Ancient Airs, Autumn Nights

What is lost and what is found.

By Iris Eisenman

In 1915, poet Ezra Pound published Cathay, a slim volume of English translations from Classical Chinese poetry. He did not speak a lick of Chinese. 

On paper, Pound was in no way qualified to tackle the works of Li Bai, often considered the greatest poet in Chinese history. Pound disregarded Chinese poetry’s key formal features like tonal prosody, used secondhand translations, and lacked in-depth historical knowledge of the Tang Dynasty. Nevertheless, his translations—a slippery term when considering these poems in particular—are lauded by scholars as some of the best, if not in letter, in spirit. 

How is this possible? Even with a thorough understanding of a poem’s original language and its cultural connotations, poetic translation remains an uphill battle against loss. Nonetheless, Cathay prioritized the philosophical essence of the poem, paying special attention to the images and mood rather than nailing a word-for-word translation. To do this, Pound’s translation method from Chinese to English was rooted in the Japanese practice of kundoku, despite his lack of proficiency in either language. This approach adapts Classical Chinese characters into Japanese kanji equivalents, then applies Japanese grammar to the lines to create an imagined Japanese reading. These kanji logographs are translated into English as a string of concepts lacking grammar or tense.

In the 1918 essay, “Chinese Poetry,” Pound writes of Li Bai as a “compiler” of poetry, his work consisting of “old themes rewritten” that found new truth and beauty in reinterpretation. I cannot help but think of these original stories, spinning out from an ancient past into the future, splintering, gathering new voices, mutating from its past versions, to Li Bai, to Pound, to me.

The poem below is the twenty-third of Li Bai’s fifty-nine “Ancient Airs.” Pound titled his version “Wine,” since nineteenth-century writer Hirai interpreted the final line as an allusion to the Chinese phrase “to hold a candle” that roughly meant “to amuse oneself with wine.” I chose to retain the poem’s idioms. Every choice a translator makes is a testament to their own poetics, their own world. This poem could by no means purport to be a Chinese poem in translation. I do not know Li Bai. All I can know is my own poetry, and follow where these seventy logographs guide my mind, with the assistance of Pound and Hirai’s notes. Our poems could not be more different from each other or from Li Bai’s original. The only shared hope is that the soul shines through.

古風五十九首其二十三		Ancient Airs, Autumn Nights
秋 露 白 如 玉		White autumn dew like crystal balls
團 團 下 庭 綠		beads beneath the garden leaves.
我 行 忽 見 之		I saw it suddenly today,
寒 早 悲 歲 促		cold and mournful in this hurried time.
人 生 鳥 過 目		We are born like birds passing swift before the eye—
胡 乃 自 結 束		why do we bind ourselves?
景 公 一 何 愚		How foolish was Lord Jing,
牛 山 淚 相 續		hoping the mountains would weep at his side.
物 苦 不 知 足		Pain knows no end,
得 隴 又 望 蜀		one waits for Shoku, even after Ro.
人 心 若 波 瀾		Our minds crest like waves of foam
世 路 有 屈 曲		and the road lay winding in this world.
三 萬 六 千 日		For a hundred years’ time
夜 夜 當 秉 燭		take, and take again, this candle in the roaming night.

古風五十九首其二十三		Ancient Airs, Autumn Nights
秋 露 白 如 玉		White autumn dew like crystal balls
團 團 下 庭 綠		beads beneath the garden leaves.
我 行 忽 見 之		I saw it suddenly today,
寒 早 悲 歲 促		cold and mournful in this hurried time.
人 生 鳥 過 目		We are born like birds passing swift before the eye—
胡 乃 自 結 束		why do we bind ourselves?
景 公 一 何 愚		How foolish was Lord Jing,
牛 山 淚 相 續		hoping the mountains would weep at his side.
物 苦 不 知 足		Pain knows no end,
得 隴 又 望 蜀		one waits for Shoku, even after Ro.
人 心 若 波 瀾		Our minds crest like waves of foam
世 路 有 屈 曲		and the road lay winding in this world.
三 萬 六 千 日		For a hundred years’ time
夜 夜 當 秉 燭		take, and take again, this candle in the roaming night.