COMMENTS BY JOHN WESTON
For anyone who has had to learn Chinese professionally, it is easy to agree with Polly Clark [in her review of Yang Lian’s Concentric Circles in the Autumn 2006 issue of Poetry London] about ‘the complex beauty of Chinese characters’.

However, in arguing that ‘Chinese characters are pictorial in nature’ she risks perpetuating an old fallacy. This goes back at least as far as Ernest Fenollossa and Ezra Pound. In his classic and unrivalled work, The Art of Chinese Poetry, (Routledge & Kegan Paul ) Professor James Liu points out that Fenollosa’s essay a century ago The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, and Pound’s notes on it, ‘exerted considerable influence on some English and American poets and critics, but as an introduction to Chinese poetry is, to say the least, seriously misleading.’

Traditional Chinese etymology postulates certain graphic principles (Liu Shu) to analyse Chinese characters. Professor Liu shows that these yield four basic character types: simple pictograms, simple ideograms (symbols of abstract notions), complex ideograms and complex phonograms ( combining a phonetic with a radical, to give some clue both to pronunciation and perhaps to meaning). As Professor Liu points out, the first two categories are only a small minority of all Chinese characters: by far the largest number belong to the last category and contain a phonetic element.

In the example Polly Clark gives, the Chinese character for ‘quiet’ (jìng) is itself a complex phonogram, where the written element she refers to as ‘the character for blue’ acts as both phonetic (qing) and as classifying radical for the whole character. But it is straining good sense to represent this as ‘a complete pictorial atom’ in the molecule of the whole character for ‘quiet’. Moreover, the ‘character for blue’ (qing) no more resembles a picture of the colour blue, than does the English word ‘blue’.

None of this is to deny the fun the poet can have with the complex beauty of the Chinese written character, which does indeed differ greatly in its movement and dynamic from an alphabetic script. But while, as Polly Clark points out, Yang Lian pulls apart the elements of the Chinese character for poetry to use them as an organizing principle for the last three sections of his collection Concentric Circles, it is telling that neither he nor his translator Brian Holton claim in their foreword and afterword that this has anything to do with the Chinese character as a ‘picture’.

My own first collection, Chasing the Hoopoe [reviewed in this issue by DM Black], contains a section on China with some translations of my own which I hope convey some of the excitement of the Chinese character, while resisting the fallacy referred to above.

WN HERBERT DISCUSSES TRANSLATION AND TRANSMUTATION
My first encounter with the writings of Fenollosa took place in the early 1980s, when a poet friend of mine, Keith Jebb, began a thesis on Fenollosa and Pound. He was interested in, and I remain fascinated by, the aesthetic implications of Fenollosa's pronouncements, which he saw as distinct from their phonological accuracy. No doubt if he were studying Fenollosa now it would be in the form of a creative writing thesis, in which the artistic possibilities were explored as thoroughly as the critical. It is in this spirit of artistic curiosity and creative excitement and engagement that I believe Polly Clark’s review should be read.

Indeed, it was in this spirit that Polly, Antony Dunn, Pascale Petit and myself went to China last year to work on translations of Chinese poets by talking directly to the poets, Tang Xiaodu, Zhai Yongming, Zhou Zan, Xi Chuan, Yang Lian and Zhang Wei, without, as far as possible, expert mediation.

In the course of those discussions, and in consulting the basic textbooks, phrasebooks and dictionaries that we had to hand, I certainly became aware of the four character types John Weston refers to. But the thing which stimulated me the most about Chinese characters then and now harks directly back to my friend’s studies in the early eighties. It was the interaction of pictorial elements (which are entirely alien to Western alphabets) with more recognizable phonological elements. In other words, I was struck by the complexity of the elements, and their particular combination into simple elegant results.

When Yang Lian discussed how, for him, each character seems to exist in its own self-sufficient universe, almost without any need for tense or grammar, it seemed to me that a Chinese reader looking at a character can be described as gazing into both pictorial and conceptual space. An English reader, on the other hand, is looking at a language which continually reveals its etymological roots. They are therefore gazing into time.

Further, a Chinese reader will find all their referents — everything that makes up pictograms, ideograms and phonograms — within Chinese. It is an autonomous field of reference. An English reader, however, is looking at hundreds of years of borrowing from foreign sources — Latin, Greek, French, German etc. The language presents itself as naturally gregarious, acquisitive, absorbent.

This made me look again at my own relationship to language, and consider the role of phonetic spelling and extended vocabulary in presenting the complex relationship of Scots to English. In other words I started thinking of equivalences between pictograms and etymology, and phonograms and non-standard Englishes. Those little apostrophes which dot the works of Burns or MacDiarmid started to look like radicals. No doubt these types of analogies were not strictly correct: that was not their point.

I felt strongly that it was the particular strength of that translation project that we should be allowed to experience the creative impact of Chinese in this way without any need for linguistic correctness. The poets themselves provided checks as to the accuracy of the work, and through our basic engagement with how meaning sits in one language, one script, I felt we all learned a great deal about how it may sit in another, let alone how tricky, intricate, and energizing the act of transmuting it into that other language may be.

