 | The works of Li Po, the Chinese poet |  |
PREFACE
This is the first attempt ever made to deal with any
single Chinese poet exclusively in one book for the
purpose of introducing him to the English-speaking
world.
Li Po has been the best-known Chinese poet in the
Orient for the last one thousand years or more. In
America his name has only recently been made familiar
to the poetry public through the translation of his
poems by eminent contemporary poets. But as the
Bibliography at the end of the present volume indicates,
Li Po—variously designated as Le Pih, Ly Pé, Li Taipé,
Li Tai-po, et cet.—has been known more or less to
Europe during the past century. A prominent place is
accorded the poet in all the French and German anthologies
of Chinese poems, which have appeared from
time to time. He is included among the Portraits des
Célèbres Chinois in Amiot's Mémoires (1776-97), while
Pavie's Contes Chinois (1839) has a nouvelle of his
life. Excellent studies and translations have been made
by two German scholars, Florenz and Bernhardi, in
their monographs on the poet.
In the English language, there is Mr. Edkins' paper
"On Li Tai-po," which was read before the Peking
Oriental Society in 1888 and was published in that Society's
Journal in 1890. Mr. Edkins was perhaps the
first Englishman to pay special attention to our poet,
though his translations are trite and barren. Professor
Giles' Chinese Poetry in English Verse and History of
1901. While his dexterous renderings of Li Po and
other poets have since been generally accepted as standard
English versions, they fail to create an appetite for
more of their kind owing probably to the professor's
glib and homely Victorian rhetoric which is not to the
taste of the present day. Mr. Cranmer-Byng is elegant,
but somewhat prolix. His two books, A Lute of lade
and A Feast of Lanterns, have many gorgeous lines,
suffused, I fear, with a little too much of Mr. Cranmer-Byng's
own impassioned poetry. These three men belong
to the old school of translators, who usually employ
rhyme and stanzaic forms.
Then, in 1915, Mr. Ezra Pound entered the field with
his Cathay, a slender volume of a dozen or more poems
mostly of Li Po, "translated from the notes of the late
Professor Fenollosa and the decipherings of Professors
Mori and Ariga." In spite of its small size and its
extravagant errors the book possesses abundant color,
freshness and poignancy, and is in spirit and style the
first product of what may be called the new school of
free-verse translators, who are much in evidence nowadays.
I confess that it was Mr. Pound's little book
that exasperated me and at the same time awakened me
to the realization of new possibilities so that I began
seriously to do translations myself. Mr. Waley omits
Li Po from his first book, but includes in his More
Translations a few specimens from a group of poems
that he published in the Asiatic Review, in which he
avers that he does not regard Li Po so highly as others
do. On the other hand, Miss Lowell devotes her recent
delightful volume, Fir-Flower Tablets, largely to our
poet, with a selection of eighty-five poems by him. Mr.
Bynner's translation of what he calls Three Hundred
publication, in which Li Po will be represented by some
twenty-five poems.
Now to the Western literary world, generally speaking,
much of Chinese poetry remains still an uncharted
sea for adventure. The romantic explorer who comes
home from it may tell any tale to the eager and credulous
folk. Not that yarns are wilfully fabricated, but
on these strange vasty waters, dimly illumined with
knowledge, one may see things that are not there and
may not see things that are really there. Such is
certainly the case with Li Po. For instance, Mr. Edkins
speaks of a poem (No. 72) which he entitles "A Japanese
Lost at Sea," as being "unknown in China" but
having been preserved by the Japanese. He adds with
the pride of a discoverer that the poem was given him
by a Japanese in 1888, whereas as a matter of fact the
same poem has for these centuries had a place in any
Chinese edition of Li Po's complete works. Take another
example. Due to the devious and extremely
hazardous nature of his method of translation, Mr.
Pound gathers two different poems of Li Po into one,
incorporating the title of the second piece in the body
of his baffling conglomeration. Even Mr. Waley registers
his fallibility by a curiously elaborate piece of
mistranslation in the Asiatic Review. Speaking of Li
Po's death, he quotes from Li Yang-ping's Preface a
passage, rendering it as follows:
When he was about to hang up his cap (a euphemism
for dying), Li Po was worried . . .
