Teaching Not Our Poetry
Eugene Ostashevsky
Global Texts / Global Contexts Conference
NYU, London, March 9, 2012
My subject is the teaching of lyric poetry in translation. Translation pitfalls open in
most texts we teach, whether CF or SF, but they affect lyric poetry most. We don’t need to
believe in eternal, transcendent genres to distinguish between poetry buoyed by narrative
structure (The Iliad) or didactic aims (Georgics), and poetry that is left to structure itself. It is
the latter we call “lyric.” Of all the genres, lyric poetry is the one most embedded in the
language it’s composed in, with the “content” of the utterance being least separable from the
“materiality” of the utterance. If you want my explanation for this fact, please read The
Dogmatic Footnote. 1
Although translators of lyric poetry generally claim to “remain faithful” to the
original, the precise—rather than mercantile—meaning of their slogan is unclear. One
translator “remains faithful” by foregrounding the poet’s sound patterns, another by seeking
denotative precision, but since no two languages have the same phonemes or break down
the world in the same way, any “faithfulness” rests on purely intuitive interpretive judgments
on the part of the translator in her capacity as an American or English or Canadian or
whatever poet. As a result, translations do not fit into our standard categories of authorship,
developed for other genres.
When the scaffolding provided by narrative or argument weakens, more basic textual structures come into the
foreground. Think of the most elementary and general of these as just “repetitions.” The generation of
repetition is the aim of any prosodic rule. For example, meter imposes a map of repetitions on the text (dactyl,
dactyl, trochee, / dactyl, dactyl, trochee). A different map is imposed by rhyme (abab vs abba, etc). When there
is no classical prosody, as in much biblical poetry, repetitions are established by aligning syntactic units, even
imperfectly symmetrical ones (“Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love”).
Grammatical forms provide the occasion for repetitions; so does morphology and even phonetics. It may be
said of the repetitions that they equip the poem with other dimensions, offering nonlinear “shortcuts” or
“wormholes” between specific points on the linear unfolding of language. The repetition of the linebreak (or
pause in song) breaks up the linearity of utterance into units (lines) in order to cluster information by
emphasis—rather like the clausal organization of a sentence. Repetitions also suggest parallelisms, which is to
say they undergird implicit comparisons or contrasts between points in a poem. Now, both of these
functions—that of emphasis and comparison—are semantic. In other words, repetitions in a lyric poem are
part not only of its structure but its meaning, with a lyric poem being inseparable from the language it’s
composed in. QED. (Ideas here indebted Russian Formalism and Semiotics, namely Yuri Tynianov, The Problem
of Verse Language, Ardis 1979; B. V. Tomashevskii, various works on poetics; Yu. M. Lotman, Analysis of the
Poetic Text, Ardis 1976.)
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Two authorship models have emerged for poetry translation, both rather
problematic. Poets speaking to other poets in small literary journals categorize it as another
kind of collaboration, alongside such kinds of collaboration as shared authorship with
another poet (e.g., Japanese renga) or visual artist (e.g., graphic novel). But it’s a funny
collaboration when one collaborator has no say over the end product! The other model,
shared by the publishing industry and the academy, withholds all authorship credit from
translators, pretending that translation can be transparent. Publishing needs to be seen as
offering access to the “originals,” because that’s what people base their purchasing affinities
on. The academy needs to be seen as offering access to the “originals,” because that’s what
people pay for when they sign up for classes. (Consider how many people would buy a book
by Hafiz or sign up for a class on Hafiz, compared to how many would pick poetry “coauthored” by Hafiz and his translators in Berkeley, California.) Hence attribution of
authorship in publishing and the academy reflects the fantasies of consumption much more
than the realities of production.
