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Modern American Poetry was invented by Ezra Pound in the
early 1900s. He didn’t do it alone. He had help,
especially from a Tokyo-based Harvard University professor
named Ernest Fenollosa, who knew little Japanese and
virtually no Chinese but who laboriously translated some
150 Chinese and Japanese poems, character by character, and
put them down in eight large notebooks that were published
by his wife after his death in 1908. By a quirk of fate,
the widow Fenollosa then selected the expatriate American
poet Ezra Pound, the bête noire of the London
literary scene, whom she barely knew, to do something with
the notebooks.
Pound
responded with enthusiasm. At first, he wasn’t quite sure
of the exact nature of the material that had fallen into
his hands. He was attracted to the ideogrammatic character
of Chinese writing and believed (erroneously) that it was
based not on sound but on its pictorial values. Whatever,
the idea of a sequence of spare yet luminous word pictures
delivered in ordinary speech took hold, and Pound, already
versed in the technique of the poem composed mostly, if not
exclusively, of images, began to devise a new way to render
reality.
Pound had been living in England since 1908, writing
lyrical poems in the manner of the French troubadours,
trying to forge his own voice out of the welter of gaudy,
fin-de-siècle rhetoric that encrusted Anglo-American
poetry. Five years later, armed with the Fenollosa
notebooks, he left for Sussex to begin the first of three
winter retreats with William Butler Yeats. While helping
Yeats prune and concretize his own poetic output, Pound
reworked a few of Fenollosa’s crude translations.
In 1915, he selected 18 of them and published them as a
pamphlet entitled Cathay, which he gave away to
friends and colleagues. The effect was galvanic. Ford
Madox Ford remarked, “What poetry should be, that they
are.” T.S. Eliot declared that Pound had become “the
inventor of Chinese poetry of our time.” In one slim
volume, as if by the stroke of a blade, Pound liberated
English-language poetry from the preachy effusions of the
late-Victorian period and ushered in a new era of easy,
natural, everyday speech. Cathay, says Eliot
Weinberger, editor of The New Directions Anthology of
Chinese Poetry, “was the first great book in English of
the new, plain-speaking, laconic, image-driven free verse.
And more: that which was most modern was derived from
poems more than a thousand years old.”
Pound had long been interested in imagism, the direct
depiction of the “thing,” shorn of superfluous commentary,
a poetry where every word was essential and lines were spun
out according to the length of a musical breath. He
searched the world’s poetries for examples, finding them
among the troubadours and in Dante and finally in classical
Chinese. In the March 1913 issue of Poetry
magazine, he inveighed against the flowery excesses of the
poetry of the early 1900s, declaring, “The image [is] that
which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an
instant of time.” The lesson that he had learned and that
he now dedicated himself to teaching others was quite
simple: poetry is Dichtung, condensation.
The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry
contains translations by William Carlos Williams, Ezra
Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and David Hinton.
Well-known poets such as Li Po (701-762) and Tu Fu
(712-770) are featured, along with lesser-known figures
from the prolific eras of the T’ang (618-907) and Sung
(960-1279) Dynasties. Back then, China was a place of
chronic regional conflict, with emperors and warlords
constantly seeking to conquer one another. Despite the
barbarity of the times, literacy was held in high esteem,
and the majority of poets earned their living as
bureaucrats in the various warring governments. Their
skills were in demand, and not just their secretarial
gifts, but their genius at bringing a moment or mood or
object alive in the form of a slim, unobtrusive poem.
The New Directions Anthology collects some 200 poems by
nearly 40 poets, from the anonymous early poetry, through
the great masters of the T’ang and Sung dynasties. The
anthology also includes previously uncollected translations
by Pound, a selection of essays on Chinese poetry by all
five translators, some never before published in book form,
and extensive biographical and bibliographical notes.
Moreover, the anthology presents different versions of the
same poem by various translators, as well as examples of
the translators reinterpreting themselves. Here are two
quick versions of a poem by the great T’ang poet, Wang Wei
(701-761):
Sitting in mystic bamboo
grove, back unseen
Press stops of long whistle
Deep forest unpierced by man
Moon and I face each other. (Ezra Pound)
Sitting alone, hid in
bamboo
Plucking the lute and gravely whistling.
