Gulls

I am content to live my life in accordance with certain truisms.  For instance: Human nature has never changed, and never will.  And one of its corollaries: Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.  Both of these seem quite apt in light of the events of the past week.  

I suspect that the utility of truisms becomes more apparent as one ages.  This is not necessarily a matter of attaining wisdom (I can attest to that).  Rather, it reflects a paring away of that which is inessential, beside the point.  There is little time left.  Why expend any of it on the sophistries of the world?

                      The Truisms

His father gave him a box of truisms

Shaped like a coffin, then his father died;

The truisms remained on the mantelpiece

As wooden as the playbox they had been packed in

Or that other his father skulked inside.

Then he left home, left the truisms behind him

Still on the mantelpiece, met love, met war,

Sordor, disappointment, defeat, betrayal,

Till through disbeliefs he arrived at a house

He could not remember seeing before.

And he walked straight in; it was where he had come from

And something told him the way to behave.

He raised his hand and blessed his home;

The truisms flew and perched on his shoulders

And a tall tree sprouted from his father's grave.

Louis MacNeice, Solstices (Faber and Faber 1961).

Charles Ginner (1878-1952), "Hartland Point from Boscastle" (1941)

The truisms mostly provide a framework for the world of humans, happenstance, and history, the world of fortune and of fate.  As for the World -- the World of beautiful particulars -- that is something else entirely.  I expect no explanations, answers, or solutions to arrive.  That being said, I am always on the lookout for glimmers and glimpses, calls and whispers, from near or far.  Yesterday, I came across thousands of tangled bare branches, a few passing white clouds, and a blue sky -- all floating on the surface of a puddle along the edge of a pathway.  Birdsong was with me wherever I walked.

Still, there are truisms that apply both to the world and the World.  For example: One thing leads to another.  As I have noted here in the past, one of the charms of poetry is that you never know where a poem will take you.  A few mornings ago, I read this:

        Evening Rain by the Bridge

Showering, the rain by the bridge,

Under shadow, at nightfall is not yet hushed.

A fisherman in straw coat waits hesitant on the bluff;

The monks' gong sounds across the central stream.

Sad and still, bush clover at twilight --

Blue into the distance, water oats in autumn.

How beautiful is the clear shallow water!

Tranquil: a single sand gull.

Ichū Tsūjo (1349-1429) (translated by Marian Ury), in Marian Ury, Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen Monasteries (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan 1992).

The poem is a kanshi: a poem written in Chinese characters by a Japanese poet.  The writing of kanshi developed due to the popularity of classical Chinese poetry in Japan.  A kanshi replicates the formal structures and prosodic features of Chinese poetry (the number of lines in a particular lyric form, the prescribed number of characters in each line, as well as requirements relating to rhyme, tonal patterns, and verbal parallelisms).  

Although very few of the Japanese poets who wrote kanshi were fluent in, or spoke, Chinese, they were familiar with Chinese characters (known as kanji in Japanese) given that the characters are used in the Japanese writing system.  For many years (particularly during the 14th and 15th centuries), the writing of kanshi was popular among Zen Buddhist monks due to Zen's origin in Chinese Ch'an Buddhism.  A number of these monks had traveled to China to study Ch'an, and, while living there, had also grown fond of Chinese poetry.

Charles Ginner, "Dahlias and Cornflowers" (1929)

Ichū Tsūjo's "Tranquil: a single sand gull" soon brought to mind one of Tu Fu's best-known, most-beloved poems:

   A Traveler at Night Writes His Thoughts

Delicate grasses, faint wind on the bank;

stark mast, a lone night boat:

stars hang down, over broad fields sweeping;

the moon boils up, on the great river flowing.

Fame -- how can my writings win me that?

Office -- age and sickness have brought it to an end.

Fluttering, fluttering -- where is my likeness?

Sky and earth and one sandy gull.

Tu Fu (712-770) (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984).