What does any of this have to do with us? Is the proverbial treacherousness of
translation—in Italian, one says, Traduttore, traditore; in French, it’s Les traductions sont comme les
femmes: Lorsqu’elles sont belles elles ne sont pas fidèles, et lorsqu’elles sont fidèles elles ne sont pas belles—
something for us just to get over and move on, teaching the best available, or perhaps simply
the cheapest, versions? I want to share two models for working with poetry in the original,
one where the instructor can read the original (easy) and one where the instructor cannot
(hard). Let’s start with the easy.
The “Requiem” of Anna Akhmatova has lots to offer to a CF3 syllabus. It’s short;
it’s not hard; it’s by a woman; it’s about a historical event; better yet, it’s by a photogenic
woman who loses her family in a historical event of great symbolic importance. The only
CF3-related improvement I can suggest is if the historical event were the Partition of India
in 1947 rather than the Great Soviet Purge of 1937. Unfortunately, the improvement did not
occur to Akhmatova; nor did she think of writing in contemporary American English rather
than a chiseled modernist-classical version of Russian, whose self-conscious purity looks
down upon the squirming official language of the period. As it turned out, to say that
translations of the “Requiem” in English leave a lot to be desired leaves a lot to be desired.
Why is this the case? Like most translations in our culture, renditions of “Requiem”
aspire to “denotative accuracy”: to supply the poems words and phrases with their best
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dictionary-meaning equivalents. Ironically, the very accuracy of such “faithful-to-themeaning” translations shows that the meaning of the poem lies elsewhere. This is because
our concept of translation as the matching of denotations between languages comes from
genres that reduce linguistic materiality: the article, the contract, the instruction manual. It
ignores the materiality of language that, as I argued in The Dogmatic Footnote, shapes the
semantic complex that is the lyric poem.
Translations of “Requiem” tend to be in free verse, a prosody that makes few
demands and is therefore especially suited for denotative accuracy. As luck would have it,
unregulated, largely unenjambed free verse also happens to be the chief poetic idiom of the
Western poetry of our day. This, as I shall argue, is no accident. But for now let us note that
Akhmatova is semantically, culturally, and even politically invested in her prosody. The
ground condition of anything the “Requiem” says, lies in the poet being positioned as the
conscience and voice of the people, in her individual experience becoming supra-individual
experience (“A people of a hundred million people speaks through my tormented mouth,”
etc.). Even if the idea of the poet as voice of the people has a Romantic origin (Herder?),
even if its operations in Akhmatova take Christological paths, in order for this paradigm to
do its job, it needs something more than ideology. It needs its technology to be of the right
generation. A contemporary American poet could never galvanize public opinion, could
never serve as a “conscience and voice of the people,” even if the American “people” were
conceivable as a single body with a single conscience that some one person can voice.
(Thankfully, they aren’t.) In that hypothetical situation, the putative “conscience and voice of
the people” might write an op-ed, make a film, appear on a talk show. The technologies
available to Americans are more efficient for reaching other Americans, and in general many
generations ahead of the technology that is classical prosody.
The closest equivalent to a talk show in Stalinist Russia were the show trials. Film
and publishing were, of course, under the absolute control of State. If you, as a poet, did not
do what you were told, you would not publish. Akhmatova, who did not publish for many
years, used to refer to that period in her country’s life as “pre-Gutenbergian.” It was a
terribly apt way of framing it. Unofficial poetry sometimes circulated in manuscript but not
so often: these were the years before samizdat, when the punishments dealt out for any
unofficial activity were prohibitive. So poetry was disseminated in the most primitive way
possible. It was learnt by heart.
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Classical prosody is a form of mnemonic technology. While, as I argued in The
Dogmatic Footnote, all repetition structures bear a semantic function, they also make the
poem easier to remember. Our argument is not concerned with which of these two
functions of lyric form is historically and/or ontologically primary, but I believe it is the
mnemonic. In any case, meter and rhyme, like those we get in “Requiem,” are particularly
efficient as mnemotechnic devices. We, the Americans of today, do not need them. Our
poetry culture is firmly based on print. We have no difficulties accessing books as readers,
nor do we have difficulties getting into print as writers. More importantly, it’s been this way
for some time—our society has been saturated with print for, arguably, over two centuries.
