A Bird Translates Silence

In 755, the Sogdian-Turkish general An Lushan rebelled against Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang dynasty after a dispute with a cousin of the emperor’s favorite concubine. Within a year, the general had captured the eastern capital of Luoyang and declared himself emperor; the next year, his forces seized and sacked the capital of Chang’an (present-day Xi’an), then the most populous city in the world. Although An—blind, crazed, and so obese that he was said to crush horses to death under his own weight—was assassinated in 757 by a eunuch conspiring with his son, the rebellion continued for several years until finally being put down by the imperial army in 763. As many as 36 million people were killed or displaced during the insurrection—three-quarters of the population. The Tang dynasty never fully recovered, and after suffering another uprising in the ninth century, China descended into civil war, ending what many consider its Golden Age.

This era of war and famine coincided with an immense flowering of calligraphy, painting, and poetry. In the eighth century, Chang’an had become a bustling, cosmopolitan city with countless canals, parks, teahouses, and monasteries and a diverse population that included Uighurs, Turks, Japanese, and Koreans. With the imperial examination system, which recruited bureaucrats on the basis of their knowledge of classical literature and philosophy, poetry was elevated to a stature that it has rarely, if ever, reclaimed: a class of scholar-officials governed the empire, and no one could rise in the ranks without the ability to compose an elegant quatrain or a witty couplet.

The Tang Dynasty, which lasted more than 270 years, produced China’s greatest poets: the Daoist drifter Li Bai, the Confucian poet-historian Du Fu, the painter-poet Wang Wei, the Buddhist hermit Han Shan, and many others. Their lives were marked by unceasing political turmoil. Refugees and fugitives, they spent their years wandering from place to place, falling in and out of imperial favor and all the while drinking, singing, and writing. Their poetry—for the most part regulated verse comprising linked couplets of between five and seven characters—is what we think of when we think of Classical Chinese poetry.

The astounding influence that Chinese poetry in translation has had on the English language throughout the 20th century—from the Modernist, Imagist revolution of Ezra Pound’s Cathay (1915) through its mid-century, counter-cultural incarnation by Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, and others—can be traced to this ragtag assortment of drunkards, hermits, and exiles. Very few collections, however, situate the Tang poets fully within their political and historical context, drawing out both the urgency and stakes of their verse. Many anthologies, such as Witter Bynner’s classic The Jade Mountain (1929), simply follow the model of Three Hundred Tang Poems (1763) compiled by the Qing scholar Sun Zhu, which for many decades remained the standard text. In the Same Light (The Song Cave, 2022), translated by the Chinese-Singaporean-Irish poet Wong May, does something different. Collecting 200 poems by 38 poets, Wong May promises to find parallels between their time and the present and, in so doing, update them “for our century.” To do this, she excavates her own story and its resonance with those of the Tang poets.

Wong May was born in Chongqing, China, in 1944. Republican forces established a provisional capital there during World War II, and Japanese forces heavily bombed the area in the years immediately before her birth. In 1950, she moved with her mother to the British colony of Singapore, where she attended university and joined a fledgling poetry scene around the University of Malaya. In the 1960s, she studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and proceeded to publish a string of critically acclaimed, if now out-of-print, volumes of poetry before marrying an Irish physicist and moving to Dublin, where she lives today. Following the tradition of painter-poets such as Wang Wei, she also paints under the name Ittrium Coey.

In In the Same Light, Wong May describes her mother as a formative influence in her poetic upbringing. A classically trained poet, her mother continued to compose in Classical Chinese while living in Singapore; after introducing the young Wong May to the poems of Li Shangyin—“But the heart / The heart, set / On the point of / A rhino’s horn”—she told her that “if you don’t get this, you can forget poetry.” Wong May was seven years old. In the book’s magisterial afterword, Wong May unearths her memories of those years and describes how “my mother must have missed the mountains greatly when we left China for Singapore in the early 1950s. There are hardly hills to speak of on the island.” Bereft of the physical landscapes of China, Wong May’s mother retreated into Tang poems as an exile’s mementos. Wong May’s other childhood influence was the Singaporean calligrapher and poet Pan Shou, whom she describes as the “Du Fu of the Chinese diaspora.” Among the various migrants in Singapore, these poets held on to the Classical tradition as both a salve and testament to the universality of their condition.

It’s natural then that Wong May emphasizes the Tang poets’ status as exiles and migrants in a tumultuous time, a sentiment that underlies the entire collection. Readers are able to see anew these poets’ familiar preoccupations—drinking, friendship, homesickness, frontier life—against the backdrop of a fragile period. Many Tang poems were occasional poetry—written on the eve of leaving a friend or to celebrate a joyful reunion—yet even the most trivial subject matter gains gravity when offset by the poets’ proximity to deprivation and despair. “History is to hound Chinese poets,” Wong May writes. “It beats like an extra heart.” Every poem becomes a de facto reflection on war or peace when readers recall that war was, and is, never far off.

