玉阶怨
2017-02-07
There is a little blue notebook I carry underarm, into which goes every odd and end of thought as well as pieces of prose and poetry as they seem seemly to me. Yesterday, it was Ezra Pound's tranlation of the "Jade Stair's Complaint" (he rendered it as The Jeweled Stairs' Grievance), which was one of his translations of Li Bai (whom he called Rihaku after the Japanese translation) in the book Cathay. From my two parentheticals, we see that Pound had no Chinese of his own, and was, instead, constructing his poems out of the translations into English from Japanese done by one Ernest Fenollosa. Cathay is not a translation, but consists in entirely new works; nevertheless, it was hailed not only as a modernist triumph in the West, but as faithful to the spirit of Li Bai by Chinese commenters.
Ezra Pound-------------------------------------------------------------
The Chinese:
玉阶怨
玉阶生白露
夜久侵罗袜
却下水晶帘
玲珑望秋月
becomes:
The Jewel Stairs Grievance
THE jewelled steps are already quite white with
dew,
It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,
And I let down the crystal curtain
And watch the moon through the clear autumn.
By Rihaku.
At the end of the poem, Pound adds this memorable note by way of explanation:
NOTE. Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, there
fore there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings,
therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear
autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather.
Also she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened
the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poem is espe
cially prized because she utters no direct reproach.
-------------------------------------------------------------
It was my choice, yesterday, to memorize this poem, which is something I do everyday in order to learn Chinese. This is perhaps not the best--and certainly is not my only--method for learning the language, but it does make the vocabulary live and breathe for me in a way that plodding through textbooks does not. I do recommend plodding, of course, because that's the way a pilgrim makes his progress. But I quite like the time spent with this image of the young lady by moonlight, which rises like a vapor above the warm waters of the mind in quiet hours. The language is so much more when it is Li Bai looking for his next barrel of wine, or when Wang Wei is speaking of the red berries of the South.
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