by Chiang Yee [Jiang Yi]

Chinese poetry has been known to the Western world at least since the late sixteenth century, when French and Italian Jesuit missionaries arrived in China. We are told that these Jesuits were excellent scholars who acquired a considerable knowledge of the Chinese language. They helped Chinese scholars to translate a number of European works of science and philosophy into Chinese, and a number of Chinese classics, including poetry, into Latin. The translation of Chinese prose into Latin presents considerable difficulties, but these are slight compared with the difficulties of translating Chinese poetry. Nevertheless, the little that was achieved by the Jesuits in this latter field was pioneer work of real value and importance.

It must be stressed that while it is not impracticable to translate, for instance, an historical narrative, a leterary essay, or even a philosophical treatise, from any language into any other, even though precise verbal equivalents may be lacking, the translation of poetry requires not only the finding of foreign words to convey straightforward meaning but also words and rhythms which will release subtleties of feeling and emotion that in the original are bound up with the sound, the etymological echoes, the contemporary or immemorial usages, even the look, of the words or characters. Indeed it is plain that the poetry of one language is never completely realizable in another language.

For anyone who can read, for instance, French or German or English it will always be preferable to read a poem in the original language rather than in a translation however good. But at least French, German and English are all alphabetic languages, using the same 26 letters. Moreover European languages often borrow -- or more precisely, appropriate -- words and expressions from one another, incorporating them into their own tongue. So, within these languages, it is feasible for a skilful translator to produce a translation capable of conveying a considerable part of the poetic quality of the original and one which is in itself worthy of consideration on its own merits as poetry.

It is true, however, that the most notable examples of translations which are universally acclaimed as poems in their own right, such as Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam or Ezra Pound's Cathay, are also much criticized by scholars as being inexact equivalents of the originals they purport to translate. But this fact only makes clear the inherent difficulties. A translation which is itself poetry inevitably contains somethings of the personal spirit of the translator. To the scholar, even the faintest trace of a translator's personality stains the purity of the original. To the perhaps less scholarly lover of poetry, a translation which is a poem will always seem more valuable than what he regards as pedestrian transliteration. The differences of opinion resulting from this problem can never be resolved.

Chinese is not an alphabetic language and the translation of it into any Western language presents unique obstacles. The grammar of Chinese is very simple. There are no articles, no gender, no case, no tenses, and (in poetry) few pronouns or prepositions. Readers of Chinese poetry in translation should remember these peculiarities of Chinese in order to understand what may seem peculiarities in translations.

In view of the extreme difficulty of translating Chinese poetry it is surprising how many volumes of such translations, into English, French, German and numerous other languages, are to be found in the great libraries of the world. Starting with the sixteenth century Latin examples, the number of new translations will be found to increase with the passage of time, until the selections and new versions published in the present century heavily outnumber all those published in earlier times. Translated Chinese poetry appears to have a wide appeal; but there remains the puzzling fact that the same poem appears so different in various translations as to leave no doubt that the real equivalence of the Chinese characters has still not been found. The way of endeavour is still very much open.

In China there are a great many anthologies of poetry, but three are outstanding: The Book of Songs, The Songs of Ch'u and Three Hundred T'ang Poems. These three collections illustrate the development of Chinese peotry from the earliest times to the full flowering of the T'ang period (A.D. 618 - 906). The Book of Songs, owing to tis social and historical as well as its literary importance, early attracted the attention of Western scholars who learned Chinese. The first complete translation of it into English was made by James Legge in 1890; he called it The Book of Odes. B. Karlgren made another translation and Arthur Waley a third, under the more accurate title of The Book of Songs. The book comprises three hundred and five popular songs dating from the 12th to the 5th centuries B.C. or even earlier. Nothing is known of the author or authors, and the poems do not conform to any of the established patterns of Chinese poetry as that is known today. Moreover, because the pronunciation of Chinese has changed in the intervening centuries, one can be misled into thinking that these ancient songs have no rhyme or meter when in fact the rhyme scheme is perfectly regular (alternate lines) and the lines are of even length (four characters) with very few exceptions. As a rule there are four lines to a stanza, and two, three, or four stanzas to a complete song. Confucius was long reputed to have been responsible for the compilation of The Book of Songs but many comtemporary scholars doubt this. All three hundred and five songs were drawn from the region north of the Yellow River and a smaller area immediately to the south of it, this being the area administered by the Kings of the House of Chou in Confucius' time. The songs are typical products of north China -- original, simple, plain expressions of human moods.