Even in those rare occasions we do deal with rhyme, we deal with it as something decorative.
This is not the case with Russia, where literacy in the nineteenth century extended only to
the upper echelons of society, and access to print was always more restricted than in the
States. I believe this divergence is responsible for the difference between how twentiethcentury American English and Russian were spoken, with the latter having a greater density
of proverbs, allusions, sayings, etc. (I don’t have statistics, but such has been my impression,
as also the impressions of other bilinguals.) It is also responsible, I believe, for the split over
prosody between our modernist poetries, with Russian modernism of the twentieth century,
unlike Western modernisms, retaining rhyme and meter. Different levels of saturation of
culture by print made the prosody split take shape already before 1917. However, the Soviet
state made the split deeper, via, among other things, the imposition of censorship,
foregrounding the mnemonic aspects of a poem as one of its salient qualities. 2 The fall of the
Soviet Union and the subsequent liberalization of publishing predictably led to more and
more free verse being written in Russian.
There are other aspects to the positioning of self in classical prosody that are
important for the “Requiem,” but I believe I said enough to make my point. The question
now is: How do we convey this aspect of the poem to students? Luckily, the solution is
pretty simple.
(a)
Never give them just one translation. Give them at least two capable translations
that, for all their capability, are as different as possible. Students must be steered
from the tendency of naïve readers to identify the translation with the original.
See Mikhail Gronas, “Why Did Free Verse Catch on in the West, but Not in Russia? On the Social Uses of
Memorized Poetry,” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 33, 168 – 214, http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/33/tsq_33_gronas.pdf.
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(b)
If you speak enough Russian to explain a few lines of the original with excurses
into prosody, grammar, connotations, and everything else missing from your
translations, do. If you can’t, no problem. Just go to (c).
(c)
Make them listen to the recordings of Akhmatova reading the poem. The
English-language site that carries it is currently down, but you can get it here:
http://onlinemusic.org.ua/song/296102/AA_Ahmatova-Rekviem.html or here: go to
http://gold.stihophone.ru/users.php?user=ahm and click on Реквием (3.35Mb). Her
reading captures virtually everything that’s missing from the translations—the
positioning of the self, the role of classical prosody, the manufacture of public
memory for the future. 3
(d)
Get ahold of a documentary such as A Film About Anna Akhmatova, by Helga
Landauer, show the students a few excerpts, and discuss why people in the film
talk about her in terms normally reserved for saints and martyrs rather than for
private individuals who happen to be good with words.
If you do this, you will have taught the “Requiem” as a foreign poem, a work of another
culture and another time. You will also have made that poem speak to our culture and our
time in a way that does not erase its own foreignness, its own cultural specificity. I think this
is the right way to proceed in a program that bills itself as “global.”
Now, for the sake of contrast, I will address teaching poetry from a place I’ve never been to,
whose culture I claim no expertise in, whose language I do not know at all, and whose script
I cannot vocalize. The poet in question lived in an era before audio recordings; whatever
modern readings of his work might be available on the Internet almost certainly
misrepresent his reading style; nor can I find them, not knowing how to write his name, in
its original form, into a search engine. Despite or because of all this, I intend to teach him
with constant reference to the original text, in a manner as linguistic as possible. The poet is
Du Fu (712-770), his name once transliterated as Tu Fu. Along with his elder friend Li Bai
(=Li Po), Du Fu is considered—to quote one scholar—“China’s greatest poet,” and thus has
a rather heavy claim on our “global” syllabus.
Although my ignorance of Chinese language and culture is a great handicap, being an
American poet makes up for it somewhat. Contemporary American poetry created itself in
I cannot praise mp3s or Youtube enough as tools for teaching poetry. Hearing Eliot read the “Wasteland”
tells your students things about both Eliot and the “Wasteland” that they will never ever pick up off the page
by themselves.
