West Meets East
Waley, Pound, the Imagists
The poetry of China and Japan was scarcely known in the English-speaking world until Arthur Waley (1889–1966) published A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918) and Japanese Poetry: The Uta (1919). Waley taught himself to read classical Chinese and Japanese while he was Assistant Keeper of Oriental Prints and Manuscripts at the British Museum. (The Keeper was another poet, Laurence Binyon [1869–1943], whose poem ‘For the Fallen’ is often read on Remembrance Sundays.)
In addition to his poetry translations, he translated Japanese Noh plays and the eleventh-century Tale of Genji, written by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting at the Japanese court, which is famed as the world’s first novel. In his introduction to the Chinese Poems he observes that, by contrast with Western poets, Chinese poets write about friendship rather than love, and express not passion but tranquillity, reflection and self-analysis. Figures of speech such as metaphors and similes are relatively rare. The need for sex is taken for granted but not considered a reason
for emotion. Poems about deserted wives or concubines are common.
All this sounds rather downbeat. But for Western readers with no previous knowledge of Chinese poetry, the variety, subtlety and sophistication – and, of course, the antiquity – of the poems Waley translates are astonishing, and their glimpses of ordinary life communicate instantly across the centuries. On a freezing winter morning, for example, the smell of hot cakes from a baker’s shop sets the mouths of passers-by watering (this casual scrap of social observation occurs in a poem written around ad 281 – that is, five centuries before English literature lumbered into being with Beowulf ).
Reactions to common human ills such as bereavement are vividly recognisable, too. Writing poetry was regarded as a civilised accomplishment that all should possess, so a (to us) surprising number of Chinese poets, both men and women, were powerful and aristocratic. But we can share their feelings, whatever their rank. The Emperor Wu-Ti (157 to 87 bc) writes on the death of his mistress:
The sound of her silk skirt has stopped. On the marble pavement dust grows. Her empty room is cold and still.
Fallen leaves are piled against the doors. Longing for that lovely lady, How can I bring my aching heart to rest?
Many Chinese poets were government officials, like the prolific Po Chu-I (ad 772–846), whose poems – about planting flowers, or his dreams, or his baldness – often read like diary entries. Another bureaucrat, and evidently rather browned off, was Su Tung-p’o (ad 1036–1101) who wrote ‘On the Birth of a Son’:
Families when a child is born
Want it to be intelligent.
I, through intelligence, Having wrecked my whole life
Only hope the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid. Then he will crown a tranquil life
By becoming a Cabinet Minister.
Chinese poems about the natural world tend to be more focused than Western nature poetry. Wang Yi (ad 89–158) venerates a lychee tree, its soft fragrances, its sweet juice, its fruit ‘lustrous as a pearl’. His son Wang Yanshou (ad 112–133) records every detail of a small, tail-less ape – how it sniffs and snorts and cocks its ‘knowing little ears’. Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) examines a cicada with similar dedication. A poem every Chinese child is said to know is ‘Ode to a Goose’ by Luo Binwang (ad 640–684), a child prodigy, who wrote it when he was seven:
Goose, goose, goose, You bend your neck towards the sky and sing, Your white feathers float on the emerald water, Your red feet push the clear waves.
Integration with nature at death is powerfully expressed by Zhang Heng (ad 78–139), an astronomer, mathematician and scientist as well as a poet, who imagines the bones of the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu speaking:
I am a wave
In the river of darkness and light, The maker of all things is my father and mother, Heaven is my bed and earth my cushion, The thunder and lightning are my drum and fan, The sun and moon my candle and my torch, The Milky Way my moat, the stars my jewels.
Centuries before European Romanticism dawned, Chinese poets were idealising a life spent with nature. Li Po (ad 701–763) envies the hermit Tan Ch’iu his outdoor existence:
My friend is lodging high in the Eastern Range, Dearly loving the beauty of valleys and hills.
At green Spring he lies in the empty woods, And is still asleep when the sun shines on high. A pine-tree wind dusts his sleeves and coat; A pebbly stream cleans his heart and ears.
I envy you who, far from strife and talk, Are high-propped on a pillow of blue cloud.
The Tang dynasty (ad 618–907) is reckoned the golden age of Chinese poetry and Li Po, with his friend Du Fu (ad 712–770), was one of its leading lights. But Chinese women excelled as poets too. The most famous was Li Qingzhao (1084–1156) whose renown now reaches out across the solar system. The International Astronomical Union has named two impact craters on the planet Mercury after her.
The uta in Waley’s translations from Japanese are poems of five lines (also known as tanka, meaning short poem, or waka) in which the first and third lines contain five sound-units or on (loosely translated as ‘syllables’) and the rest seven. Almost all classical Japanese poetry is written in this form, which contrasts with the range and technical freedom of Chinese poetry.
Japanese uta are often about transience and the passing seasons, emphasising the appreciation of fleeting moments of beauty that Buddhism encouraged. But love is treated with more emotion and sensuality than in Chinese:
My morning-sleep hair
I will not comb; For it has been in contact with The pillowing hand of my beautiful Lord.
