William Carlos Williams on Marianne Moore: “A word is a word most when it is separated out by science, treated with acid to remove the smudges, washed, dried and placed right side up on a clean surface.” Keep in mind that Williams is using the word “science” slyly here; it’s nothing to do with test tubes or microscopes, but, quite simply, knowledge, or at least close attention to the realities, “clear and distinct” as old Descartes might have said. That’s one poetic modernism, and it’s the one that through Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa found aid and confirmation in the “ideogrammatic” poetry of China, a poetry of “visible hieroglyphics,” as Fenollosa put it, “a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature.” And as Fenollosa taught, and Pound repeated, “Like nature, the Chinese words are alive and plastic, because thing and action are not formally separated,” so this pictorial poetry would not be a poetry of still pictures but rather of what Gilles Deleuze—in a completely different context, of course, namely that of cinema—call movement-images. True or false, misleading or illuminating, Fenollosa’s ideas as published by Pound in 1920 found persuasive substantiation in the latter’s own poetry, and still seemed fresh when C.H. Kwock and Vincent McHugh began publishing the translations from the Chinese later collected in Old Friend From Far Away in a series of pamphlets beginning in 1958. I suppose it is these, along with Kenneth Rexroth’s earlier Chinese and Japanese translations, that formed a more direct link between Pound and the west coast Buddhist poetry of the 1960s: Joanne Kyger, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen. But that’s not where I’d have wanted American poetry to go, and maybe that’s one reason why the book left me dissatisfied when I read it last fall, even if I wasn’t sure why, which is why I didn’t write about it back then. But lately, I’ve been drawn back to it. Why? I suspect for the simplest possible reason: It has such a good title!—which I didn’t particularly notice at the time, even though, when I posted a picture of its cover on Instagram (I always post what I’m reading) a Chinese friend responded, “The title captures all the poignancy of the central theme of separation and farewell in Chinese poems!” Yes, but it’s more complicated. The title comes, not from one of the poems, but from the book’s epigraph, attributed to the Confucian Analects: “To have an old friend come from far away—isn’t it a joy!” So the implication is not separation but return, reuniting. And yet my friend was right, the words are still so poignant. Why? I suppose because one feels the pain of separation so vividly when it seems to be ending. Haven’t you noticed that it’s when you come inside to a warm house from the freezing cold that you shiver? And of course the implication is that Chinese poetic ways are the friends from far away that will reunite with the anglophone poetry that had been separated from it. But that didn’t quite happen. The many lovely moments in these poems are always about to slide into something all too recognizable as a special dialect of translationese that at least for a time was reserved for the poetries of the east, in which an insistent colloquialism is given solemn resonance by, more or less, the white space of the page—by spacing. As in this version from Tu Fu:
My country in ruins
Hills
remain
rivers
Spring
coming to the city
The grass
grows tall
Finally there is a shortness of breath that leaves this wartime lament strangely prosaic and ineloquent. Yes, on a second reading, I am still disappointed with this book whose title somehow won’t let go of me.
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Old Friend From Far Way: 150 Chinese Poems from the Great Dynasties, translated by C.H. Kwock and Vincent McHugh, was published by North Point Press, San Francisco, 1980.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.