Five T'ang Poets

Tr. David Young

Oberlin College Press, 1990; Pages: 182

This little book from the FIELD Translator Series (#15) is a collection of poems by five Chinese poets of the T'ang period (618-907 CE), translated by David Young. The book comprises short poems by "the usual suspects": Wang Wei, Li Po, and Tu Fu, along with the somewhat less well-known in the West Li Ho and Li Shang-yin.

Wang Wei is perhaps most famous for his stylish landscape poems that resemble paintings. In fact, it is easy to reconstruct scenes from his descriptions. The narrator, although present, is frequently lost in the beauty and majesty of his surroundings, like a small figure huddling at the foot of great mountains.

Li Po, on the other hand, is more personal, almost obsessively so, and is well known for his paeans to drunkenness. The collection of his poems that I recently read (The Selected Poems of Li Po) reads like one long ode to the glory of wine. Legend has it that the poet drowned when trying to embrace the reflection of the Moon in a river, a most fitting, if untrue ending to his life.

Tu Fu is the serious one of the bunch. Along with poems on social ills, he has very frank (and quite brutal) descriptions of the evils of warfare, with which the declining T'ang dynasty was constantly plagued. Although the selection here does not convey his seriousness, his innovative skills are apparent. Some consider him the greatest poet of China.

Writing rather late in the T'ang period, Li Ho's (791-817) short life is an intense experience of his surroundings marked by persistent adversity. Never successful in attaining the government positions demanded by Confucian ideals, he spent his years riding out of his house every day and dashing off poems on scraps of paper to revise at night. His poetry thus reveals a great ability to capture the fleeting moment and freeze a passing sensation to savor later.

My favorite of the five, however, is Li Shang-yin (813?-858), whose love poetry is among the subtlest and most profound writings I have seen. Although quite abstruse at times because of frequent oblique allusions to myths, folk beliefs, and figures from Chinese history, his poems have a poetic flavor that perhaps resonates quite well with Western readers. The five untitled love poems are pure delight.

David Young's translation is an attempt to render Chinese poetry into English poetry. Thus, he did not try literal translations, which can sound too stiff and formal, and he did not shy away from modifying lines, adding or subtracting, in order to make their meaning clear. One result is that the poems do read like something an English poet might compose, which brings out their lyric qualities quite well. In addition, the incorporation of "explanations" into the poems themselves makes footnotes unnecessary and enables the poems to stand on their own. Obviously, this latter desire compelled Young to choose poems that are susceptible to such rendering, thus limiting his collection somewhat. Lest one thinks that Young has strayed too far from the originals, a comparison with translations by Burton Watson reveals a remarkable overlap, which gives some confidence that we are actually reading the Chinese poets. Still, translation of poetry (and indeed literature) produces a work that is a collaborative effort between the author and the translator. So in some sense, we are reading Young's version of the five poets. The good news is that this version is pretty good.

October 18, 2001.

@book{young-tang-poets,
    title     = {Five T'ang Poets},
    author    = {David Young},
    year      = 1990,
    publisher = {Oberlin College Press},
    address   = {Ohio},
    isbn      = {0-932440-55-X},
    note      = {Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Li Ho, Li Shang-yin}
}