Wong May’s primary innovation in these translations is to open the space of the page. She rarely sticks with the rigid quatrain form—extremely difficult to imitate in English, with its complex interplays of tonal rhythms and parallelisms—and instead stretches her translations vertically down the page, with lines sometimes double- or triple-spaced. A perennial difficulty of translating Chinese poetry is how, or even whether, to mimic its compactness and precision without the benefit of tones or characters. Wong May’s solution is to substitute those nuances with a visual cadence, abetted by her balletic enjambment and expansive use of space. Her translations harness the typographic lessons of Concrete and Language poetry; in tone, they resemble Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery more than the Beats or Imagists.

In this way, even the most canonical poems seem fresh. Consider Li Bai’s “Night Thoughts,” for example, a poem written when the poet was 25 that any Chinese student can recite by heart. By elongating the poem and adding evocative gaps and other cues, Wong May visualizes the absences that make up Li Bai’s experience of homesickness, symbolized for him by a reflection of the moon:

Moon
              Before the bed,
 
Or
Frost on the ground?
 
Lifting my head
I see the moon,
 
                        Looking down,
                        I remember home.

Substituting 21 words in English for Li Bai’s original 20 characters, Wong May demonstrates that she can hew closely and elegantly to the original. Yet she never feels constrained by an excessive fidelity and often adds her own flourishes, as in Li’s “Drinking Alone Under the Moon”:

& if booted out of the earth,
 
To the stars above?
 
                  Traffic of the spheres, permit
Celestial clouds & river of mercury
 
Li Bai shall not go entirely friendless,
 
— See you.

Although none of these lines appear exactly in the original, Wong May’s introduction of the third person and Li’s abrupt farewell give a fuller sense of Li’s exilic plaint, written at the fringes of the empire. In his later years, Li aligned himself with a rebellious prince and was sentenced to death, gaining a last-minute reprieve before allegedly drowning while trying to embrace the moon reflected in the Yangtze River.

The poet who appears most in these pages is Li’s contemporary Du Fu. Earthy, moral, and almost documentary in his sensibility, Du Fu recorded the full toll of the era’s unrest. Spending most of his later years as a war refugee, he saw his youngest son starve to death because of widespread famine, and the poet himself died en route home to his beloved Chang’an. Perhaps because of Du Fu’s lifelong itinerancy, his writing is especially attuned to fleeting moments. He comments on the rising price of rice or sightings of fishermen or jots down a recipe for cocklebur with winter gourd. He is also the great poet of friendship’s joys and sadness. In “Written for Scholar Wei,” Du Fu recounts revisiting a friend after both have grown old: “The best years of our life— / Suffice to say / They didn’t last. / Already our temples / Are grey, / Half of our friends, ghosts.”

Du Fu met Li Bai in 744, inaugurating one of the most productive friendships in literary history, a friendship made all the starker by exile—the poets met only a handful of times in a single year before Li Bai’s death in 762. If Li Bai was the rambunctious Daoist, then Du Fu played straight man to his holy fool. Five of Du Fu’s poems about their friendship appear in this volume. In “Dreaming of Li Bai,” written after the older poet’s death, Du Fu writes

                 Uncannily bright,
                 The moon too
                 Has no place to hide,
                        Crashing through the rafters
As it leaves the sky—
                 My absent friend
                       I begin to dream in your colors.

No other tradition in world literature has so valued friendship or made as poignant the inevitable loss and separation of earthly bonds.

Wong May’s most evocative translations emphasize the landscapes and animals that abound through Tang poetry. Her collection begins with the wail of a “stricken ape”; cicadas, deer, and crows flit through succeeding pages; mountains, creeks, and groves form the constant backdrop, mapping the geographies of her poets’ wanderings. As a translator, she has perfect pitch for the ways in which Tang poets traced the grandeur and impersonality of the landscape, embodying the Daoist idea of perception without a subject. “A bird translates silence,” as Wong May succinctly notes in her afterword.

Consider her translation of Wang Wei’s famous “Deer Grove,” the subject of Eliot Weinberger’s classic study Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (1987). Weinberger chastises many of the poem’s previous translators for introducing the first-person singular or for including unnecessary or inexact natural detail. Wong May renders the poem’s first couplet as

              Empty mountains
 
No one about
 
   But
 
      Sounds
 
            Sounds speaking of humans

The repetition of sounds creates an implicit echo, and the uncanny phrasing of “speaking of humans” produces the effect of an absent observer. She lends the same sensibility to the poems of Han Shan (“Cold Mountain”), the reclusive hermit who became a patron saint of nonconformism in the 1950s and 1960s thanks to Gary Snyder’s translations. Wong May makes him sound pleasurably ornery and principled: “Out of clothes? Go find yours. / Don’t get a fox to take off his coat. / Wanting food? / Pick your own.”