That is by Hitomaro, one of the greatest Japanese poets, who died around ad 710. An anonymous poem from a tenth-century anthology is equally outspoken:
When dawn comes With the flicker, flicker Of sunrise, How sad the helping each other to Put on our clothes!
Another anonymous poem from the same anthology makes higher claims:
Can even the God of Thunder
Whose foot-fall resounds
In the plains of the sky
Put asunder
Those whom love joins?
The uta form, though brief, is capable of great tenderness, as in the poem on the death of his son by the soldier-poet Otomo no Tabito (665–731):
Because he is young, And will not know the way to go, Would I could bribe
The messenger of the Underworld, That on his shoulders he might carry him!
In time the five-line uta contracted to three, and the haiku became the standard metre of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like much oriental poetry it is, Waley points out, almost impossible to translate into Western languages, not only because of fundamental linguistic differences, but also because calligraphy –the beauty of the pen-strokes or brushwork – was historically an important part of the Japanese poem and cannot be reproduced in Western print-culture. In the Tale of Genji, it is only when Genji has taught his future bride calligraphy that he marries her.
A typical haiku is a three-line observation of a moment in nature, in which the first and last lines have five sound-units and the
middle line seven. It is elusive and elliptical, avoiding abstract statements and direct expressions of personal emotion, and implying everything by images and the order of images. The most famous haiku poet was Matsuo Basho (1644–1694). A bare, literal translation of his best-known poem (often used by Japanese when they try to explain the niceties of haiku to Westerners) might read:
Old pond, Frog jumps in, Water’s sound.
Apart from Waley, the best-known English-language poet who translated Chinese and Japanese poetry was Ezra Pound. In fact he knew no Chinese when he published translations of fifteen Chinese poems in Cathay (1915). But he worked from papers given him by the American orientalist Ernest Fenollosa’s widow. Some critics familiar with Chinese praise Cathay. Others regard it as a kind of colonial project, imposing Western meaning on Asian culture. Typical of its indirectness is Li Po’s ‘The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance’, which Pound renders:
The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew.
It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings, And I let down the crystal curtain
And watch the moon through the clear autumn.
Though it is not stated, we can deduce that the woman is a court lady, and waiting for a faithless lover, who has no excuse for not coming since it is a clear autumn night. Pound says in a note that the poem was especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.
Pound did not know any Japanese either, but his attempt at an English haiku, ‘In a Station of the Metro’, published in 1913, has been hailed as the first Imagist poem:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.
The idea for it came to him, he said, when he got out of the Paris underground at Concorde and saw, in the jostle, beautiful faces. He worked at it for a year, gradually reducing it from thirty lines to ten then to two.
The aims behind Imagism were brevity, the exclusion of superfluous words and abstractions, and concentration on ‘the thing’, whether subjective or objective. According to one story, Pound, the American Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), who had come to London from Philadelphia in 1911, and the English poet Richard Aldington (1892–1962), whom Doolittle married in 1913, thought up Imagism one afternoon in 1912 in the British Museum tea room.
In reality, though, the inventor of Imagism was Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883–1917) who had the distinction of being thrown out of Cambridge University twice, once for rowdy behaviour on Boat Race night and the second time for having an affair with a girl at the exclusive boarding school, Roedean. After that he travelled, learned languages, became interested in philosophy, and published the first Imagist poems in an anthology in 1909. ‘Autumn’ was one of them:
A touch of cold in the Autumn night –I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded, And round about were the wistful stars With white faces like town children.
As a poet he recommended ‘dry hardness’ and rejected Romanticism as ‘spilt religion’. He joined up in 1914, served as an artillery officer and was killed in 1917.
Pound’s anthology, Des Imagistes (1914), does not include Hulme, nor, despite its title, any French writers. But it has poems by Pound himself, Aldington and Doolittle (who published under the name H.D.), a poem by James Joyce (‘I Hear an Army’), which seems unrelated to Imagism, and a poem by the wealthy American Amy
Lowell (1874–1925) who tried unsuccessfully to keep Imagism alive after Pound had broken ranks and joined Wyndham Lewis’s (equally short-lived) Vorticist movement.
An outstanding poet in Des Imagistes, now almost unknown, is Frank Stuart Flint (1885–1960). Born in Islington, the son of a commercial traveller, he left school at thirteen but made himself into an authority on modern French poetry. He has five poems in Des Imagistes, among them ‘The Swan’:
Under the lily shadow
And the gold
And the blue and mauve
That the whin and the lilac Pour down on the water, The fishes quiver.
Over the green cold leaves
And the rippled silver
And the tarnished copper
Of its neck and beak, Toward the deep black water
Beneath the arches, The swan floats slowly.
Into the dark of the arch the swan floats
And into the black depth of my sorrow
It bears a white rose of flame.
Flint abandoned poetry in the 1930s, and had a distinguished career in the Statistics Division of the Ministry of Labour. The year 1929 saw the beginning of the Great Depression and Flint remarked, wryly, that the proper study of mankind was, for the time being, economics.