When I was about to hang up my cap (a euphemism
for resigning from office), Li Po was
sick. . . .
to hang one's cap, that is, one's official cap, is never
used as a conceit for dying. In her Introduction to Fir-Flower
Tablets, Mrs. Ayscough is right in rejecting the
tempting morsel of legend about Li Po's drowning,
which has been accepted by Professor Giles and
others. But on the same page she makes a misstatement
to the effect that Li Po after his return from exile
went to "live with his friend and disciple, Lu Yang-ping,
in the mountains near Kiu Kiang." The fact is
Li Yang-ping (not Lu Yang-ping) was then magistrate
of Tang-tu, the present city of Tai-ping in the province
of Anhwei, at a considerable distance from the Lu
Mountains, which are in Hunan. Nor does she seem
to be conversant with the notorious bit of China's literary
history regarding the "Eight Immortals of the
Winecup." They acquired their enviable fame in the
taverns of Chang-an during Li Po's sojourn in that
metropolis. Tu Fu's celebrated poem (No. 125) will
serve as an evidence. The group never lived in the
mountains together as Mrs. Ayscough makes out. Again
she blunders glaringly and inexcusably in writing,
"China's three greatest poets, Li Tai-po, Tu Fu, and Po
Chu-i all lived during his (Ming Huang's) long reign
of forty-five years," for elsewhere in her own book the
years of these poets are correctly given to be respectively,
A.D. 701-762, 712-770 and 772-846.
By citing these few obvious errors committed by
zealous scholars and daring poets, I do not mean to
discredit their brilliant achievements, which I fully
appreciate, and to which I am heavily indebted in the
execution of my work. Only I feel it my duty to indicate
to my reader the still very imperfect state of
what is accessible to him in the way of a Li Po literature
in English. And conscious of my own failings, I offer
by the contributions of my predecessors, and although
I feel that in the limited scope I have chosen, my work
is generally adequate.
I am a Japanese. I pretend to no erudition in Chinese
literature. But I have been all my life a student
and lover of Chinese poetry, or as much of it as I
can read. In my boyhood I learned some shorter pieces
of Li Po by heart. And during these past years of my
study and travel in America I have always carried with
me a small edition of his works. These translations
were made at intervals, over half of them having been
finished before the spring of 1916. It is more than a
year since the entire collection was completed and I
began to look for a publisher. A few of the poems
were published in the Wisconsin Literary Magazine, a
student publication at the University of Wisconsin
where I did my graduate work in English during 19171918.
One poem (No. 9) was printed by a friendly
editor in 1919 in the now defunct Art and Life. All the
rest is presented to the public for the first time.
For the historical and biographical matter in the
Introduction I drew only on the most reliable Chinese
sources such as the writings of the poet himself and his
contemporaries and the two Books of Tang, while I
referred constantly to the works of European historians
and translators. As to the poems themselves, they represent
only a little more than one-tenth of the works
of Li Po preserved in the standard Chinese edition,
but I have tried to make the selection as varied and
representative as possible and included, consequently, a
number of popular pieces which have been translated
by more than one hand. I have honestly tried my best
to follow the original poems closely and to preserve
the moment when I was in the right mood to take up a
particular piece. For the elucidation of the difficult
passages I depended largely on Japanese and Chinese
commentaries, and consulted freely, wherever possible,
existing European translations; and I had also the assistance
of my Chinese friends. But I wish to have my
reader understand that many of my versions are far
from being literal. A literal translation would often
leave a Chinese poem unintelligible unless supplied
with a great amount of exegesis, and I did not wish to
empty all the rich content of the original into footnotes.
I have amplified or paraphrased on many occasions.
I have omitted unimportant words here and there. I
have discarded, or translated, a number of proper names
because, some way or other, Chinese syllables refuse to
sing in company with English words. I have dropped
all the phonetic marks, which indicate some tonal peculiarities
in certain words like T`ang yün, fêng, etc.,
but which serve only to mystify a non-initiate like myself
or my reader. But after all these and other
things I have done, I am inclined to believe that my
renderings are often simpler and more exact than other
extant versions, which I have studied and which I have
listed at the end of the book.
In conclusion, I acknowledge my heavy obligations
to all my European and American precursors in the
field and to my many personal friends who have aided
me in various ways during these years of protracted
toil. I mention specially my Chinese friend, Mr. Yulan
Fung, who went over the entire manuscript and
furnished me with valuable criticism and corrections,
and also Mr. Lo and Mr. Yang who did for me the
Chinese titles of the poems, which appear at the margins
is due to my old friend, Arthur Harcourt Mountain,
without whose enthusiastic interest and frequent companionship
and collaboration this book might have
never been brought to completion.
| The works of Li Po, the Chinese poet | |