Very little has been written about Ichū Tsūjo in English, so I am not qualified to opine upon his familiarity either with Chinese poetry in general or with Tu Fu's poetry in particular.  However, I suspect that he was familiar with both Tu Fu's poetry and with "A Traveler at Night Writes His Thoughts."  I would also not be surprised if "Tranquil: a single sand gull" is a conscious echo of "Fluttering, fluttering -- where is my likeness?/Sky and earth and one sandy gull."

Charles Ginner, "Novar Cottage, Bearley, Warwickshire" (1933)

Tu Fu's "one sandy gull" in turn brought me to this, one of my favorite poems of spring:

   The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush

Before the first visitor comes the spring

Softening the sharp air of the coast

In time for the first seasonal 'invasion.'

Today the place is as it might have been,

Gentle and almost hospitable.  A girl

Strides past the Northern Counties Hotel,

Light-footed, swinging a book-bag,

And the doors that were shut all winter

Against the north wind and the sea-mist

Lie open to the street, where one

By one the gulls go window-shopping

And an old wolfhound dozes in the sun.

While I sit with my paper and prawn chow mein

Under a framed photograph of Hong Kong

The proprietor of the Chinese restaurant

Stands at the door as if the world were young,

Watching the first yacht hoist a sail

-- An ideogram on sea-cloud -- and the light

Of heaven upon the hills of Donegal;

And whistles a little tune, dreaming of home.

Derek Mahon, Collected Poems (The Gallery Press 1999).

Gulls.  One thing leads to another: from the banks of a village stream in 14th century Japan, to a boat anchored in a great river in 8th century China, and, finally, to a seaside town in 20th century Northern Ireland.  Are such journeys idle indulgences in a world of misery, calamity, and evil?  Or are such journeys absolute necessities in a world of misery, calamity, and evil?

Charles Ginner, "Yellow Chrysanthemums" (1929)

Timeless

The sight of a solitary bird crossing the sky is a common occurrence in Chinese poetry.  These lone birds are seldom the main subject of the poem. Rather, they pass through in a single line of verse:  a few brushstrokes in a larger landscape.

     Lu-lung Village, Autumn

Refusing worldly worries,
I stroll among village strollers.

Pine winds sing, the evening village
smells of grass, autumn in the air.

A lone bird roams down the sky.
Clouds roll across the river.

You want to know my name?
A hill.  A tree.  An empty drifting boat.

Hsu Hsuan (916-991) (translated by Sam Hamill), in Sam Hamill, Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese (BOA Editions 2000), page 212.

One of the distinctive (and beautiful) features of Chinese poetry, particularly poems in the chüeh-chü (quatrain) form and in the lü-shih (eight-line, regulated verse) form, is its immediacy:  we share a moment in time with the poet.  The World unfolds in the present tense.  But this immediacy mustn't be mistaken for extemporaneous artlessness:  the prosodic elements of Chinese poetry are strict and demanding.

Thus, the lü-shih form requires (1) the same number of characters per line (five or seven), (2) tonal parallelism, (3) a single rhyme (appearing at the end of the second, fourth, sixth and eighth lines), and (4) verbal parallelism in the second and third couplets of the poem.  The chüeh-chü form requires (1) the same number of characters per line (five or seven), (2) tonal parallelism, and (3) a single rhyme (appearing at the end of the second and fourth lines).  The rules of tonal parallelism may be generally described as follows:

"In principal they decree that a single line shall not have more than two, or at the very most three, syllables or words in succession that belong to the same tonal category, and that in the second line of a couplet the words in key positions shall be opposite in tone to the corresponding words in the first line of the couplet.  This latter results in the second line of the couplet producing, in terms of tone, a mirror image of the first line."

Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984), page 10.

These formal characteristics cannot be replicated in English translations. This is not to say that good translations cannot capture the spirit of the originals.  Accomplished translators (for instance, Arthur Waley, Burton Watson, and Sam Hamill) have produced lovely versions of Chinese poems. But it is important to bear in mind that the apparent spontaneity of the poems is the product of great artistic effort.

