This is always an informative exercise.
Far and away Liu's most popular poem is the more standard T'ang-rhythm, four-line "Snow River." Numerous versions are available online.
Lucas Klein's fine Cipher Journal features a page dedicated to the poem, which includes five of the better versions and a critical essay on the background of the poem. There we discover that Kenneth Rexroth has done a solid job:
A thousand mountains without a bird.
Ten thousand miles with no trace of man.
A boat. An old man in a straw raincoat,
Alone in the snow, fishing in the freezing river.
Perhaps Wai-lim Yip's version is the best on the page, more reflective of the original Chinese morphology:
A thousand mountains—no bird's flight.
A million paths—no man's trace.
Single boat. Bamboo-leaved cape. An old man.
Fishing by himself: ice river. Snow.
Red Pine's translations are uniformly the better, as English poems, among all options in these contests, and remains so in this instance.
A thousand mountains and not a bird flying
ten thousand paths and not a single footprint
an old man in his raincoat in a solitary boat
fishes alone in the freezing river snow.
Comparing his translation with the rest he seems clearly to have captured it all with a perfect simplicity, however much the "straw cloak and bamboo hat" of the original has simply become a "raincoat."
Klein's short essay on the poem is a fine and informative piece of work in its own right.
Most of the poems in Written in Exile are more striking for not being four or eight lines as in nearly all of T'ang poetry. They also rely less on references to earlier Chinese literature and shared symbolic values inherent in the details of nature.
Every bit as surprising, poems such as "Reburying the Bones of Workman Chang Chin" reveal that stylistics was not the only surprise in store for the reader of Liu. The compassion for the carelessly buried workman—no family member or friend but a human being nonetheless—is unexpected.
He spent his life cleaning stables
he didn't complain cutting hay
when he died they gave him a cheap coffinthe slope above the roadway collapsed
his bones were suddenly exposed
too scattered to put back together
luckily a passerby told me
I am not aware of another such T'ang era poem.
Neither Red Pine's earlier translations of T'ang poets nor (by all appearances) their original poems share the natural language and colloquial tone present in Written in Exile. This makes his poetry feel a bit more modern, but not so much so as to make it feel familiar. We do not share the world of Liu Tsung-yüan in which snake catchers are not required to pay taxes as a kind of hazardous-duty bonus. The howls of gibbons do not pierce the woodlands as we sit outside the cottage of our exile from the Imperial city of Chang'an in the evening drinking wine with friends.
I've sampled from time to time from historical Chinese literature, often wishing I could do more. The necessary circumstances have never come together.
Nevertheless, I have come to understand more about Chinese poetry than I could have imagined and greatly enjoyed the reading experience while I have done so. This is almost entirely because of the translations of Bill Porter, a.k.a., Red Pine. The translations live as English language poems and English Taoist and Buddhist texts. The translation of each author brings alive for the reader a unique individual personality that she or he can only appreciate.
I am once again pleased Bill Porter keeps puttering around and finding himself unable to stop until the puttering arrives at another fine volume of translation.
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