People wouldn’t know that deep woods
Can be this bright in the moon. (Gary Snyder)
While Cathay earned Ezra Pound great accolades from
his fellow writers, it’s been Kenneth Rexroth in our own
time who has brought Chinese poetry in translation to a
much larger audience. Both One Hundred Poems from the
Chinese (New Directions, 1956) and Love and the
Turning Year: One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese
(New Directions, 1970) have enjoyed multiple printings,
which says something about a medium notorious for its
inability to attract buyers. Obviously, Rexroth’s limpid
re-workings of ancient themes struck a chord with American
poetry readers, and continue to do so. This is an example
of cultural cross-fertilization at its best—the most
hierarchical of countries giving to the most democratic a
manner of delivery intimately keyed to the plainsong of its
everyday speech.
As Eliot Weinberger avers in his introduction, of all the
poet/translators, Rexroth’s own work has been more deeply
informed by Chinese poetry than anyone else. While still
in his teens, he was introduced to Chinese poetry by Witter
Bynner, who encouraged him to read Tu Fu. Rexroth
eventually abandoned the dense, cubist style of his early
verse for a more conversational delivery, which was to
influence everything he wrote, prose and poetry, throughout
his long career. Consider, for example, the opening lines
of “The Heart Unbroken and the Courage Free,” (1940):
It is late autumn, the end of
Indian summer.
It was dry and warm all day, tonight it is cold.
In the light of the quarter moon the hoarfrost
Glows dimly on the dry long grass . . . .
The
tone is unmistakable, the encapsulated lines, the keen eye
for nature, the melancholy voice.
By contrast, Ezra Pound, in his post-Cathay phase,
seems to have forgotten everything he preached about the
simplicity of Chinese poetry. By the 1920s, he had
subverted his own stringent rules on poem-making in favor
of the collage-effect, with line and stanza functioning as
separate, self-contained images (or characters), humming
along simultaneously with every other line and stanza.
Another Pound fixation was the overriding idea of the work
as a gigantic, formless ideogram composed of countless
shards and pieces (fractals), suggestive of the whole, such
as he attempted to achieve (with mixed results) in his
masterwork, The Cantos.
Included in the section entitled “On Chinese Poetry,” in
The New Directions Anthology, is a translation by the
brilliant and eccentric Sinologist, Achilles Fang
(1910-1995), of a little known work by Lu Chi, a deposition
on Chinese poetics entitled “Rhymeprose on Literature.”
This entry alone is worth the price of the book. Lu Chi
(261-303) was China’s first major literary critic, and
still, to this day, one of its greatest. His family
enjoyed the confidence of the Royal House in the kingdom of
Wu until that kingdom was overthrown by Chin, whereupon Lu
Chi, along with his two brothers and two sons, was put to
death on false charges of high treason.
The “Rhymeprose” is composed of single-sentence aphorisms
about the art of writing bunched together in pithy little
chapters with titles like “The Music of Poetry” and “The
Art of Rewriting.” The entire text should be passed around
to student and teacher alike at writers’ conferences. A
few examples will suffice:
•
“We lock a whole infinity in a square foot of silk; we
pour a deluge from the inch-space of the heart.”
•
“Essentially, language must communicate, and reason must
dominate; prolixity and verbosity are not commended.”
•
”Put down terse phrases at key positions; they will
invigorate the whole piece.”
How many of us, slogging through a course on English
Romantic poetry, yearned to write with ripe, mellifluous
meaningfulness about brooks and nightingales and decrepit
abbeys? And how many of us, cowed by the presence of such
worthy exemplars of the poetic canon as Coleridge, Keats,
and Wordsworth, threw down our pens in disgust and decided
to become journalists or genre writers?
