Q & A with China Digital Times
CDT Bookshelf: "A Wen Yidou Poem Is
Like a Jewel"
Wen Yiduo, poet, professor, and staunch critic of the Kuomintang (KMT), was unafraid to speak his mind. Born to a wealthy family in 1899, he came of age during the fall of the Qing dynasty and the tumultuous years of the early republic. While studying painting in the United States in the early 1920s, Wen turned his sights to poetry. He joined the Crescent Moon Society in 1928, where he emphasized the importance of “formal properties” in poetry. “Stagnant Water” is the title of his best-known poem and the collection of poems by the same name.
Wen became a professor and literary critic once he returned China. Fiercely opposed to the Nationalists, he walked out of his office at the Democratic Weekly one June day in 1946 to be greeted by a shower of bullets. Mao blamed the Nationalists for Wen’s death, elevating the poet to heroic status.
Robert Dorsett has translated Wen’s work in the new volume Stagnant Water & Other Poems. Dorsett, who was a physician before he devoted himself to writing full-time, has published his own poetry in The Kenyon Review, Poetry, and other literary journals. He has also translated Gao Ertai’s book In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labor Camp.
Dorsett’s new translation of Wen Yiduo’s poetry is accompanied by the calligraphy of Huang Xiang, a poet and artist who left China after multiple imprisonments for his advocacy of human rights. Huang was the first writer in residence at City of Asylum/Pittsburgh from 2004-2006.
Anne Henochowicz, CDT’s translations editor, corresponded via email with Dorsett about the process of translating Wen’s poetry.
China Digital Times: In the forward to Stagnant Water, Christopher Merrill notes that other translators have translated the phrase sishui 死水 as “dead water.” What made you decide to do your own translation of “Stagnant Water”? Where does your version depart from previous work?
Robert Hammond Dorsett: “Sishui,” Wen Yiduo’s signature poem, has probably been translated more than any of the others. Although the word sishui, has been rendered as “dead water” in most previous translations, it is a common Chinese idiom that means simply “stagnant water.” In my opinion, to insert a poetic sounding metaphor for a common idiom, although I’ve done it elsewhere, skews this poem.
I feel Wen Yiduo means that only if we accept reality as it is are we able to build something better in the future; he parallels this idea by using ordinary words to say very extraordinary things. In general, I wanted to make translations that not only captured the depth, subtlety and irony of the originals, but also sounded natural, as if written originally in English. I tried to avoid making the foreign sound strange.
CDT: Wen loved to work in poetic forms, such as the sonnet in “You Pledge by the Sun” and the roundel in “Forget Her.” Your translations largely forgo rhyme and meter, but still transmit Wen’s voice. How did you reconcile Wen’s emphasis on form in your translation?
RHD: Rhyme and meter present difficulties. There are more identical rhyme words in Chinese, so rhyme is easier to accomplish; however, these words usually differ by tone. This effect doesn’t exist in English. Also, applying an English metrical system often gives the translation a stilted feel and obscures the clarity of the voice. I would say it is possible to do, and a very valuable thing to do, but I feel it would take a poet with as much skill in English as that consummate master, Wen Yiduo, has in Chinese. Even if successful, I think such a translation would necessitate so many changes that it would more properly be termed “based on” rather than “translated from.”
CDT: Wen himself worked within the tension between the classical Chinese of his education and the vernacular advocated by his contemporaries. Are there poems where one type of language wins over the other, or where one makes a conciliatory bow to the other?
RHD: I believe after the beginning of the May Fourth Movement, Wen Yiduo was committed almost entirely to the vernacular. After his return to China from the United States, he became a leading expert in classical Chinese literature but always sought to make that literature immediate and relevant. He resisted most of his contemporaries who urged the use of politically dominated free verse. His most conversational poems still have formal excellence: “The Rickshaw Puller” and “The Fault,” for example.
Wherever he found a conflict within himself, he didn’t resolve it, but used that conflict as a source of power. Only by the possession of the past and by its application to the present can a future be built: I believe this was his philosophy.
CDT: Where did the poems outside of the collection Stagnant Water come from? When were they first written, and where did they first appear? How did you choose them for this volume?
RHD: Besides those in the Stagnant Water section, all poems, with the exception of “Miracle,” come from the earlier collection, Red Candle, published in 1923. The Stagnant Water collection was published in 1928. My sources were Wen Yiduo Quan Ji (聞一多全集), published by Far East Publishing Co., Hong Kong in 1968 (no ISBN) and a more handy, pocket sized edition, Hong Zhu, Sishui (紅燭·死水), published in Hong Kong by Joint Publishers in 1999. Wen’s poems often exist in several versions; I kept to, almost exclusively, these two sources. I chose poems for their literary excellence and for their variety.
CDT: Is the poem “Tiananmen” about the May Fourth protests, or another incident? How does it resonate with the student protests of 1989?
