Three Hundred Tang Poems

Three Hundred Tang Poems
Translated and edited by Peter Harris
Everyman’s Library, March 2009
ISBN: 9781841597829

This volume contains fresh and vibrant translations of all three hundred poems in Sun Zhu’s celebrated eighteenth century anthology.

Within these pages, you will find about seventy five poets who wrote during the Tang dynasty (618-907), among them poets of the stature of Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu, Li Qi and Wei Yingwu.

The poems convey a diverse range of moods and themes: love and longing, celebrations of nature and music and drinking ale, sorrow and melancholy, mysticism.  One common subject is the sadness of saying goodbye to friend whom you may never meet; another subject, less common, is the joy of meeting a long-lost friend or a family member on the desolate road or in a companionable inn.  We can get a sense here of the vastness of China, an immense country where it would have been easy to lose touch with people.  And easy, hermit-like, to lose yourself in.

Of the three hundred poems here, I’ve selected three short ones that I especially like.  Call it a small sampler, if you like.  First, a poem by Wang Jian about a newly-wed bride which I love for its recognisable quotidian detail and its familiar portrait of family life:

After three days I went down to the kitchen,
Washed my hands and cooked a well-stocked soup.
I didn’t know my mother-in-law’s tastes in food,
So I got my little sister-in-law to try it first.

 Next, two rather melancholy poems.  Li Shangyin’s The Pleasure Gardens is a poem that I read in Rexroth’s translation several years ago.  It captured my attention then.  Here is Peter Harris’s equally fine version:

It’s evening and I am feeling out of sorts,
So I drive my carriage up to the old plateau.
The sun at dusk is immeasurably fine –
Or it would be, but for the coming twilight.

And here is a curiously haunting poem that was new to me, Climbing Youzhou Tower – a song by Chen Ziang.  It is like hearing a voice from beyond the grave, but in the present moment.  An anguished voice, addressing those whom he cannot see, though we can hear him:

Looking back we cannot see the people of the past;
Ahead of us we cannot see those who are yet to come.
I muse on heaven and earth, immense and enduring,
And lonely, engulfed by sorrow, my tears fall.

These are wonderful poems all, and wonderful translations.

Russian Poets

Russian Poets
Edited by Peter Washington
Everyman’s Library, May 2009
ISBN: 9781841597805

Close to 180 poems, from just over 30 poets, are to be found in this compact, beautifully designed book.

 Along with the greatest (Pushkin) and the great (for example, Akhmatova and Pasternak and Mayakovsky) there are many poets here who will be unfamiliar to English readers; or at any rate there were quite a few (such as Vyazemsky and Batyushkov and Fet, for three) who were unknown to me.  It will come as no surprise, surely, to learn that favoured themes include love and death and Mother Russia herself.

Only Pushkin would have the nerve and the bottle to write ‘Exegi Monumentum’, a poem at once arrogant (‘And I shall be famed so long as underneath / The moon a single poet remains alive.’), magnificent (as a for instance, when he claims that ‘in centuries to come’ he will be loved ‘For having glorified freedom in my harsh age / And called for mercy towards the fallen.’) and deeply ironic (it is in the last verse that the poet comes clean – kind of – and urges his Muse to ‘not argue with a fool’).  You can tell that Pushkin had a thing for Byron, but this is a poem that echoes  Shakespeare’s fifty-fifth and sixty-fifth sonnets above all, and it serves as a companion piece to both.

The great discovery was Andrei Voznesensky and he happens also to be the sole living poet represented in the volume.  In ‘Dead Still’ two lovers lie close together, their warm contentment ‘like a flame held between hand and hand’; later the poet urges the  souls (sic) of his companion to ‘flutter like the linnet / In the cages of my pores.’  He, Voznesensky that is, fills this poem with a slue of other gorgeous images too.

‘Ballad of the Full Stop’ is a playful poem about the nature of death: ‘Our sentence in nature has no period’, writes Voznesensky.  We are granted no definite guaranteed span, nor any assured neat ending come to that.  There is a vibe akin to A.R. Ammon’s great poem ‘Play’ at work here.

A lovely erotic poem, ‘Her Shoes’, is Voznesensky’s final offering.  And he uses those coveted consumer items, pedestals by another name, that lay like ‘doves perched in the path of a tank’, to celebrate their wearer.  That the poem manages to be both poignant and pervy (e.g. ‘The world is pitch-black, cold and desolate / But they are still warm, right off her feet.’ and that’s not the end of it…) is to Voznesensky’s credit, I feel.

There is an abundance of that much vaunted Russian soul – spiritual and cynical, sometimes both at once; continually celebrating and kvetching about creation – in this fine collection.

And finally, God bless translators!