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part via translations from the Chinese, and of T’ang dynasty poets such as Du Fu and Li Bai
in particular. Consequently, there exist not only many capable renditions, but also a gamut of
critical writing about them, composed by scholars and practitioners of all the affected
disciplines. For a translator from the Russian such as myself, the sophistication of American
discourse about classical Chinese poetry is flabbergasting. No similar discourse exists about
Russian poetry in the US, because no one ever used Russian poetry to reform American
poetry. No such discourse exists about Chinese poetry in Russia, either, because no one ever
used Chinese poetry to change Russian poetry. One of the reasons for teaching Du Fu, Li
Bai, and also Basho, in CF, is that they have become the ancestors of contemporary
Americans.
It thus makes sense for aspiring teacher of Chinese poetry to start her preparation by
contextualizing T’ang dynasty poetry within our twentieth century. This sounds egocentric
but, as I hope to show, it will help us read the language of the original! Chinese poetry enters
American literature with Ezra Pound’s Cathay in 1915. After publishing the Imagist
manifesto, with its call for “direct treatment of the thing” and for turning away from classical
prosody, Pound took to fishing for predecessors—and pulled out Li Bai. I don’t want to go
into the whole story but, basically, the notes of the recently deceased Ernest Fenollosa let
Pound connect the putatively “ideogrammic” poetics of the Chinese with the nascent collage
/ montage aesthetics of modernist art. He also used Chinese poetry as a stick to beat back
Edwardian linguistic abstraction—paralleling William Carlos Williams’s subsequent slogan of
“No ideas but in things.” Finally, his commentaries on selected examples, such as Li Bai’s
“The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance,” teach readers to employ the juxtapositions characteristic of
both collage and the ideogram to maximize meaning while minimizing the means. In short,
Pound used Chinese poetry to make up American poetry. 4
Pound’s translations are a miracle. He did not speak Chinese. Fenollosa, whose notes
Pound relied on, did not speak Chinese. The misconceptions that constitute their
ideogrammic method arose partly from the presumption of Fenollosa’s Japanese tutors, who
I teach Ernest Fenollosa’s essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” as edited by
Pound, as an imaginative introduction to twentieth-century poetics. For American incorporation of Chinese
poetry, see Eliot Weinberger’s introduction to his The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, New
Directions 2003, xvii-xxvii; Wai-lim Yip, Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues between Chinese and Western Poetics, U of
California P 1993, available in its entirety on http://publishing.cdlib.org, especially his brilliant ch. 3. Also see
Weinberger’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated, Asphodel 1987 (nineteen
different translations of same poem with commentary), and Yip’s Ezra Pound’s Cathay, Princeton UP 1969. A
scan of first edition of Cathay may be downloaded from http://www.archive.org/details/cathayezrapound00pounrich.
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deigned to read Chinese characters as if they bore Japanese sound-values; as a result, Pound
thinks Li Bai’s name is not Li Po, not Limp Popo, but… Rihaku! Pound gets words wrong.