RHD: Wen wrote the poem “Tiananmen” shortly after his return from the U.S. It may refer to an incident that occurred on March 18, 1926, when students protested the power of the warlords and the concessions given to foreign powers. I am not qualified to discuss the differences between that demonstration and the later 1989 demonstrations. However, the March 18 incident must have reminded Wen of the May Fourth protests.
CDT: Wen studied in Chicago, Colorado, and New York from 1922 to 1925, rubbing shoulders with American poets like Amy Lowell, Harriet Monroe, and Carl Sandburg. Did his time in the U.S. affect his political leanings in any way? As for his poetry, how does the American influence show through in his work?
RHD: I believe the English Romantics influenced Wen most, especially John Keats. To my ear, “What Have I Dreamed” is similar in tone to “Isabella,” and “Forget Her” echoes Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “Forget Not Yet.” In addition to western forms, such as the sonnet and ballad, Wen also struggled to adapt English metrical rules to Chinese. I can’t help but to think Carl Sandburg encouraged Wen’s use of the vernacular.
I think Wen was offended by the exclusions he suffered in the U.S., and, because of this, he became more nationalistic. As I mentioned before, after his return to China, he became a famous classical scholar.
CDT: Wen was assassinated in 1946, allegedly by the Nationalists, and Mao lionized him. How has Wen’s place in Chinese literature and the building of the nation changed from his death to the present? Is his work still published, uncensored, in China today?
RHD: I am not privy to the status of Wen Yiduo studies in China, but I can say there was an edition, Wen Yiduo: Selected Poetry and Prose, published as a Panda Book in Beijing in 1990, and also a commemorative edition published by the National Library of China Publishing House in 2007; a two volume edition of his letters was also published by the same house in 2010. Reading these, I cannot detect any systematic censorship of this poet.
CDT: You worked as a pediatrician before you devoted yourself to writing full-time. How, if at all, does your medical training inform your approach to poetry and translation?
RHD: I often asked my residents and medical students to describe a patient exactly, so that, when I saw the patient, what I expected to see and what I did see coincided. I then asked them to combine what they saw with what they had learned in school and to put that into words. This process of observation, capturing that observation in words, and then being able to communicate it, is similar in poetry. It is a matter of discipline.
CDT: Were you involved in selecting the passages to be written in calligraphy for the book? If so, could you talk about that process?
RHD: I suggested five lines to Huang Xiang which I felt epitomized Wen Yiduo’s themes. They are in rough paraphrase: “look at the blue ridges but not beyond for your home” (exile), “the Death God barks” (commitment, anti-war), “from my mind radical thoughts break out” (originality, passion), “an arrogant storm tramples the world” (protest, suffering), and “in the half-parted door, You” (inspiration, vision). Mr. Xiang was, of course, free to use his own inspiration. I feel he did beautiful work.
CDT: What is your favorite among the poems in this volume, and why?
RHD: I have many favorites, but I’ll mention “Peddler Songs,” because it’s, at least in the Chinese, a little masterpiece. The poem starts in the morning, ends at night, recounting one day in the life of three generations of an upper class family. The only connections this family has with the lower classes are the peddler calls and the aromas of their wares, which Wen represents by nouns of separation (wall, screen, etc.) and verbs of transit (drifts, passes, etc.). The last call is by the poet himself to the reader across the barrier of the page: an example of Wen’s nuanced brilliance. All this is compressed easily, naturally, in four short stanzas.
A Wen Yiduo poem is like a jewel: its luster is a function, not of its surface, but of its depth. You can see why I think this poet is very special
Q & A with Beijing Cream
Wen Yidou: A Masterful Poet Is Revived In New Translation
By Anthony Tao
Stagnant Water and Other Poems, 87pp;
BrightCity Books.
The temptation, when evaluating a poet gunned down by his government, is to start there, with the politics that led to his murder. But Wen Yiduo (1899-1946) was much too complex and heterodox to comfortably wear the martyr’s robe, his works too nuanced and unsettled to be a paragon of any revolution. His poems explore religion and rickshaws, contain the chrysanthemums of Chinese folklore and the mud of contemporary times, and dare readers to challenge prevailing conceptions, even to render their own cynicism as hope.
This stagnant ditch is hopeless. Clearly not a place where beauty thrives. Better cultivate its ugliness. Perhaps its ugliness will create a world.
Mao blamed the Nationalists for Wen’s death, thus elevating him to model — if not mythic — status, yet the poet needed no such validation. He resisted easy classification. He was a writer whose ballast was in ideas and logic, while remaining fresh to the point of innovation.
That makes his poetry both a challenge and a thrill, one that a new generation of readers can now tackle thanks to the work of poet-translator Robert Hammond Dorsett. Stagnant Water and Other Poems, recently released by BrightCity Books, contains all the poems from Wen’s second (and last) full collection, Stagnant Water (first published in 1928, rendered by previous translators as Dead Water), plus 29 other poems compiled and translated by Dorsett. It represents a long overdue attempt to bring international attention to one of China’s preeminent 20th-century writers.