Well, The New Directions Anthology of Chinese Poetry
can help change all that and make an important difference,
especially for those seeking to understand what it takes to
write poetry. Poetry remains relevant today primarily
because of the proliferation of good poets, who pay close
attention to the spate of simple, quiet things floating
just under their noses. The emotions engendered by this
type of regard must be carefully modulated in the manner
suggested by Sung Dynasty critic, Wei T’ai: “Poetry
presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It
should be precise about the thing and reticent about the
feeling.”
It’s easy to celebrate classical Chinese poetry. Who can’t
feel good about the friendship between Tu Fu and Li Po, who
were known to have gotten together on several occasions and
imbibed beakers of wine and written poems in a friendly,
competitive fashion? The image of the itinerant poet,
traipsing from place to place, looking and listening,
living off whatever he or she can scratch up, resounds at
the heart of the sensibility. Then there’s the death of Li
Po, perhaps the most poignant of all the great poets; out
drunk in a boat at the age of 61, he fell into a river and
drowned trying to embrace the reflection of the moon
shimmering on the surface of the water.
Good poets of any time or era know it’s best to treat
experience with simple clarity and steady focus. Life is a
fount of inexhaustible energy, and it’s virtually
impossible to harness that energy for one’s own personal
display. We don’t have to bluster and swagger in order to
be heard. The Chinese poets showed the way a couple of
millennia ago—“We wrestle with non-being to force it into
being; we beat silence for an answering music” (Lu Chi)—and
they continue to show the way today. |
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A memoir
should give us the sense that if we could write about our
lives from a distance, a compelling narrative would
emerge. V.S. Pritchett has said of the memoir, “It’s all
in the art. You get no credit for living.” The
assumption here is that, if told well enough, any
experience can become an engaging story. These two
memoirs, however, show that the life lived counts for as
much as how it is relayed. Perhaps what matters is the
attitude toward that life and whether or not the writer
can go beyond the narrow concerns of the self.
Both Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Living to Tell the Tale
and Pascal Khoo Thwe’s memoir, From the Land of Green
Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, account the extraordinary
beginnings of two men. Living to Tell the Tale
documents the first 28 years of Marquez’s life. Marquez,
or Gabo, as he’s frequently called, is the Nobel
Prize-winning author of more than 20 books, including the
magical realism cornerstones One Hundred Years of
Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. This
autobiography (the first in a series of three) focuses on
his family’s esoteric history and the years he spent in
apprenticeship as a writer.
In reading Living to Tell the Tale, one never gets
the sense that what is being documented is necessarily
“real.” Marquez was once quoted as having said, “If you
say there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not
going to believe you. But if you say that there are four
hundred and twenty-five elephants in the sky, people
will believe you.” In Nabokovian style, Marquez admits to
and embraces the fallibility of memory. The story jumps
in and out of time. Even the epigraph reads, “Life is not
what one lived, but what one remembers and how one
remembers it in order to recount it.”
One of the texts that Marquez says influenced him most is
One Thousand and One Nights, with its blend of the
earthly and the extraordinary. The story he liked best is
that of a fisherman who promises a neighbor that he will
give her the first fish he catches if she will lend him a
lead weight for his casting net. When the woman opens the
fish to fry it, she finds a diamond.
Marquez spends the rest of the book stringing legend,
history, experience and mythology together. Aracataca,
the town where Marquez is raised, is a wild place of
“infallible wizards and biblical misfortunes.” It is here
that he watches the exorcism of his Aunt Wenefrida, Nana:
All of a sudden Nana writhed in deep convulsion and a bird
the size of a chicken and with iridescent feathers escaped
from between the sheets. The woman caught it in midair
with a masterful blow of her hand and wrapped it in a
black cloth she had prepared. She ordered a fire lit in
the backyard and without any ceremony tossed the bird into
the flames. But Nana did not recover from her ailments.
Even as a young adult, Marquez’s life is touched by
magic. After a hapless three months of trying to write
for a newspaper, he asks one of his teachers to tell him
the secret to writing feature articles. Maestro Zabala
declines; instead, he troubles Marquez with “the enigma of
a twelve-year-old girl, buried in the Convent of Santa
Clara, whose hair grew after her death, more than 20
meters in 2 centuries.”
