酷我-北美枫

[ericcoliu]

Poetic Lens


New Traditions: Chinese Short Songs in English


(Below is an excerpt from my review of an essay entitled New Traditions - Chinese Short Songs in English, which is written by my friend, Gary Blankenship, who is an American poet and a true over of Chinese poetry and whose work entitled A River Transformed is inspired by Wang Wei’s Wang River Collection. For further information on his essay, please read his New Traditions - Chinese Short Songs in English)



Hi! Gary:

After having finished reading your essay, I began to understand why you made such a claim: “I love Wang Wei, and sometimes think I channel him.” And I also thought your essay was written through the poetic lens of Wang Wei.

Firstly, linguistically speaking, your view of Chinese written language stands in line with that of Fenollosa’s, one which had been popularized by his spiritual disciple, Ezra Pound, and other translators and poets of their ilk. In his then-famous essay entitled The Chinese Written Character as a medium for Poetry, Fenollosa described in detail how Chinese characters were ideograms made up of pictographic elements that combined to form a new word or concept. In fact, any scholar whose academic specialty in Chinese language or literature would give you a shockingly different view that only a small number of Chinese characters, estimated to be about less than 15% (The Shambhala Anthology of Chinese Poetry, p.xv), are pictographic or ideogrammatic, and that the majority of them are phonetic-signific (p.xvii). However, Fenollosa’s “creatively beautiful” mistake has brought about a transformational reform of the poetics of American Poetry, especially in Poundian imagist poetry. This transformation is well documented in the Introduction to The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry edited by Eliot Weinberger.

Secondly, when it comes to aesthetics, your view of high Tang poetry in general and Chinese Short Songs (jueju, tonally regulated quatrain) in particular is colored by your “channelling” relationship with Wang Wei. However, I was not surprised by this. According to Pauline Yu, whose translation of and commentary on Wang Wei is scholarly authoritative, of the three major high Tang poets, Wang Wei is perhaps most closely associated with the imagistic methods, a poetic style that attempts to efface the overt, commentative presence of the poetic subject to yield the initiative to objects. This stance stems mainly from his Taoist-Buddhist inclinations to deemphasize the human ego and instead suggest a union with and submergence in the natural world. His quatrains, especially his Wang River Collection, are strikingly illustrative of his ‘imagistic” poetics of “silence.” (I personally prefer quietitude or stillness because the Chinese have ontologically and epistemologically different views of silence) As Stephen Owen has noted in his history of high Tang poetry in The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High Tang (His anthology listed in your bibliography), Wang’s quatrains probably represent his most significant contribution to generic development.

Thirdly, generally speaking, Chinese tonally regulated quatrains have a highly patterned and pleasing aural effect (For further information, you can find it on pp. lxi – lxv in Chou Ping’s ‘Introduction to Chinese Poetic Form’ in The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry, which is listed in your bibliography). In achieving this effect, along with euphonic devices such as rhyme and tonal parallelism, Chinese poets employ various rhetorical devices such as simile, metaphor, symbols, and personification, though with greater restraint, and also make extensive use of verbal parallelism. Such parallelisms customarily appear in the form of couplets in which both lines follow the same syntactical pattern. Based on the rules set for Chinese tonally regulated quatrains, I would suggest that the necessary rules for English-speaking poets to consider when penning the Short Song are:

1 minimalism: do not exceed 8 lines and put in mind of the economic use of language;

2 parallelism(s): use as many as possible; surely, there is no tonal parallelism for English poetry;

3 Poundian imagism: comparatively speaking, Chinese poetry is more image-centric than its Western counterparts and Pound’s ideogrammatic poetics is very helpful in writing a minimalist kind of poetry, and is resonant with that of Wang Wei.

(4 silence: if you think about the rules for penning the Short Song derived from Wang Wei, I think it’s a good strategy to make a distinctive difference between it and other short form verses to emphasize Wang’s poetics of “silence.” I’ll share with one of his poems illustrative of this type of poetics:

Wild flowers bloom beautifully in clusters,
a bird’s single note quiets the ravine.
In still night he sits in an empty forest
feeling the autumn on the pine forest wind.)