Dudley Holland, "Winter Morning" (1945)

The immediacy of traditional Chinese poetry causes the thousand or so years that separate us from the poets to instantly vanish.  My own experience confirms this marvelous timelessness:  the following poem by Tu Fu was written more than twelve centuries ago, but I see essentially the same scene each autumn when, in the early evening, I look across the waters of Puget Sound to the Olympic Mountains rising in the west.

             Watching the Distances

I watch the limitless distance of autumn,
the far-off dark rising up in layers

where icy waters merge with the frozen sky
and the city is blurred with mist.

Last leaves are torn into flight by winds,
and sunless, distant peaks fade fast.

A lone crane flops home at dusk.
The trees are full of crows.

Tu Fu (712-770) (translated by Sam Hamill), Ibid, page 140.

A single difference distinguishes Tu Fu's 8th century China from 21st century Seattle:  Tu Fu sees a lone crane flying home at dusk; I see a lone great blue heron flying at dusk towards its nest high in a cedar.  And, yes, there are often crows in the trees.

"He who sees things present, has seen all things which either have been from eternity, or shall be to eternity; for all are of the like nature, and similar."

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book VI, Section 37, in Francis Hutcheson and James Moor (translators), The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (1742).

Here is a lovely alternative translation of the same passage:

"He that has taken a view of the present age, has seen as much as if he had began with the World, and gone to the end on't; for all things are of a kind, and of a colour."

Jeremy Collier (translator), The Emperor Marcus Antoninus: His Conversation with Himself (1701).

John Haswell (1855-1925), "Whitnash Church"

I am not suggesting that this quality of immediacy is unique to Chinese poetry.  It is found in many good English poems.  ("Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Lying Awake" (Thomas Hardy), and "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now" come immediately to mind, but there are hundreds of others.)  And immediacy is arguably the defining feature of haiku: existence and the World embodied in a singular image -- a 17-syllable moment of enlightenment rendered in the present tense.  Still, there is a certain serene matter-of-factness underlaid with deep emotion in Chinese poetry that, for me at least, sets it apart from all other forms of verse.

   Watching a Lonely Wild Goose at Nightfall

There are few stars north of the Milky Way.
One wild goose calls, "Where am I going?"

If he'd known he'd lose his flock,
he would have begun his journey alone.

Hsiao Kang (503-551) (translated by Sam Hamill), Ibid, page 62.

Wild geese, like lone birds, appear frequently in Chinese poetry.  As one might expect, they tend to bring a sense of longing and wistfulness into a poem (all of that endless journeying).  But we should resist the temptation to turn them into "symbols," "metaphors," or "allegories."  They are there because they are there:  a part of the World.  Yet every part of the World, wherever and whenever it appears, means something, doesn't it?

Allan Gwynne-Jones, "Spring Evening, Froxfield" (1922)

The World is by turns breathtakingly immense and breathtakingly tiny.  So it is with our life.  One afternoon last week I looked up into the sky:  yellow-bordered white clouds, lit from behind by the setting sun, set against endless pale-blue; clouds and sky seen through the black, twisted, empty branches of a row of tall maples.  I suddenly felt a comforting, welcoming, reassuring immensity.  This was not something I put into words; I felt it.

     Night Thoughts While Traveling

Thin grass bends on the breezy shore,
and the tall mast seems lonely in my boat.

Stars ride low across the wide plain,
and the moon is tossed by the Yangtze.

What is fame and literary status --
the old and infirm should leave office.

Adrift, drifting:  what is left for the lone gull
adrift between earth and heaven.

Tu Fu (translated by Sam Hamill), Ibid, page 166.

One day this week, as I walked down a wide path within a wood, I noticed the leaves of several types of trees spread out on the ground before me.  The leaves did not lay in piles.  Instead, they had landed apart on the path, several inches of empty space between each of them.  They separately gleamed on the ground in the dim light of dusk.  I thought of them as planets and stars in a small universe.  Unique and irreplaceable, each of them.