From the Land of Green Ghosts,
which won the Kiryama prize for nonfiction, centers on
Thwe’s origins in the remote Paduang tribe in Burma—a
country ruled and virtually ruined by the dictatorship of
Ne Win and the successive implementation of one futile
government after another. The book follows Thwe’s
experiences as a student and rebel in Mandalay up through
his eventual escape to Caius College at Cambridge
University in England.
Thwe shares Marquez’s esoteric but auspicious beginnings.
In Phekkon, Thwe’s ancestral village, rice wine is a
staple, even in infancy. They use a homemade shampoo of
soap fruits, slimy barks and roasted herbal beans before
reentering the home, and entice ancestral spirits with
aromatic flowers and food. His Paduang tribe is known for
the famed metal rings worn by its women to elongate their
necks. “They looked to us like mythical creatures,” Thwe
writes, “half-human and half-bird—and yet it never
occurred to us that the Paduang were different from other
people. That we were descended from a ‘zawgyi’— a male
creature, half-human and half angel—and a beautiful female
dragon did not seem odd, merely a source of pride.”
These stories give Thwe a sense that the Paduang are more
than just a freak show. “They may even have made up some
of the stories,” he says, “or parts of them—but in being
told in this way the stories entered the world of myths.”
Each night after dinner, Thwe’s family basks in moonlight
and the children are told about their ancestors: “The
young night was pollinated with stars, and the full moon
looked like a huge lollipop as it rose in the east over
the purple hills and shed light on our unlit town . . . .
It even seemed to heal sorrows and spiritual wounds.”
Thwe and Marquez struggled to achieve their dreams—one to
become a writer, the other an academic. “Even when I had
not eaten,” writes Marquez, “I never missed school”; he
loved writers such as Faulkner, Joyce, Borges, Hemingway,
Woolf, and Steinbeck. Though he reminisces about lying in
the arms of prostitutes and married women, Marquez prides
himself on the fact he was too poor to buy books of his
own and was forced to borrow them from friends and stay up
all night in order to finish and return them. Thwe’s love
of literature and reading takes him from his village to
study in Mandalay. There he is disoriented and robbed,
driven to insomnia and left to pray that he will not wake
with the barrel of a gun in his face.
In both stories, the political backdrop drives the
narrative. For Marquez, it is “La Violencia,” the
political unrest that plagued Columbia during the 1940s
and 1950s and resulted in the deaths of more than 200,000
people. Despite the grotesque violence, Marquez describes
Columbia as “a nation obsessed with poetry.” For Thwe, it
is the rebel student movement, inspired by the democratic
leader Aung San Suu Kui. During the 1988 uprising, Thwe
flees to the Burmese Thai border. In each section of
Marquez’s story, something befalls the protagonist. In
Thwe’s tale, he escapes and manages to make it to England
with the help of Dr. John Casey, a Cambridge don. His
flight from military oppression reads like an action
movie.
The most compelling moments of Thwe’s book come when he
finally reaches England. He describes himself as “lost”
in the modern world. To relax, he takes up gardening.
Because he does not recognize English flowers and plants,
he chops down a noble old clematis thinking it’s a weed.
When a cat eats the eggs out of a bird’s nest, Thwe vows
to kill it and eat it. When asked by Casey how he would
do that, Thwe replies that he would bang its head against
a wall or tree. The last hundred pages are so beautiful
one wishes we could see more of the West through Thwe’s
eyes.
Living to Tell the Tale
and From the Land of Green Ghosts have what good
autobiographies and memoirs should have, that delicate
mixture of indulgence and humility. By the end of
Living to Tell the Tale, Marquez is a journalist and a
published short story writer. He has fallen in love and
departed for Europe. Despite the fact that the major
novels have not yet been written, and Marquez is virtually
unknown, he is surprised and delighted by his good
fortune. From the Land of Green Ghosts ends with Thwe’s graduation from Cambridge, an event for which he
feels blessed, despite his exile.
Perhaps we are seeing that V.S. Pritchett was, in some
ways, wrong: How you tell your story matters, but it is
what you say that ultimately makes the difference.
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