By the 4th century B.C. China's boundaries had expanded to include the vast area of the Yangtze river valley, where the strong State of Ch'u became even stronger. This region is very fertile and the life of the inhabitants was more highly developed than that of the northern people. They produced their own type of song, a representative collection of which was compiled under the name of Ch'u Tzu or The Songs of Ch'u. Only isolated items from this collection was translated until as recently as 1961, when Professor David Hawkes made the first complete rendering under the title of Songs from the South. These poems are not limited, like those in the Book of Songs to four characters to the line; some have as many as eleven or thirteen; an even number is the rule. They represent a real development.

After the third century B.C. the various states of China were repeatedly annexed by whichever was militarily the strongest among them. The first Chinese Empire was founded under the House of Ch'in and extended over a wider area than any of the preceding agglomerations of states. The Ch'in dynasty was succeeded by the Han dynasty (206 B.C. - 219 A.D.), whose territory was pushed far to the south-east and south-west. By the time the T'ang dynasty, which was founded in A.D. 618, had fully established itself, China covered roughly the same large area as it does today.

Something like a thousand years separated the Book of Songs and the Songs from the South from the literature of T'ang. During this long period Chinese literature, and especially poetry, did not stand still. The two old anthologies continued to be read, re-read, interpreted and imitated, but there were also always poets who attempted new and more complex forms. In the Han period the employment of five characters to the line was found to be a more rewarding measure, permitting a smoother and more melodious effect and the evocation of subtler human feelings. The rhyme still fell on alternate lines -- second, fourth, sixth and so on -- but there was no standard number of lines to the poem nor was the old tonal pattern insisted upon. Some Han poems have seven characters to the line. By the beginning of the seventh century a few clearly-defined poetic forms had crystallized: four or eight lines to a poem, each line having five or seven characters; a great range of diction; extreme subtlety of tonal arrangement.

The T'ang period is the golden age of Chinese poetry. All subsequent Chinese poetry derives its forms from the creations of this time. The T'ang poets explored with the zeal of pioneers all the possibilities of arranging five-character and seven-character lines beautifully and rhythmically. Thus the translation of the complete Three Hundred T'ang Poems anthology, which includes the most representative, and some of the most beautiful, Chinese poems, is of immense value to those who wish to acquire a general idea of what Chinese poetry really is.

The number of known T'ang poets runs into thousands; their output was enormous, and almost every great poet's work was published in one way or another. Yet for almost another thousand years no one seems to have felt the necessity for a selection for common use from this vast field. It was not until the 18th century that an anonymous scholar who signed himself Heng-t'ang-t'ui-shih, the Retiring Scholar of the Fragrant Pool, compiled the third standard anthology of Chinese poetry, the T'ang Shih San Pai Shou or Three Hundred T'ang Poems. Of course there were not lacking critics to complain that the anthology omitted many great poems, but no anthologist escapes this complaint. Readers in general accepted the book, and it has been reprinted in countless editions for two hundred years. Schools have used it all over China, and scholars generally know a great deal of it by heart. However imperfect it may be, it contains representative poems by seventy-seven of the greatest T'ang poets.

A fair number of these poems have been separately translated into English and other languages, but it is high time the whole anthology was translated. Western readers need a more complete picture of the Chinese world, as well as its poetry, of over a thousand years ago. The makers of existing translations have furnished good reasons for not treating the entire collection; but the fact that some of the poems are very much more difficult to translate than others does not shake my conviction that someone should attempt all of them, for the entire book affords a deeper insight into the life of the people than is obtainable from selected poems.

The present translator, Mrs. Innes Herdan, has worked on the Three Hundred T'ang Poems for several years, and has striven to make her translations as close to the originals as possible, despite the difficulty of finding equivalent expressions in two such totally different languages as Chinese and English. She holds an honours degree in English Literature from Oxford University, and in 1937 she spent a year at the National Wu-han University of China. Thus she possesses two of the essential qualifications for a poetry translator: her knowledge of Chinese enables her to be faithful to the text, and her study of English literature helps her to bring out the beauty of the original in her own language. I am delighted that she has made the effort to carry through this work and so fill a gap that has existed for a long time in the study of Chinese literature.

Nine of the seventy-seven poets in the anthology: Wang Wei, Chang Chiu-ling [Zhang Jiulin], Meng Hao-jan [Meng Haoran], Li Po [Li Bai], Tu Fu [Du Fu], Li Shang-yin, Po Chü-yi [Bai Juyi], Tu Mu [Du Mu] and Liu Tsung-yuan [Li Shanyin], are read more than the others by the Chinese themselves. Of these, four: Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu and Po Chü-yi are widely known in translation in many lands outside China. Though some of the English translations of Li Po are good, no one in my view has yet succeeded in conveying the qualities in which Li Po excelled -- the spontaneous movement and flow of his rhythm and his inspired manipulation of language. For this reason Li Po's greatness as a poet -- and he is one of the greatest Chinese poets, if not the greatest of all -- is not yet manifest to readers dependent upon translation. His feeling for nature and for life differ from Wang Wei's, for he was an unconventional, romantic, even `Bohemian' figure, who never held an official post, while Wang Wei knew public life to the full, comparing it with his withdrawal from the world of affairs upon his retirement.

