Why the Poetry of the Tang Dynasty can still be relevant today
After having re-read Guy Gavriel Kay’s brilliant Under Heaven last week, I want to take a look at Chinese poetry, and more specifically that of the Tang dynasty (one of the golden ages in the history of the Chinese Empire, lasting from 618–902 AD).
Kay’s book itself was inspired by his encounter with the Tang poet’s craft, and many poems play an important role in the book. One of the central central characters is even bassed on the poet Li Bao, one of the two most well-beloved of all the Tang poets, who we will encounter soon.
It’s been a long time since the Tang Dynasty, and Ancient China is a place far remove from our daily lifes. So how can we justify spending time looking into it? Let’s delve right into with Li Bai’s Quiet Night Thought:
Moonlight before my bed
Perhaps frost on the ground.
Lift my head and see the moon
Lower my head and I miss my home.
The poem is one of the all-time classics of Chinese poetry, taught and learned by heart to this very day by school children in China and Taiwan. The imagery is simple. A person in bed, the moon (unchallenged as the Tang poets favourite symbol of everything). A small movement of the head, to check the ground. The moon, bringing clarity. Another small movement of the head: the moon, having brought memory of home.
There is a subtext to this poem that is next to impossible to grasp for the Western reader: it most likely refers to the August moon of the Mid-Autumn Festival, celebrating family values and family reunion, much like Christmas does for us today. The last line therefore indicates that the narrator is far removed from his home town during that Festival, and the bright moon reminds him of this.
But maybe it’s not only a reminder, as the moon also has the ability to connect: there is only one moon, and one could imagine the poet’s family looking up at the same moon, thinking about their far removed son, connecting spiritually and more abstractly in a time were cell phones and late night Skype sessions were not yet a thing.
It’s fascinating to think of these lines as having been crafted 1300 years ago, in so different a world and circumstance that it’s hard for us to get our mirror neurons tingling. It’s almost impossible sometimes to relate to the people we hear and read about in history books as having been human, as having been people of flesh and blood, with ambitions, with feelings of kinship, love and awe. But a poem, as experience distilled in words, might sometimes be able to grasp the essence of an emotion that is universal across many cultures and ages, and makes us feel kinship to times that are now ancient to us.
I can conjure up moments where I felt similar, an image or a song bringing back unasked for memories, the brain reacting to the world in its idiosyncratic, enigmatic ways. Of late nights, lying in bed in ambivalent states of memories joyous and painful, of happiness intertwined with longing.
Another famous Tang poem is Tu Fu’s Overnight at the River Pavillion:
Evening is walking up the mountain paths
I lie in the high chamber here at the River Gate
thin clouds rest against the cliffs
a lone moon swims among the waves
Full moon is falling through the sky
Cranes fly through the clouds
Wolves howl
I cannot find rest
Because I am powerless
To amend a broken world.
The feeling and imagery is somewhat similar, although it is much more pointedly bleak in its outlook. The brokenness of the world specifically references the An Lushan rebellion, taking place during the lifetime of Tu Fu and Li Bai. It was one of the most devastating events in human history, with an estimate of up to 40 million dead.
Being powerless to amend a broken world: one need imagine lone man struggling pointlessly in totalitarian societies, a more than metaphorically broken world after nuclear armageddon, or after climate change having run its full, irreversible course, to see that this images still have value today.
The Question of Translation
I don’t speak any Chinese, so I am dependent on translations of the poems I have found online. Sometimes the English translations I read had a bit of an strange feeling to them (everyone that has tried to read the Tao Te Ching or the I Ching probably also knows what I’m talking about). Looking at different translations of the same text, I noticed they tended to differ to a large extent, sometimes even conveying an altered message. Like I was missing something by reading them in English that was impossible to grasp in translation (I had encountered a feeling quite similar when reading Anna Karenina a couple of years ago, prompting me to passionately start learning Russian for three full days before giving up).
This is in a way unsurprising, as Chinese is a structurally and semantically so different from English and all Indo-Germanic languages, making the work of translation between them a difficult task. Consider this other version I found:
So bright a gleam on the foot of my bed –
Could there have been a frost already?
Lifting myself to look, I found that it was moonlight.
Sinking back again, I thought suddenly of home.
Notice how it says “thought” of home instead of “missing” home. While the “missing” is implied in the image, is it not much better to say “thinking” and to only hint at an emotional reaction instead of fixing it? It is ambiguity that makes up, in my opinion, a large part of the power of poetry. The divide is equally apparent if we take a look at a French and a German translations:
Devant mon lit, la lune jette une clarté très vive ;
Je doute un moment si ce n’est point la gelée blanche qui brille sur le sol.