Fourthly, compared with its Western counterparts, Chinese poetry, as has been so frequently remarked (Further information, you can find it on pp. 2-4 in The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry translated and edited by Burton Watson), is on the whole unusually humanistic and commonsensical in tone, seldom touching on the supernatural or indulging in extravagant flights of fancy. In his Laughing Lost in the Mountains, Willis Barnstone claims that Wang Wei may be thought of as the most accomplished mystical poet of the East (p. liv). Such a claim is completely made out of his own Western epistemological framework is, one which, to my best knowledge, finds no support from any scholar whose academic speciality in Chinese literature and religion. As for the “boring” titles for Chinese poems, most of them are the ones named for so-called “occasional poems.” This is another “creatively beautiful” mistake made by Pound and his likes. In fact, Pound used a lot of “boring” titles in his late masterwork, thinking them to be “typical Chinese.”

Fifthly, I was really impressed by your knowledge of the Chinese poetic tradition, and deeply moved by your love for Wang Wei, one of my favourite poets, and by the unflagging efforts you’ve put into incorporating the Chinese poetic form into that of English poetry. I hope my comments or suggestions will help you refine your own Chinese Short Songs.

At last, I would like to take a moment to thank you for sharing with me your view of Chinese poetry, and for constantly helping me improve my English writing.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

Poetic Lens


New Traditions: Chinese Short Songs in English


(Below is an excerpt from my review of an essay entitled New Traditions - Chinese Short Songs in English, which is written by my friend, Gary Blankenship, who is an American poet and a true over of Chinese poetry and whose work entitled A River Transformed is inspired by Wang Wei’s Wang River Collection. For further information on his essay, please read his New Traditions - Chinese Short Songs in English)



Hi! Gary:

After having finished reading your essay, I began to understand why you made such a claim: “I love Wang Wei, and sometimes think I channel him.” And I also thought your essay was written through the poetic lens of Wang Wei.

Firstly, linguistically speaking, your view of Chinese written language stands in line with that of Fenollosa’s, one which had been popularized by his spiritual disciple, Ezra Pound, and other translators and poets of their ilk. In his then-famous essay entitled The Chinese Written Character as a medium for Poetry, Fenollosa described in detail how Chinese characters were ideograms made up of pictographic elements that combined to form a new word or concept. In fact, any scholar whose academic specialty in Chinese language or literature would give you a shockingly different view that only a small number of Chinese characters, estimated to be about less than 15% (The Shambhala Anthology of Chinese Poetry, p.xv), are pictographic or ideogrammatic, and that the majority of them are phonetic-signific (p.xvii). However, Fenollosa’s “creatively beautiful” mistake has brought about a transformational reform of the poetics of American Poetry, especially in Poundian imagist poetry. This transformation is well documented in the Introduction to The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry edited by Eliot Weinberger.

Secondly, when it comes to aesthetics, your view of high Tang poetry in general and Chinese Short Songs (jueju, tonally regulated quatrain) in particular is colored by your “channelling” relationship with Wang Wei. However, I was not surprised by this. According to Pauline Yu, whose translation of and commentary on Wang Wei is scholarly authoritative, of the three major high Tang poets, Wang Wei is perhaps most closely associated with the imagistic methods, a poetic style that attempts to efface the overt, commentative presence of the poetic subject to yield the initiative to objects. This stance stems mainly from his Taoist-Buddhist inclinations to deemphasize the human ego and instead suggest a union with and submergence in the natural world. His quatrains, especially his Wang River Collection, are strikingly illustrative of his ‘imagistic” poetics of “silence.” (I personally prefer quietitude or stillness because the Chinese have ontologically and epistemologically different views of silence) As Stephen Owen has noted in his history of high Tang poetry in The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High Tang (His anthology listed in your bibliography), Wang’s quatrains probably represent his most significant contribution to generic development.