Tu Fu possessed neither Li Po's unrulable romantic nature, nor Wang Wei's reticence. He was a careful hard-working scholar who tasted all the bitterness of life in war and peace. His poems reveal a deep understanding of human life and suffering, reflecting not only his own experience but that of human beings in general. All Chinese history has alternated between wars and periods of stability, and Tu Fu's work has touched the hearts of successive generations right up to the present.

The outstanding quality of Po Chü-yi's poetry lies in the use of popular expressions which can be easily understood by simple people as well as by the learned. His choice of words and their arrangement seem offortless and easy, though not quite so forceful as Li Po's. Po Chü-yi had what must be considered a successful life, though he felt dissatisfied at times. He was born too late to know the three poets Wang Wei, Li Po and Tu Fu, but the work of all three influenced him.

One cannot do justice to these great poets in a sentence or two. Each shows some differences in conception, imagery and expression which the careful reader will discover for himself: I think the present translator has had considerable success in preserving and reproducing these differences.

The natural conditions and geographical position of the land in which the Chinese live, shaping their way of life from the beginning, have inevitably left their mark on their poetry. In the valley of the Yellow River, where the earliest group lived, the soil is largely loess -- a fine sand blown over from the Gobi desert. Plants grow well there provided there is sufficient rainfall, but sufficient rain by no means always falls, and the five or six months from May to October can be very hot and dry. Rain after drought was, and is, a joy to everyone in the land, and the poets expressed their joy in it in verse. Rain is seldom a subject for poetry in England, but it appears frequently in this anthology, more often in fact than any other natural phenomenon.

The moon too, whose waxing and waning form the basis of the Chinese lunar calendar, is closely associated with Chinese life. It is an important symbol of home life (the full moon), of separation (a waning moon), and of contemplation. It is not easy to contemplate under the sun! The changes of the moon inspire poets to sing of `reunion' or `distant longing'. In China's T'ang period, communication and transport from one place to another were not easy; every Chinese was a home-bird under the Confucian family system. And each was attached to his home life above everything else. If some member of the family had to leave home, it was his chief desire to return again as soon as he could. Examples of this feeling are certainly not lacking in this anthology.

It is curious that the compiler of these poems included the work of only one poetess, and of her work only one poem, for there were many women writers in the T'ang period. But there are numerous expressions in the book of women's agony through enforced separation or ill-treatment, of the loneliness of existence inside and outside imperial palaces, and of `failure in love' though they all were written by men. Under the Confucian regulations for life, there were many restrictions on men and women, and much suffering resulted. Nothing shows these social ills more clearly than the poetry.

Though China has a very long sea-coast, the Chinese people on the whole have never been seafarers, possibly because their early civilization originated inland, around the central Yellow River rather than along the sea-coast. The wonder and cruelty of the sea have never attracted the Chinese people, no doubt because they concentrated on agriculture and husbandry. There is no seascape in Chinse art, no sea poetry, no sea stories. Unlike the ancient Greeks, the Chinese live on a great land mass, in a temperate zone, and have never experienced the need to cross the sea and make war on neighbouring countries. War, too, has never been glorified in Chinese writings; we have no `Happy Warriors'. Genghis Khan was sung by the English poet Coleridge but not by the Chinese. China has all too often experienced wars in her long history, but her people, tillers of the soil from time immemorial, and bound by the Confucian principles of a closely-knit family system, have never had a good word to say for those who caused the break-up of family life and the disruption of agriculture. There are many poems about war in this anthology, but none in praise of it.

Again, although immortals and spirits and their mysterious dwellings appear in these pages, there is no single poem recording the ecstasies of mystical contemplation, as there is in the work of Persian and Indian poets, nor any comparable with the English religious lyrics. China has never had an established state religion, for Confucianism is not a religion in the strict sense of the word and Confucius has never been worshipped as a God. Many forms of religion have had their footing in China at various times, and the Chinese have put their faith in one or the other or in several at once. We do not quarrel over religious dogmas, and there has never been a religious war in China. The human aspect of things remains the most important to the Chinese poet. He sings of the inevitable in life, of the calm wisdom of living in the moment, of the pangs of parting and separation, of human affection and love. On these themes the T'ang poets have left us many masterpieces.