Je lève la tête, je contemple la lune brillante ;
Je baisse la tête et je pense à mon pays.
Vor meiner Bettstatt lag wie Reif so weiß
des Mondlichts mitternächtiges Gegleiß
Ich hob das Haupt — der Mond schien voll und blank
und ließ es wieder sinken, heimwehkrank
Again, in French, the narrator simply thinks (penser), while in German, he is homesick (even more than that, he is homesicksick!). Chinese seems especially well suited for this ambiguity, and inviting to read between the lines. So what does the poem “actually” say in Chinese?
Chuáng qián míng yuè guāng
[bed] [front] [bright] [moon] [light]
Yí shì dìshàng shuāng
[suspect] [is] [ground] [on] [frost]
Jǔ tóu wàng míng yuè
[raise] [head] [look] [bright] [moon]
Dītóu sī gùxiāng
[lower] [head] [think of] [old] [home village]
The whole poem takes up only 17 words (which is the length of the second line alone in the French translation).
The words given at the bottom are only approximate ranslations. Word by word translations are really not that straightforwardly possible, as Chinese tends to be more relational and dynamical than Indo-European languages, which are more thingful/essential. Every translation into English fixes something that is, by its nature, not to be fixed. The line in the Hsin Hsin Ming “If you’re trying to grasp the point of reality, you miss the point of reality.” can also, in a way, be extended on the whole of the Chinese language and thought.
Chinese leaves different spaces for relationships between the different constituents of the sentences, and for relations between subjects and objects. This does not mean that it is necessarily a superior language. I do not envy anyone that attempts to translate such seminal works of western thought as the Kritik der reinen Vernunft or the Phänomenologie des Geistes into Chinese, and it seems that the structure of our languages has provided advantageous for Western civilisations in many ways.Only think of the terminology of the philosophy of Ancient Greece, with Aristotle’s categories, of the eidos, or with the abstract, irreducible Platonic idea at the heart of reality.
It’s interesting to think about which way this influence went: if the language, implicitly containing the unspoken philosophy of our forefathers, shaped the channels through which the thoughts of the thinkers to come were to flow? Perhaps it’s only consequential to have modern science, as the purest striving after the thingful, objective essence of things, arising in Western cultures. Althought this is somewhat speculative, it is so rich a subject that I will hopefully dedicate a full post to it in the future.
That being said, we can also trace out some connections to more contemporary art in the west. Let’s look at Paul Verlaine’s Clair de Lune:
[…]
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,
Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d’extase les jets d’eau
[…]
The image of the moonlight, at the same time sad and beautiful, recurs.
The famous piano piece by Debussy was actually inspired by that very poem. Ambiguity here is already present in that first D flat major chord, swinging upwards on the three (F) and the five (A flat), strongly implying f minor, only to softly fall downwards to add the D flat.
As if, in an afterthought, giving the sadness (minor) a soft edge by giving it a major flavor (while still keeping the third as a root). The way this captures the essential symbolic content of the moon as both “sad with an edge of hope and beauty” in a single voicing is just utterly brilliant. As if one needed more reasons to love Debussy.
And while there are new and different layers of sophistication in the examples I just quoted, it is nevertheless sometimes a helpful reminder that no, Europeans did not invent everything of worth in art and science, and while Europe was a bit of a shithole during that period of time (name a single person you know from Europe of the eigth century), China was a remarkable place. I even read somewhere that the Ezra Pound translations of some of the poems by Li Bao at the beginning of the twentieth century inspired him to develope what was later to be known as imagism, a tremendously influential movement in Anglo-American poetry.
And I also can’t help but be reminded of the lack articles and of the overall syntax of expressionist poets like August Stramm, as exemplified in his Patrouille:
Die Steine feinden
Fenster grinst Verrat
Aeste würgen
Berge Sträucher blättern raschlig
Gellen
Tod.
I’m not saying at all that Stramm knew these poems, which is highly doubtful, but it is still cool that twentieth century poetry (intentionally or unintentionally) connects back to the poetic language of Ancient China and the syntax of Chinese.
So what to take away from this? I highly recommend reading Under Heaven, and delving a bit into Chinese history and poetry, for example by looking into the 300 Tang poems. And I think it can be nice sometimes to remember that humans have been around for quite a long time, confronted with an equally strange and miraculous world as the one we face today. And that we are not superiour or completely removed from them in every aspect of our lives.
I for one will look out of the window at the moon, and think of home.