     A Traveler at Night Writes His Thoughts

Delicate grasses, faint wind on the bank;
stark mast, a lone night boat:
stars hang down, over broad fields sweeping;
the moon boils up, on the great river flowing.
Fame -- how can my writings win me that?
Office -- age and sickness have brought it to an end.
Fluttering, fluttering -- where is my likeness?
Sky and earth and one sandy gull.

Tu Fu (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century, page 233.

Charles Dawson, "Accrington from My Window" (1932)

"A Gull Between Earth And Sky"

Nearly all of the best-known T'ang Dynasty (618-907) poets were civil servants.  But T'ang Dynasty civil servants differed a bit from our modern civil servants.  For instance, the rigorous civil service examinations required applicants to demonstrate both an extensive knowledge of poetry and an ability to write it well (in accordance with the elaborate and strict rules of traditional Chinese prosody).  I have never looked into the matter, but I'm fairly certain that, in the United States, knowledge of -- and proficiency in writing -- poetry are not prerequisites for governmental employment.  I can't speak for other countries.

The T'ang Dynasty poets were usually prefects who spent their lives moving from one provincial city to another.  The changes in position were often the result of political vicissitudes: falling out of favor for known or unknown reasons.  A transfer was usually akin to an exile.  Therefore, a large number of T'ang poems are either about sailing the rivers of China from one post to another or about bidding farewell to friends and fellow poets: either those the poet is leaving or those who are departing from the poet.

Not surprisingly, the endless traveling and leave-taking takes on a philosophical cast when it comes to the writing of poems:  one begins to see one's life as a journey and, to borrow a phrase from Yeats, "a continual farewell."  Elements of Taoism and Buddhism fit naturally into this picture as well.

David Young Cameron (1865-1945), "A Castle on Mull"

The following poem is by Tu Fu (712-770), who is one of the four great poets of the T'ang Dynasty (the others, as I have noted before, are Li Po, Wang Wei, and Po Chu-i).

     A Traveler at Night Writes His Thoughts

Delicate grasses, faint wind on the bank;
stark mast, a lone night boat:
stars hang down, over broad fields sweeping;
the moon boils up, on the great river flowing.
Fame -- how can my writings win me that?
Office -- age and sickness have brought it to an end.
Fluttering, fluttering -- where is my likeness?
Sky and earth and one sandy gull.

Tu Fu (translated by Burton Watson), in Burton Watson (editor and translator), The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984).

David Young Cameron, "Morvern and Mull"

  Thoughts while Traveling at Night

Light breeze on the fine grass.
I stand alone at the mast.

Stars lean on the vast wild plain.
Moon bobs in the Great River's spate.

Letters have brought no fame.
Office?  Too old to obtain.

Drifting, what am I like?
A gull between earth and sky.

Tu Fu (translated by Vikram Seth), in Vikram Seth, Three Chinese Poets (Faber and Faber 1992).

David Young Cameron, "A Castle by the North Sea" (1924)

     Traveling at Night

Slender grasses,
A breeze on the riverbank,
The tall mast
Of my boat alone in the night.

Stars hang
All across a vast plain.
The moon leaps
In the Great River's flow.

My writing
Has not made a name for me,
And now, due to age and illness,
I must quit my official post.

Floating on the wind,
What do I resemble?
A solitary gull
Between the heavens and the earth.

Tu Fu (translated by Greg Whincup), in Greg Whincup, The Heart of Chinese Poetry (Doubleday 1987).

The poem is much more than the lament of a disappointed poet-bureaucrat: it is about the journey all of us are in the midst of.  I am aware that the idea of "life as a journey" has become a commonplace, and thus may be suspect, especially in light of the many trivial uses to which it is put in our demented age.  But that does not mean that we have to be ironic about it, or discard it. If an idea has an element of human truth in it, we should not let it be destroyed simply because it has been ill-used.

David Young Cameron, "The Summer Isles" (1935)

The Sound Of Waves

In my previous post, I suggested that Tu Fu's "Thoughts while Travelling at Night" is the most famous on-board-ship poem of the T'ang Dynasty. Others may argue that the following poem by Po Chu-i (772-846) claims that distinction.  On further reflection, I recognize that "most famous" is a hollow and superficial description -- "most beloved" or "most admired" are, I think, preferable.  In any event, both poems are lovely.