I loved Yang Lian’s description, for instance, of the way the character for ‘fresh’ is built out of the combination of the characters for ‘fish’ and ‘lamb’; or Zhou Zan’s use of the characters for ‘accident’ at the end of one line, and her neat reversal of the same two characters to produce the combination for ‘story’ at the end of the next. I understood we were only scratching the surface of a complex field of study, but felt that the excitement of that surface encounter was easily akin to the huge complex of information and emotions that overwhelmed me in visiting the Forbidden City for the first time.

I feel such opening moments are crucial, as our society, no matter what the subject, is too keen to divide us into tourists and experts. Tourists are led through historical sites by a guide with an umbrella; experts peer out briefly from the museum windows. Tourists are intimidated by the mass of knowledge required to engage intellectually with any complex issue; experts wonder whether it's worth even starting to explain. Tourists’ interests are temporary, and are therefore presumed not genuine; experts’ are lifelong, and therefore must be convinced of their own authenticity. In this way every opening moment rapidly transmutes into another involuntary act of closure.

Poets are neither tourists nor experts. Nor are they concerned overmuch with authenticity. They have engagement without especial expertise, and they are not intimidated by what they do not yet know. In other words they are perpetual amateurs. What fascinates them is the spark generated by language, any language, the life inherent in all codes of communication, and the various energies of linguistic pattern. Whether you are a tourist or an expert, it can be good to encounter such an amateur. Certainly, it is hard to think of a field of intellectual endeavour which was not opened by the enthusiasm of amateurs.

Fenollosa’s interest in Chinese was clearly amateur in this sense; Yeats’ interest in the Bengali of Rabindranath Tagore was definitely amateur; even Burns’ interest in collecting folk songs was, strictly speaking, amateur. But it is the amateur who connects curiosity to expertise; it is the amateur who has a foot in both camps. In a world where too frequently poets find themselves merely being stamped on the toes, it is heartening to hear John Weston opening what I believe to be a fascinating discussion.

POLLY CLARK ON IMAGINATION AND INTEGRITY
This discussion, like the poet-to-poet translation project WN Herbert and I were involved with in 2005, and Yang Lian’s book Concentric Circles, brings to life the challenges poets face in translation, and even the difficulty of defining what exactly it is. As I said at the beginning of my review in the last issue, the three books I was looking at all approached the idea of translation in different ways, showing that it is an art as various as poetry itself.

The poet-to-poet translation project took from the beginning a view about what translation could be, seeing it as an artistic opportunity for poets to experiment with, and reach beyond, the constraints of language. As a method it produced translations which are both true (to both poets) and alive. How we succeeded without a great deal of linguistic understanding is both strange and simple: our communication depended on a different set of tools — our imagination as artists and the integrity of the work being translated were key among them.

It is the hotline artists have to the imagination which enabled me to come to Yang Lian’s work for the first time a couple of years ago and appreciate it, even before I fully understood the wealth of possibilities and excitements it possesses. It was also clear that Yang Lian’s work has an integrity and robustness that allows an imaginative translator fully to get hold of it, and which allows it to support many approaches, without being overwhelmed. Put another way, bad poems do not translate well, no matter what the abilities, linguistic or otherwise, of the translator.

These two together, imagination and integrity, are what produced the unique translations of contemporary Chinese poets’ work by WN Herbert to be found in a recent issue of Poetry Review, and by Pascale Petit in this issue of Poetry London, and by all the UK poets in the current issue of Modern Poetry in Translation.

Our project found that when the material is of a high artistic quality, the imaginative abilities of poets working together will permit a deeper understanding of the poetry of each other's culture than a thorough knowledge of the language will. However, as the enthusiastic amateurs WN Herbert’s piece makes us hope we are, we should always be open to learning more, and I welcome John Weston’s observations which can only add to the discussion.

COMMENTS BY YANG LIAN
Ezra Pound encountered Chinese characters when he borrowed Fenollosa’s notes, which led him to the translation of classical Chinese poetry, and further, led him to the creation of Imagism, and his own discovery of Eliot’s ‘invention’.

Faced with Chinese characters of such distinctiveness, characters so impossible to fit into western ideas of ‘grammar’, characters which, moreover, have yet to be fully and clearly explained by Chinese linguistics — if the poet doesn’t invent an understanding of them, what else can he possibly do? Pound’s most valuable contribution was his creative attitude to language. Starting from his poetic intuition, he parted the weeds on the academy’s pond, reached down into the water, and produced treasures from the deep.

His theory of images enabled him to open up the Chinese script, allowing us to see, for the first time, the precise movements of the gear wheels inside these little black boxes which had been sealed for millennia. He wasn’t a sinologist, but he made the academy sweat, because he gave Chinese studies its significance — that of opening up human wisdom. From Yeats on, all modern British poetry has benefited from the solidity and specificity of the image. It is where, in Robert Bly’s words, ‘all levels of abstract thought silently blend together’. All of my work in poetry can be seen as an effort to continue inventing from images.

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