Three Chinese Poets

Vikram Seth is a literary giant and Renaissance Man of international renown. "Three Chinese Poets" is yet more evidence of his versatility as a man of the written word. Being fluent in a few languages, I appreciate the meticulous care and sensitivity that Seth shows in his translated works. His understanding of semantics, sensitivity to literary atmosphere, and respect for originality carries through. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!! :)

I think there is no task more daunting for a writer than to translate poetry from ancient China. First of all, the poems consist of ideograms, the so-called "characters". Vikram Seth's introduction to his book "Three Chinese Poets" has a good example how a Chinese poem looks in the original characters and in pinyin translation, and how a literal, word-by-word translation would sound: "lonely, close, brushwood, door/ vast, face, falling, light/ cranes, nest, pine, tree, everywhere/ men, visit, wicker, gate, few/ tender, bamboo, hold, new, powder/ red, lotus, shed, old, clothes/ at the ford, lantern, fire, rise/ everywhere, water-chestnut, picker, return home." The freedom given by the lack of grammar stands in stark contrast to the rigid structure of the poem. It consists of eight lines with five Chinese characters in each line. The lines 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8 end with rhyme words. Lines 3 and 4 have an identical grammatical word order, as have lines 5 and 6. Also, the images of the poet are symmetrically arranged. In line 1 a closed door stands in contrast to the vast expanse of line 2; line 3 sets the cranes everywhere in contrast to the few visitors of line 4; line 5 sees new powder against the old clothes of line 6. Only lines 7 and 8 do not contain contrasting images but rather an evening scene that reflects the evening scene of lines 1 and 2. Within this finely crafted structure the poet expresses a feeling: loneliness.A translator has two options: to stay true to the Chinese characters and the structure of the original poem, or to stay true to what he feels to be the poetic message of the poem. It is essentially the same problem that a piano player faces when interpreting a sonata by Mozart or Beethoven. Seth chooses the conservative path of staying very close to the original, as he explains in his enjoyable introduction: "I should mention that the poems in this book are not intended as transcreations or free translations, in this sense, attempts to use the originals as trampolines from which to bounce off on to poems of my own [great image, by the way, for the arrogance of some translators]. The famous translations of Ezra Pound, compounded as they are of ignorance of Chinese and valiant self-indulgence, have remained before me as a warning of what to shun. I have preferred mentors who ... admit the primacy of the original and attempt fidelity to it."Fidelity, however, is not all it takes to make a translation succeed. Sometimes the much lamented and maligned "freedom" of a translation yields better results. This is the case here. Let me compare two translations of a poem called "Moonlit Night" by the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu (712 - 770 AD) to illustrate my point.Seth translates: "In Fuzhou, far away, my wife is watching/ The moon alone tonight, and my thoughts fill/ With sadness for my children, who can't think/ Of me here in Changan; they're too young still./ Her cloud-soft hair is moist with fragrant mist./ In the clear light her white arms sense the chill./ When will we feel the moonlight dry our tears,/ Leaning together on our window-sill?"For comparison, here the "transcreation" by David Young from his book "Five T'ang Poets" (1990): "Tonight/ in this same moonlight/ my wife is alone at her window// I can hardly bear to think of my children/too young to understand/ why I can't come home to them// her hair must be damp from the mist/ her arms cold jade in the moonlight// when will we stand together/ by those slack curtains/ while the moonlight/ dries the tear-streaks/ on our faces?"Seth's translation keeps the eight-line structure and the rhyme words in lines 2, 4, 6 and 8. He does not give a pinyin (character-by-character) translation of the original poem. Therefore I cannot judge how true to the original his choice of words is. I would assume Young takes more freedom with the words. Young also breaks up the 8-line structure of the poem into a 3-3-2-5-line structure. In doing so he tries to highlight the train of thought of Du Fu: wife, children, beauty of wife, yearning for reunion.The success of Young's translation lies in his bringing out the pain and longing of the poet who is separated from wife and children. This is where Seth fails. How pale is the pain of separation in "and my thoughts fill with sadness for my children" in comparison to "I can hardly bear to think of my children"; and how old-fashioned does it sound to end a poem with "leaning together on our window-sill" rather than with the poignant "while the moonlight dries the tear-streaks on our faces".The best ancient Chinese poems pack a tremendous amount of emotion into a tight and formal structure. In this they can be compared to Shakespeare's sonnets. These Chinese poets are no lesser poets than Shakespeare is. Translating their poems, the success of the translation must be measured by the extent to which the emotion can be released without destroying the sense of structure in the original poem. Seth's translations with their stress on formal structure and literalness stifle the full emotional impact. The translations focus on the original structure rather than the truth about the human condition that the poet wants to convey to the reader. This is where Young's freer translation yields much better results.The only objection one might raise against Young's translation is that it is reminiscent of a modern poet like William Carlos Williams. But I'd rather have Du Fu's substance in a modern structure than Du Fu's admirable craftsmanship at the expense of the impact his words have on my heart. His emotions are timeless - let them shine through with the help of a little "transcreation".

