When sinologist and translator Wilt Idema in 1991 Mirror of Classical Chinese Poetry released, that was an event. Readers who mainly knew Chinese poetry through Slauerhoff’s idiosyncratic adaptations had in one go an overview of a complete tradition, from the 10th century before to the early 20th century after Christ, with this canonical anthology.
Not only could those readers now see how headstrong Slauerhoff had been, because Idema naturally translated directly from Chinese, there was also the cautious realization that it was actually time to get acquainted with that great tradition. As Idema himself modestly said in his acceptance speech for the Martinus Nijhoff Translation Prize, which was promptly awarded to him: ‘Developments in China – a quarter of humanity – will partly determine the face of the 21st century and everyday life in Abcoude and Zwaagwesteinde.’
Getting familiar with patterns
Thirty years later, those words sound as true as they are innocent. We now know a little better how China determines everyday life and can be read in Idema’s radical revision of his book, under the title Thirty centuries of Chinese poetry, a less ‘non-committal’ experience. Of course, you can enjoy browsing through it and pick out what you like, even if you like, as far as Idema is concerned. But he’s also always had more in mind: getting to know another culture as a way to “increase one’s own powers of appreciation.”
Every poetic tradition is made up of connotations and associations that can make it difficult to grasp for the ‘foreign’ reader – who may therefore go in search of the familiar, just as Slauerhoff searched for fellow bohemians among the ancient Chinese poets. Idema has deliberately translated and collected so much to familiarize the reader with the patterns, the recurring forms and obsessions along the way – not by explaining everything, but by simply showing it.
And that works. Of course, many will remember Du Fu’s poignant wartime accounts, or the drunken musings on the moon of Li Bai – two great names of the Tang Dynasty. But the overwhelming directness with which they still speak to us gains strength when you notice how close Chinese poetry has always been to reality. It is an age-old penchant for concreteness that is reflected in clear images such as ‘I scratched my gray hair so thin/ I couldn’t pin my hood on it’ (Du Fu). Or in those typical titles that simply indicate the actual reason for the poem: ‘When I wanted to visit the hermit of Mount Daotian, I did not meet him’ (Li Bai).
But you also get more affinity with certain form aspects the more often you encounter them. Take the parallel that so permeates the Chinese aesthetic: Idema faithfully reproduces it, where other translators sometimes tamper with fear of repetition. Reading those tight pairs of lines again and again gives a pleasant cadence: ‘The field so wide: the sky presses the trees/ The stream so clear: the moon comes to you’ (Meng Haoran), ‘A small garden – try the spring clothes! / A tall tower – lean into evening sunlight!’ (Li Shangyin).
New names
In his revised version, Idema has included about 40 new names, out of a total of more than 230 (he also sacrificed some to limit the volume). The proportion of poets from the nineteenth century has increased, bringing to the fore images of ‘white devils’ and the Eiffel Tower, and especially the increase in the number of women, yielding moving testimonies of social inequality and personal frustration.
‘I lamented the admonition of the hen that crows in the morning’, we read in ‘Complaint’ by Concubine Ban from the first century BC. In a footnote, Idema states that this hen, rather than rooster, is an image of a woman meddling in affairs of state. Another sigh of not being able to go out into the world and being limited to domestic labour, we read in Li Hanzhang from the 18th century, with a characteristic parallelism: ‘I embroider the bridges long and short in the morning/I embroider the hills east and west. me in the evening.
This earthly emotion also contains that concrete and direct feeling, you will learn if you read on. You also learn how central this emotion is in the entire tradition. ‘Poetry is the articulation of a feeling’, is the old Chinese definition, which you can see beautifully reflected in Shi Hanke from the 17th century, also new in the collection. His ode to Du Fu, the 8th-century grand master, may well contain the core of Thirty Centuries of Chinese Poetry†
Your poems turn to blood,
In a poem my blood changes again –
I never knew that poem and blood meet
Soaking so deeply since all eternity.
Wilt L. Idema: Thirty Centuries of Chinese Poetry. Brooklyn; 652 pages; €35.