Wong May’s arrangement of poems is often poignant, as with Luo Bin Wang’s “To the Cicadas” and “Goose.” In the first poem, Luo listens to the insects while awaiting execution in prison, wondering “who else / Could express my grief as well as you?” On the recto page, “Goose,” purportedly written when the poet was seven, presents a snapshot of the eponymous bird’s “White trunk / Abreast water.” When paired, the two poems bookend an entire life. Wong May also highlights poets who have personal meaning for her, such as Li Shangyin, the writer whose esoteric verse she was introduced to by her mother. In her translations of Yu Xuanji and Xue Tao, the only two women poets in the collection, Wong May is attuned to the delights of their writing—ineligible for the imperial exams, their poems had little effect on their material standing—as well as their sense of injustice. In “Visiting Zhong Zhen Temple at the South Pavilion, Saw the New List of Those Who Passed the Civil Service Exam,” Yu writes,

     Lifting my head
I went through
The list of names
 
With plain envy.

Wong May is always attentive to what is just off the page, to the experiences and voices that do not make it into established history.

In her tour de force of an accompanying essay—nearly 100 pages, part memory palace, part itinerary through Tang history—Wong May discusses everything from the genesis of her project, which came to her while she was ill in a Beijing hotel in 2016, and the biographies of her poets to her own background. A map spatially guides readers through her anthology, oriented like a museum floor—complete with display cabinets, curios, and a gift shop—and Wong May even includes a sidekick and tour guide in the form of a cartoon rhino who pops up regularly with helpful suggestions or snarky comments. (“Get moving!!”)

The collection would be worth acquiring for the essay alone, in which one fully senses how personal, timely, and idiosyncratic Wong May’s translations are. She makes connections fluently across time and space, comparing the Daoist text Zhuangzi to Kafka’s stories or Wang Wei’s verse to King Lear; “what is still to be hoped for,” she writes, “is to return the text to the body of world literature, the world in which we all have our origins.” She also brings the poems to bear on recent Chinese history, from the May Fourth Movement to the Cultural Revolution, when revolutionaries jettisoned the Classical language in favor of the vernacular. “It was the strange fate of Chinese Classical poetry as a genre to be exiled from the literary scene at the end of the Second World War,” Wong May writes. “Practiced by few on the mainland, it was taken seriously only by émigrés & mostly out of nostalgia—a minority art of the overseas diaspora.”

For Wong May, the poems themselves, though inhabiting the seventh through ninth centuries, also embody the winding history of Chinese exiles and diasporas since the upheavals of the 20th century. In this, she finds herself recalling atrocities in the 21st century too. “When I look to Chang’an,” Wong May writes, “I see Palmyra … another cat’s cradle of human civilization.” She recalls the “cultural cleansing” that took place; the destruction of shrines and temples; the bombing of the city by Russian, Israeli, and Syrian airstrikes; the outflowing of human misery with which the world still contends.

Every translation reflects its own time. When Ezra Pound translated these poems in the early 20th century, T.S. Eliot proclaimed that he had invented Chinese poetry in the English language. (Pound relied on the notes of the Orientalist professor Ernest Fenollosa as well as on looking up the definitions of individual characters, which elided their contextual meaning but accentuated their Imagistic qualities.) Though acknowledging Pound’s poor grasp of the language, Wong May still describes him as “in his way our best translator of Classical Chinese.” Given their compactness and economy, these poems often benefit from the flexibility and looseness of interpretation; the best translations have been by other poets.

Yet it’s also true that most examples in the history of translated Chinese poetry rely on assimilating them into a more familiar (to some) context, so that one could find in the words of Han Shan the proclamations of a Beat or of a blue-collar American. Many translators were drawn to the poetry because of their own interest in Buddhism, others because of (perhaps overemphasized) aesthetic concision when compared to English. In this way, translators often bring poems closer to readers, translating not only vocabulary but also spirit for the intended audience. (Almost all major translators of Classical Chinese poetry have been white men.) Wong May, on the other hand, declares that she will bring readers closer to the poem and not the other way around: “I am translating you into Li Bai, 1,200 years ago, writing this poem, homesick on a moonlit night.”  

Wong May represents a middle ground between Pound, with his barely intelligible Chinese, and sinologists with their near-pedantic veracity. As a bilingual poet who can harness her own experience of diaspora and the long afterlives of war and displacement, she offers a lived intimacy that one hopes will become increasingly prevalent in the field of translation. “Poetry lives in the present—though it happened in Tang China,” she writes. “I do not mean the poem should read like it has just been translated, but like it has just been written.”