Thirdly, generally speaking, Chinese tonally regulated quatrains have a highly patterned and pleasing aural effect (For further information, you can find it on pp. lxi – lxv in Chou Ping’s ‘Introduction to Chinese Poetic Form’ in The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry, which is listed in your bibliography). In achieving this effect, along with euphonic devices such as rhyme and tonal parallelism, Chinese poets employ various rhetorical devices such as simile, metaphor, symbols, and personification, though with greater restraint, and also make extensive use of verbal parallelism. Such parallelisms customarily appear in the form of couplets in which both lines follow the same syntactical pattern. Based on the rules set for Chinese tonally regulated quatrains, I would suggest that the necessary rules for English-speaking poets to consider when penning the Short Song are:

1 minimalism: do not exceed 8 lines and put in mind of the economic use of language;

2 parallelism(s): use as many as possible; surely, there is no tonal parallelism for English poetry;

3 Poundian imagism: comparatively speaking, Chinese poetry is more image-centric than its Western counterparts and Pound’s ideogrammatic poetics is very helpful in writing a minimalist kind of poetry, and is resonant with that of Wang Wei.

(4 silence: if you think about the rules for penning the Short Song derived from Wang Wei, I think it’s a good strategy to make a distinctive difference between it and other short form verses to emphasize Wang’s poetics of “silence.” I’ll share with one of his poems illustrative of this type of poetics:

Wild flowers bloom beautifully in clusters,
a bird’s single note quiets the ravine.
In still night he sits in an empty forest
feeling the autumn on the pine forest wind.)

Fourthly, compared with its Western counterparts, Chinese poetry, as has been so frequently remarked (Further information, you can find it on pp. 2-4 in The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry translated and edited by Burton Watson), is on the whole unusually humanistic and commonsensical in tone, seldom touching on the supernatural or indulging in extravagant flights of fancy. In his Laughing Lost in the Mountains, Willis Barnstone claims that Wang Wei may be thought of as the most accomplished mystical poet of the East (p. liv). Such a claim is completely made out of his own Western epistemological framework is, one which, to my best knowledge, finds no support from any scholar whose academic speciality in Chinese literature and religion. As for the “boring” titles for Chinese poems, most of them are the ones named for so-called “occasional poems.” This is another “creatively beautiful” mistake made by Pound and his likes. In fact, Pound used a lot of “boring” titles in his late masterwork, thinking them to be “typical Chinese.”

Fifthly, I was really impressed by your knowledge of the Chinese poetic tradition, and deeply moved by your love for Wang Wei, one of my favourite poets, and by the unflagging efforts you’ve put into incorporating the Chinese poetic form into that of English poetry. I hope my comments or suggestions will help you refine your own Chinese Short Songs.

At last, I would like to take a moment to thank you for sharing with me your view of Chinese poetry, and for constantly helping me improve my English writing.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[robarts]

[[robarts]]

[dundas]

[[dundas]]

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[Lake]

Good effort.

Is there a typo in this line?

[[Lake]]

Good effort.

Is there a typo in this line?

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[Lake]

[[Lake]]

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[Lake]

[[Lake]]

[ericcoliu]

The limited number of pictographs are due to the fact that abstract concepts in language are formless, which renders it impossible to picture them.

Yes, I think it’s partial true. Pictography is mainly used by ancient Chinese to represent “things,” not ideas, which Fenollosa claimed.

However, pictography remains the most important method of composing Chinese characters.


Pictography is one of the six word-creating methods used by ancient Chinese and it’s not the most important one; otherwise, they would consist of more than 15% of the Chinese written words. However, compared with other languages, pictography is one of the most outstanding methods used by human beings.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

The limited number of pictographs are due to the fact that abstract concepts in language are formless, which renders it impossible to picture them.

Yes, I think it’s partial true. Pictography is mainly used by ancient Chinese to represent “things,” not ideas, which Fenollosa claimed.

However, pictography remains the most important method of composing Chinese characters.


Pictography is one of the six word-creating methods used by ancient Chinese and it’s not the most important one; otherwise, they would consist of more than 15% of the Chinese written words. However, compared with other languages, pictography is one of the most outstanding methods used by human beings.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[Lake]

Are you for or against this?

[[Lake]]

Are you for or against this?

[ericcoliu]

It’s partial true.

This method is mainly applicable to ideographs, most of logical aggregates, and some of phonetic complexes and transference. It’s less applicable to borrowing.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

It’s partial true.

This method is mainly applicable to ideographs, most of logical aggregates, and some of phonetic complexes and transference. It’s less applicable to borrowing.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul