Arthur Sze opens The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry with a pair of introductory essays. Or, perhaps, excavations is a better word. One is a preface tracing what’s been added to this expanded edition of The Silk Dragon, first published in 2001. The second, from the original version of the book, is among the most vivid demonstrations of how translation works that I have read.
“I know translation is an ‘impossible’ task,” Sze writes there, “and I have never forgotten the Italian phrase traduttori/traditori: ‘translators/traitors.’ Which translation does not in some way betray its original? In considering the process of my own translations, I am aware of loss and transformation, of destruction and renewal.” He may as well be describing the poems themselves.
What, after all, is poetry—or literature—if not an art of approximation? We feel things, or live through them, and then attempt to (yes) translate them into language. That language is subjective and fallible is part of the point. It is a set of symbols through which we seek to represent experience. This is not the same as re-creating it.
Sze makes the idea explicit by sharing an account of how he translated a short, untitled work by the ninth-century poet Li Shang-yin. To begin, he wrote out the Chinese characters, then added a rudimentary English equivalent, “along with a word, phrase, or cluster that helps mark its fields of energy and meaning.” By way of illustration, he re-creates the draft: eight lines, each with seven characters, a metric order he will seek not to replicate, exactly, but (more accurately) to represent. For Sze, the central challenge is to keep in mind the shape and rhythm of the source text even as he frames the requirements of the version he means to create. From his notes, he roughed out eight lines in English, but “the translation [was] too cramped.” His solution? To break each line in two. The resulting 16-line edit, which Sze also presents, begins to resemble the final translation we will encounter.
I am fascinated by the intimacy of this engagement, which leads Sze to draw meaning not only from the language of the poem but also from its form.
A similar sensibility emerges throughout the 70-plus selections in The Silk Dragon II, 18 of which are newly translated. These poems span nearly 1,700 years, from the work of Tao Qian, in the fourth and fifth centuries, to that of Jiang Tao, born in 1970, and they make for a collection that, while brief—with notes, it comes to barely 120 pages—is both wide-ranging and unified. If, in the prior edition, Sze focused primarily on traditional verse, here he has added nine contemporary writers with the intention of exploring the divide in Chinese poetry that occurred after “the May Fourth Movement in 1919.” The term refers to a series of student protests that precipitated a seismic shift in the culture, including a break “from writing in classical Chinese” in favor of “writing in the vernacular.” At the same time, Sze understands, this “transformation” is also part of a larger continuum. In that sense, he wonders: “To what extent were poets in China furthering a rupture with the past? To what extent were Chinese poets drawing on Western poetry as their primary source of inspiration? To what extent were poets drawing in classical Chinese poetry but not being bound by it?”
This last question feels particularly resonant, since despite the disruptions of the past, The Silk Dragon II demonstrates a surprising consistency. Or maybe it’s that both the vernacular poems and the most traditional work are infused with stark simplicity.
“The moon in the deep night lights every sliver of bone,” writes Wang Xiaoni, born in 1955, in her “Very White Moonlight.” “I inhale blue-white air. / The world’s trifles and smatterings / turn into sinking fireflies. / The city’s a carcass.” There’s a timelessness to the images, the language, that recalls Li Qingzhao’s “To the Tune of ‘Intoxicated in the Shadows of Flowers,’ ” which concludes:
I drink wine by the eastern fence in the yellow dusk.
Now a dark fragrance fills
my sleeves and makes me spin.
The bamboo blinds sway in the west wind.
And I am even thinner than a yellow flower.
Li Qingzhao—who, Sze observes, “is generally considered to be China’s finest woman poet”—wrote those lines in the 12th century, yet they feel as contemporary as any in The Silk Dragon II. So, too, Li Bai’s “Night Thoughts,” written during the 8th century. The poem reads, in its entirety:
The moonlight falls by my bed.
I wonder if there’s frost on the ground.
I raise my head to look at the moon,
then ease down, thinking of home.
In part, such an interplay has to do with the translator, who has also edited and ordered the book. Sze admits as much; “I’m interested,” he writes, as he traces a line of his own between Li Bai and Wang Xiaoni, “in continuity and growth as well as rupture.” At the same time, it’s in the nature of the poems, which remain grounded in direct expression of both the physical world and human evanescence. Consider the opening of “Ice Anglers,” by the contemporary poet Wang Jiaxin:
In the reservoir near my house, when winter comes,
you can see some ice anglers,
squatting there in old army overcoats.
From a distance, they look like crows scattered in the snow.
Except for the army overcoats, those lines might have been produced at a variety of points throughout the long aesthetic history Sze seeks to chart.
That’s the most exhilarating aspect of The Silk Dragon II, which is less sequel than elaboration, a widening of its predecessor’s lens. A fitting exemplar may be found in Wen Yiduo, who lived from 1899 to 1946, and, Sze notes, “rejected classical Chinese, choosing to write in the vernacular, and yet his work shows a confluence of the two.” We can see this in his poem “Miracle,” which under the guise of critiquing classical concerns reveals a deeper set of undertones. He writes:
Ah, who doesn’t know of how little worth
is a tree full of singing cicadas, a jug of turbid wine,
or smoky mountain peaks, bright ravines, stars
glittering in the empty sky? It is all so ordinary,
so inexorably dull, and it isn’t worth our ecstatic joy,
our crying out the most moving names, or the
longing to cast gold letters and put them in a song.
On the one hand, such lines can be read as a negation, since the motifs they dismiss sit at the heart of the classical ideal. On the other, how can their presence be anything other than an affirmation, or, at the very least, an acknowledgement? What Wen Yiduo is saying is that the lines aren’t so distinct. Wen Yiduo, and Sze, as well. “A spring silkworm spins silk / up to the instant of death,” Li Shang-yin writes, a pair of lines that, Sze insists, “can be taken as a metaphor for how a poet works.” What he means is we are all bound by the same world.•
THE SILK DRAGON II: TRANSLATIONS OF CHINESE POETRY, BY ARTHUR SZE
