The New Criterion

A. C. Graham, translator
Poems of the Late T'ang.
NYRB Classics, 184 pages, $14.95

Ezra Pound knew no Chinese when he approached the poems of Li Po, translating solely from the notes of Ernest Fenellosa, a Sinologist whose knowledge of the language was questionable to say the least. Maybe the Chinese attention to the image, or that tradition’s strict fusion of form and function, beckoned to Pound’s militantly Modernist sensibilities, but something clearly clicked in this unlikely marriage. It is impossible to forget the undercurrent of longing, brushed with just the slightest hesitation, at the conclusion of “The River-Merchant Wife: A Letter” by Li Po:

If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fo-Sa.

The eminent translator Arthur Waley, who begrudged Pound’s forays into his territory, is much more faithful in his version of the same poem, but gone is the tension of a wife pining for her husband while mourning her own vanished youth. And just as Waley chafed against Pound’s appropriation of Chinese verse, later Sinologists frowned upon mid-century poets like Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder who filtered the poetry of ancient China through the sensibilities of northern California and the restless climate of postwar America. The twentieth century, in short, witnessed a rift between those who refused to use the poetry of China as a springboard for innovation in the English tongue and those who, touched by Pound’s edict to “make it new,” could do nothing but.

In the camp of those who remained true to the source—even if it meant sacrificing some of the artistry beloved by Pound and his acolytes—one of the most important figures is A. C. Graham, who by the time of his death in 1991 had not only translated much of Chinese poetry and philosophy, but expended considerable energy interpreting it for Western audiences. Now, his Poems of the Late T’ang has been re-released by New York Review Books. This essential little anthology does not attempt to capture the entire legacy of China between two covers. Featuring only seven poets, Poems of the Late T’ang focuses exclusively on the three final tumultuous centuries of the T’ang dynasty, which collapsed under the pressure of internal strife and external pressures in 907 A.D. Within this limited purview, Graham toils with an uncompromising fidelity that pays homage to the original intentions of the T’ang authors without much concern for what modern predilections might have demanded.

Readers will immediately note the absence of Pound’s much beloved Li Po. Instead, his contemporary Tu Fu—and, in many respects, polar opposite in sensibility—takes center stage, though only his last poems find their way into this anthology. The profligate Li Po supposedly died drunk, lunging into the waters of the Yangtze, hoping to catch a reflection of the moon; Tu Fu was a middling, melancholic public official who never rose as high in the civil service as he had hoped and whose personal disappointments mirror the dissolution of the T’ang dynasty.

Tu Fu’s final verses abound with the natural scenes we consider native to Chinese poetry, but it is a tense and tumultuous wilderness where serenity barely masks an essential, inescapable loneliness. As Graham notes, “the bitterness of exile and failure in a ruined Empire is lightened by glimpses of a hard-won serenity,” and he manages to express this sentiment in terse, unadorned English:

In the empty gorge the night is full of noises

The autumn wastes are each day wilder
Cold in the river the blue sky stirs

Chanting, peering into the distance, in anguish my white head droops.

The rugged mountain peaks of the outer provinces serve only to remind the poet of his shortcomings and remove him from the watershed events—invasions, rebellions, deposed emperors—occurring somewhere at a distance.

Religion was also a source of strife as T’ang rule headed for decline. The interplay between the traditional values of Confucianism and the ascendancy of Buddhism is treated at length in the poetry of Han Yu, who Graham says “rediscovered the possibility of the simple, strong and flexible style of ancient prose” with which he then proceeded to assail the disciples of the fashionable new faith. Though his poetry would, in fact, aid in the decline of Buddhism during the subsequent Sung dynasty, his finest verses use nature as a backdrop for personal frustration that is balanced precariously with the acceptance of life’s hard lot:

The ambition for robes of office has long since turned to loathing.
While I live, shall I take your hand again
Sighing that our years will soon be done?

One can see in this anthology the formation of what might be called the poetics of disappointment, since a significant number of the poets in the volume were government men, deeply insightful but generally dissatisfied, who today would probably content themselves with writing a dyspeptic blog about missed promotions and endless days at the office.

One of Han Yu’s primary followers, for example, Meng Chiao, only entered the civil service in middle age—much like Tu Fu—and achieved virtually no success. With his “bare, bleak style” he recalls the Sturm und Drang Romantics.

The wind which roams without design
Cleanses of passion’s transient strife

In all this turmoil, where shall peace be found? The hidden gem of this collection is a series of short verses by Tu Mu. In opposition to Han Yu and his disciples, he pioneered a quatrain known as the New Style that, not unlike the haiku of the masters Basho or Bosun, creates enormous tension in the briefest space:

Whirled ten years beyond all bounds,
Treating myself in the taverns, drinking my own health.

Tu Mu is, as Graham points out, generally more optimistic than other poets in this anthology, his poems abounding in “acutely sensual delight” that serves as a respite from the prevailing gloom of the late T’ang poems. That may be because like Li Po, he ultimately finds refuge at the bottom of his glass.

It should be said that Graham’s translations, which can be cumbersome or plodding at times, do not stir up the delight of cracking open Pound’s freewheeling riffs on Li Po. Yet there is a quiet, understated beauty to these meticulously reproduced verses that the lonely civil servants of the T’ang would have almost appreciated. So many of them, after all, spent years never quite achieving the standing they had sought, seeking success but never finding it. Many died in distant provinces; not a few were nearly forgotten. It is good to see them given their due.