I picked this book primarily because after reading both verse and prose from the author, I know the translation would make a great reading. It did. I liked the poetry, the ideas, and whatever Chinese poets must have thought about was communicated as well as possible in well-compiled text. I cannot read or understand Chinese, but my Chinese friends found the translations to be inadequate and half-hearted representations of what they described as timeless, classic poetry. Knowing the difficulty in faithfully representing a different culture for an author, and the complexity of translation of any verse, cultures, times and metaphors, I think Vikram Seth as always did a commendable job. For real taste of his poetic genius, read The Golden gate or All you who sleep tonight!

I have only a little knowledge of Chinese poetry, but when I recently discovered that Vikram Seth, whose poetry I greatly admire, had translated three Chinese poets I was compelled to buy this book and try it out. I am very impressed with these translations, and with the overall production of this very slim volume. It is well bound in a soft back cover, laid out beautifully on the pages, and with some of the shorter poems, this accentuates the simplicity of the emotions which the poems seek to convey.It is also worth mentioning that Seth has taken a very particular approach to translation. He sets this out in detail in the introduction, which you can and should read on this Amazon product page. His aim is admirable, and in my opinion he achieves what he set out to do, although of course I have no knowledge of the original Chinese texts.For those who are unfamiliar with Chinese poetry, this selection is a great introduction. There are some very short poems, no more than 4 lines long, in which the poet conveys a great deal of emotion, time, poignancy and place simply by describing for example a deer park or a brook. These often illustrate the very strong and unique traditions of Chinese Nature poetry, which has its roots in Chinese philosophical traditions of Buddhism and Daoism. These are often similar in effect to Haiku. For me, the translation of these brief poems really does transport me into the mind of the poet centuries ago. The effect is very different from reading English Nature poetry, for example Wordsworth's "Daffodils".On comparing English Nature poetry to Chinese Nature poetry, one thing which strikes me is that the English poets go to great lengths to praise the beauty of the nature which they see and wax lyrical about it, whereas the Chinese seem not to. The Chinese poets will simply say what they see, for example this line from Wang Wei "Up comes the moon, startling the mountain birds". In the hands of the English poet, to this simple scene would be added a few words about how pale, bright, silvery etc the moon was and how the birds sang etc. These poems illustrate how the appreciation of nature by some Chinese poets is really starkly different from what we are accustomed to in the English canon. For me, this attitude is beautifully captured by these lines, by the Daoist poet Li Bai:-"They ask me why I live in the green mountains,I smile and don't reply; my heart's at ease"Another major difference between these Chinese poems and some English poems is the simplicity of their style and the emotions which they convey. There are many English poems where I have to re-read lines three of four times before I begin to understand the meaning. With these Chinese poems, there is no "hidden meaning". You read the line once and it "does what is says on the tin" This makes the poems much more accessible and enjoyable, and it means that you'll read the poem 4 times in order to enjoy it 4 times, not because you didn't get it the first 3 times...As well as Nature poetry there are lots of poems about friendship, love and life. Again, I'll quote some of my faovourite lines, from the poem "To Wei Ba, who has lived far away from the court", which is about old friends meeting again after a long time:-"When I last left so long ago,You were unmarried. In a rowSuddenly now your children stand,Welcome their father's friend..."Written by Du Fu more than 1,200 years ago at a time when travel was so difficult, this poem seems to me to be just as relevant today in the age of Facebook. We may post pictures of our holidays and families online, but when we catch up in person with old friends, the feeling is the same as when Du Fu met the children of Wei Ba in circa 750 AD. Again, in the English canon I don't think I've come across any poem which captures this emotion so simply and beautifully.This is a slim volume. There are only about 40 pages. You could whizz through the entire book in about the same time as it would take you to read The Hungry Caterpillar to your child. However, the first reading is only the beginning. These are poems which you will want to read again and again, like picking up a framed photo of your loved ones from your desk, or hearing a good song on the radio, you will want to keep coming back to these simple poems to transport you over and over again into these beautiful emotions.If I had a playlist of poetry, then many of these poems would be in my "most played" list - the poems that I will read again and again. I aim to keep this book on my bed-side table at least for the next 6-12 months and dip into whenever I can.

for some reason, i love this, more than or same as 'better' more scholarly translations. Has one page of literal side-by-side translation from chinese to english which is highly enlightening for the reader, learner or translator

Everything I thought it would be.

Excellent!

I was craving to peer back into the poetic roots of my own culture... and this has given me a great panorama. The introduction was very informative, and the translation is faithful and sublime.