He fuses two poems into one by mistake, incorporating even the title of the second into the
resultant body. And yet—over and over and over, by some weird intuition—he hits
something that’s buried deep in the poem and he shows it to us. Such at least is the
consensus of critics, including professional Sinologists. As Dennis Tedlock, one of the
founders of ethnopoetics, writes in his preface to his Popol Vuh, “precision in translation is
not to be confused with mechanical literalness.” 5
Unlike Li Bai, Du Fu did not reach the American reader through Pound’s Cathay, but
rather through the One Hundred Poems from the Chinese of the San Francisco poet Kenneth
Rexroth (1956). Brilliantly rendered, Rexroth’s “Tu Fu” is the one whose (English) words
pierce you and stay. Unfortunately, Rexroth enjambs like no Chinese poet ever has, and so if
you want to get into the mechanics of Du Fu’s poetry, as well as read his longer war pieces,
you need to go elsewhere. How far elsewhere? For a single-translator book, you have many
choices, with the most prominent being editions by Burton Watson (Columbia 2002), David
Young (Knopf 2008), and David Hinton (New Directions 1988). Hinton’s apparatus is
terrific, but his renditions resemble an old dresser with the drawers variously open and the
clothes hanging out, and some of the socks don’t even look washed. In other words, he
retains nothing of the structural precision and laconic elegance of the original. Following
scholarly precedent, David Young composed a convenient biography using Du Fu’s own
poems—alas, if only he hadn’t awarded Du Fu an MFA from Iowa! Burton Watson’s style
lacks the resonance of Rexroth, but his scrupulous imitation of the phrasing and grammar of
the original makes his version the most apt for a teaching method that also uses the original
and other translations.
And other translations there be. The great maturity of the Chinese-translation
subculture is evidenced all over the Internet. For instance, there exist websites comparing
large numbers of English-language renderings of a single T’ang dynasty original. Du Fu’s late
“Thoughts while Traveling at Night” can be found in thirty-five different versions on the
website of The Bureau of Public Secrets (http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/tu-fu.htm). Fiftysix different versions of the equally iconic “Spring View,” are available on ChinaPage at
http://www.chinapage.com/poem/dufu/chunwang.html. For assignments, students can be asked to
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Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life, ed. and trans. Dennis Tedlock, Touchstone 1985, 17.
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defend some translations and critique others or—not so simply—to compose their own.
Other websites patiently walk us through decisions taken by translators as they work on a
poem. Thus, C. John Holcombe discusses his multiple versions of “Restless Night” and
“The Ballad of the Beautiful Ladies” on his blog at http://www.textetc.com/workshop.html; he
attends not only to grammar but also to the rhyme scheme of the original, in a refreshing
riposte to free-verse methodology instituted by Pound.
Yet the tool I relied on most, for both classwork and homework, is Mark
Alexander’s www.chinese-poems.com, a vast website of classical Chinese poetry with a substantial
section devoted to Du Fu. Alexander, a devoted amateur whose breadth makes up for
apparent defects in precision, provides the reader with the Chinese text in (a) traditional
characters; (b) twentieth-century simplified characters; (c) Romanization with the tones
marked; (d) word-for-word literalist crib; and (e) his own syntactically conservative
translation of the original. It is the (d), the crib, that I find to be most useful in the
classroom. I must preface my example of what can be done with some linguistic and
prosodic remarks.
Chinese is an uninflected language, that is to say its words have no built-in markers
for number, case, tense, or even part of speech. It relies on order and context to determine
grammatical function and meaning more than English. Classical Chinese has fewer analytic
(not built-in but separate) grammatical indicators than Mandarin. The poetry of classical
Chinese has almost none, and thus presents the language in its most concise, dense and
ambivalent form. Famously, such poetry usually lacks even the first-person pronoun,
refusing to distinguish between the objective and the subjective interpretations of any scene,
and allowing Sinologists to speculate about its perspectivalism when they should probably be
speculating about its anti-perspectivalism. Instead, classical Chinese poetry narrows meaning
suggestively and structurally, with a help of a great deal of what The Dogmatic Footnote
calls “repetition,” whose ultimate aim is to establish semantic parallelisms. During the T’ang
dynasty Chinese poetry accumulates such occasions for repetition as regulated tonal, rhyme,
and semantic patterns. As a result, its main subgenre of so-called “recent-style shi poetry,”
the lüshi, an eight-liner with five (in some versions six) syllables-characters-words per line
became arguably “one of the most complicated kinds of poetry in the world.” 6 The second
An indispensible title for learning Chinese poetry is Zong-Qi Cai, ed., How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided
Anthology, Columbia UP, 2008. My quote is from p. 161; pp. 162-170 are devoted to a painstaking scrutiny of
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and third couplet of the lüshi are locked in a complex game of double parallelism, meaning
that lines 3 and 4 parallel each other, lines 5 and 6 parallel each other, and the two couplets
also parallel each other, but contrastingly. I obviously don’t ask students to catch all the
patterns—I can’t catch all of them myself—but we do try to understand the very basics.
