`Harness Jades and Girdle Jaspers'

Most of what little I know about classical Chinese poetry I trace to a slender Penguin paperback I first read about 40 years ago: Poems of the Late T’ang, translated and edited by the late Welsh Sinologist A.C. Graham. [A brief digressive question: How much of my literary education do I owe to Penguins?] Soon I read the translations of Waley, Pound, Rexroth and others, but Graham’s tone of cool wistfulness is the one that has stuck, the one that sounds, rightly or wrongly, “Chinese” in my inner ear. Let’s be grateful to New York Review Books for returning Graham’s 1965 anthology to print. His annotations are spare and useful, and never attempt to usurp the poems. Included is Graham’s essay, “The Translation of Chinese Poetry,” which modestly begins:

“The art of translating Chinese poetry is a by-product of the Imagist movement, first exhibited in Ezra Pound’s Cathay (1915), Arthur Waley’s One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918), and Amy Lowell’s Fir Flower Tablets (1921). Except for Waley, the unique instance of a sinologist who is also a poet, its best practitioners have always been poets or amateurs working on the draft versions of others.”

The T’ang Dynasty dates from 618 to 907 A.D. Graham’s choice of poems by Tu Fu, Meng Chiao, Han Yu, Lu T’ung, Li Ho, Tu Mu and Li Shang-yin is small but delicately selected. Here is “A Withered Tree,” by Han Yu (768-824 A.D.):

“Not a twig or a leaf on the old tree,
Wind and frost harm it no more.
A man could pass through the hole in its belly,
Ants crawl searching under its peeling bark.
Its only lodger, the toadstool which dies in a morning,
The birds no longer visit in the twilight.
But its wood can still spark tinder.
It does not care yet to be only the void at its heart.”

This is precise description worthy of a naturalist like Thoreau, but Graham adds in a note: “The `void at it heart’ is both the hollow inside of the tree and the Buddhist ideal of the mind freed from the illusion of a material body.”

And this, by Tu Mu, is “Pien River Blocked by Ice”:

“For a thousand miles along the river, when the ice begins to close,
Harness jades and girdle jaspers tinkle at the jagged edge.
The drift of life’s no different from the water under the ice
Hurrying Eastward day and night while no one notices.”

I especially like the sound of “Harness jades and girdle jaspers.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines “jasper” as “a kind of precious stone,” more specifically “an opaque cryptocrystalline variety of quartz, of various colours, usually red, yellow, or brown, due mostly to the admixture of iron oxide.” Its etymology may have influenced Graham’s choice of a word a most recent OED citation dating from 1868: Spanish and Italian, by way of Latin, Greek, Herbrew, Assyrian, Persian and Arabic. Poems of the Late T’ang is full of small linguistic treats. As an epigraph, Graham uses a lovely passage from Wei T’ai:

“Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words; this is how poetry enters deeply into us. If the poet presents directly feelings which overwhelm him, and keeps nothing back to linger as an after-taste, he stirs us superficially; he cannot start the feet and the hands waving in time, far less strengthen morality and refine culture, set heaven and earth in motion and call up the spirits!”

In a nutshell, and with infinite variations, this distils Imagism and its Russian cousin, the Acmeism of Mandelstam and Akhmatova.