     Aboard A Boat, Reading Yuan Chen's Poems

I pick up your scroll of poems, read in front of the lamp;
the poems are ended, the lamp gutters, the sky not yet light.
My eyes hurt, I put out the lamp, go on sitting in the dark;
a sound of waves blown up by head winds, sloshing against the boat.

Po Chu-i (translated by Burton Watson), Burton Watson (editor), The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (1984).

                        Laura Knight (1877-1970), "A Valley at Evening"

Here is a second translation of the same poem by Arthur Waley (1889-1966), who was one of the pioneering translators of Chinese poetry into English.  Waley's translations have a lyricism to them that is not often present in other translations, yet he still remains faithful to the original texts.

     On Board Ship: Reading Yuan Chen's Poems

I take your poems in my hand and read them beside the candle;
The poems are finished, the candle is low, dawn not yet come.
My eyes smart; I put out the lamp and go on sitting in the dark,
Listening to waves that, driven by the wind, strike the prow of the ship.

Arthur Waley (translator), Chinese Poems (1946).

Nearly ten years after Yuan Chen's death, Po Chu-i wrote the following poem.

  On Hearing Someone Sing A Poem By Yuan Chen

No new poems his brush will trace;
   Even his fame is dead.
His old poems are deep in dust
   At the bottom of boxes and cupboards.
Once lately, when someone was singing,
   Suddenly I heard a verse --
Before I had time to catch the words
   A pain had stabbed my heart.

Arthur Waley (translator), Ibid.

                                    Laura Knight, "Sundown" (c. 1940)

On A Boat At Night

Chinese poets of the T'ang Dynasty (618-907) were fond of writing poems while on journeys.  Many of the poets were government officials, and it seems that, if they were not travelling the provincial frontiers on routine bureaucratic business, they were going into exile due to having fallen out of favor with the powers that be.  (This may also account for the large number of farewell poems written by the T'ang poets -- they seem to be always bidding tearful farewells to one another.)

Quite a few of these poems were written on board ship, usually while travelling on a river.  I would hazard to say that the following poem by Tu Fu (712-770) is perhaps the most famous of these on-board-ship poems. But I hasten to add that the poem goes much deeper than the circumstances of its composition.

              Henry Moore (1831-1895), "Catspaws Off The Land" (1885)

  A Traveler At Night Writes His Thoughts

Delicate grasses, faint wind on the bank;
stark mast, a lone night boat:
stars hang down, over broad fields sweeping;
the moon boils up, on the great river flowing.
Fame -- how can my writings win me that?
Office -- age and sickness have brought it to an end.
Fluttering, fluttering -- where is my likeness?
Sky and earth and one sandy gull.

Tu Fu (translated by Burton Watson), Burton Watson (editor), The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (Columbia University Press 1984).

                                     W. E. Leadley, "Driftwood" (1960)

Here is another translation of the same poem.

  Thoughts While Travelling At Night

Light breeze on the fine grass.
I stand alone at the mast.

Stars lean on the vast wild plain.
Moon bobs in the Great River's spate.

Letters have brought no fame.
Office?  Too old to obtain.

Drifting, what am I like?
A gull between earth and sky.

Vikram Seth (translator), Three Chinese Poets (1992).

As I have noted before, although English translations of traditional Chinese poetry tend to come across as fairly prose-like and casual, the originals were subject to strict rules relating to the number of lines, the number of characters (ideograms) per line, end-rhyme, and tonal parallelism.  According to Burton Watson, the original of this poem was in the form of 8-line, 5-character per line "regulated verse" (which requires a single rhyme to be used at the end of the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth lines, and internal tonal parallelism).  It is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to carry over these formal features into English translations, and translators seldom attempt to do so.

                        Geoffrey Spink Bagley (1901-1992), "Rye Harbour"