For example, let us take lines 3-6 of “Facing Snow,” a piece composed in 755, during
the great cataclysm of the An Lushan rebellion.
Alexander’s crib:
Rexroth:
Hinton:
Watson:
Disorder cloud low dusk
Rapid snow dance return wind
Gourd ladle discard cup without green
Stove remain fire like red
Ragged mist settles
In the spreading dusk. Snow skurries
in the coiling wind. The wineglass
Is spilled. The bottle is empty.
The fire has gone out in the stove.
Clouds at
Twilight’s ragged edge foundering, wind
Buffets a dance of headlong snow. A ladle
Lies beside this jar drained of emerald
Wine. The stove’s flame-red mirage lingers.
Ragged clouds press down in the fading twilight,
swift snow dances in the turning wind.
Gourd dipper discarded, no more green of wine in the cask;
stove beside me, still a flicker of red.
Even without knowing Chinese, you can start lining up the key words in not only horizontal,
but also vertical columns in order to narrow their meaning grammatically and / or
semantically. (The task is made more difficult by Alexander’s unclear treatment of line four.)
“Spring View.” An anthology that includes the word-for-word cribs as well as translations is Wai-lim Yip’s
Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres, 2nd edition, Duke 2004. I also benefitted from James J. Y.
Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry, U of Chicago, 1962, and Stephen Owen, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High
T’ang, Yale 1981.
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Disorder(ly)
Rapid
cloud(s)
snow
lower?
dance(s)
lowering?
turning
dusk
wind
Wine dipper
Stove
lying useless
remains
cup
fire
without
like
green (color of wine)
red (color of fire)
This is obviously not a perfect exercise when you do it without a word of Chinese, but it
become easier when there are Chinese-speaking students in class. Nonetheless the creation
of such a matrix of parallelism shows you the patterns that specify the grammatical function
of Chinese words; you can also see the semantic caesura after the second character of each
line, dividing the line into two unequal blocks. You can discuss whether the speaker is in the
picture or not; whether the lines constitute a pathetic fallacy or not. Comparing this lüshu
with other of its kind by Du Fu, you can show how the couplets 2 and 3 tend to be more
eternal and less historical than those of the outlying couplets; and how couplet 2 is usually
about the natural world, while couplet 3 about the man-made one.
These poems ask the reader to be intellectually active, to infer things that are not
said, that lie in semantic negative space. I prep the students with a visual exercise, the
decoding of “Night Shining White” by the painter Han Gan, a contemporary of Du Fu.
“Night Shining White” depicts a horse tied to a stake and feeling rather unhappy about it. By
referencing the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Campidoglio which we had
discussed earlier, I get them to see “Night Shining White” as a political statement about the
Chinese empire on the eve of the An Lushan rebellion, and to note the Confucianist political
engagement of the painter. Then I remind them of the rebellion, which they had read about
the night before. Then we study Du Fu, whose poetry places “no ideas but in things,”
speaking in much the same manner as the painting of Han Gan. 7
Although Du Fu’s dates place him in CF2 by about a century and a half, I teach him at the very end of CF1
because (a) doing so allows comparison with poets of another empire, Rome; (b) my CF2 is full. For decoding
Han Gan, see Maxwell K. Hearn, How to Read Chinese Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art 2008, 3-9;
painting online at http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1977.78. Eliot Weinberger’s essay “China’s Golden
Age,” NY Review of Books, Dec 18, 2008, although ostensibly a review of an exhibit and a volume of later
poems, provides an imaginative introduction to T’ang culture and multiculturalism.
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