Born into a well-to-do Hubei family, Wen studied fine arts and poetry in the United States for three years, including at the Art Institute of Chicago, before returning to China in 1925 as a professor and critic. He co-founded a literary society that promoted formalism and deemphasized political content, yet the politics of the time would soon sweep Wen and a generation of scholars into the breach. His outspokenness put him in a line of bullets on June 6, 1946.
Wen’s abbreviated but remarkable literary career was characterized by internal contradiction, as he resisted both what the world had become and his own role in shaping it otherwise. He also knew grief: some of Stagnant Water‘s most powerful poems are about his young daughter, who died while he was studying in the US. But that was the Chinese experience in the 20th century, filled with sacrifice. The representative voice may well belong to the rickshaw puller’s, who exclaims in a poem titled “Tiananmen” about the violent crackdown of student protests:
It’s the living who suffer; to hell with the dead!
Last week I spoke with Dorsett, who began reading and translating Wen more than 20 years ago, to talk about the poet’s life, death, and legacy, and the challenges of conveying it all to an English-language audience.
What attracted you about Wen Yiduo’s work?
RHD: There’s so much I loved about the original work. It’s architectural in the sense that it’s almost like one of those gothic churches in Europe: the outside is beautiful and symbolic, and when you go inside, much more opens up, layer upon layer, and it depends on whose eye is looking.
Does labeling him a political poet undermine his artistic value? Does not calling him that lessen the recognition he might receive on an international level?
RHD: Both those statements are true, and what makes Wen Yiduo such a powerful poet is he did not resolve his conflicts. He kept his conflicts, they gave him a spark, they gave him the power and gave him the driving, lyric power of his poetry.
It’s hard to label Wen Yiduo as anything. You have to look at the conflicts within him. He was a classical poet that turned to the avant-garde but without giving up the classics. He’s a person who brought the past into the present. To bring the past into the present, you can make the future – not by staying in the past and not by staying in the present for long. He became a people’s poet, but he also was the well respected classical scholar.
You’re making the case that Wen is one of the most preeminent Chinese poets of the 20th century, but his name, at least among English readers of Chinese poetry, isn’t very well known. Would you agree with that statement?
RHD: I do, and we’re trying to rectify that with this book.
Why do you think he’s remained obscure?
RHD: Because most of the translations are done from Indo-European languages, that’s why. And I think it’s much more difficult to translate from an Asian language into an Indo-European language than it is to go between two Indo-European languages.
Another language I can translate from is German, and if I take someone like Rilke or Novalis and just translate it word for word, you get something. It sounds good. But if you do that for Chinese it sounds superficial or odd. And one of the overlying principles that I try to use is what one of our critics, Marcia Falk, said, to not make the foreign sound strange – to take that Chinese poet and make him sound like a living poet in the language he’s being put into. And that’s a little difficult.
Did you struggle with that? It obviously came together very well, but what was the process like?
RHD: You can have an idiom in Chinese that sounds very usual when it’s spoken but it sounds very strange when it’s put into English. [For example,] the poem “Quiet Night,” sometimes it’s called “My Heart Leaps,” and in Chinese when you say my heart jumps, it doesn’t have that kind of sentimental feeling that it does in English, so I think the better translation is, “I was afraid.”
The process of my translation is, I start with the text itself, I look at all the characters, and even if I recognize them, I look them up, and I get sounds. Then sometimes I get help from other people, what they think, look at other translations. Once that’s done, all the decisions, I work from the original language itself. That’s a point of integrity with me because I think it’s been in practice now for people to have other people give them an English version, and then they rewrite that version and call it a translation. I try to make sure, for myself, it’s from the original.
Have any China scholars talked to you about the book and given feedback?
RHD: Orville Schell has gotten a copy and he wants me to come to New York to do an on-camera interview. I got a letter from Phil Levine (former US poet laureate) about this book, and he said he had not heard about Wen Yiduo before but after reading the book he became a fan overnight. That was quite kind of him.
How do you think Wen’s works have stood the test of time? How have the Chinese taken to his work, and how do they feel about it now?
RHD: For all indications that I have, I think he’s a very popular poet. Most Chinese people in the United States that I speak to immediately light up when I mention Wen Yiduo. Orville Schell said he was one of his favorite poets.
As far as the test of time, he’s such a powerful poet that I think he’ll be known for as long as we’re translating, for as long as we’re reading, for as long as we’re speaking Chinese and English.
Does Wen have an American corollary, i.e. he is to Chinese poetry as blank is to American poetry?
RHD: I could fill in a lot… I think he’s to China as Wallace Stevens is to American poetry. They’re different poets, but we’re talking about reputation here.
Do you care to surmise what he might write if he were alive today?
RHD: He’s someone who would never be completely at ease. And I don’t think our times, our politics, our philosophies, are ever at ease. He would be a wonderful poet right now.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
RHD: Like all strong poets, when you get to the substrata, when you get down to the depth of the poem, [Wen Yiduo] reaches the human. When you get down that far, he’s not specifically Chinese, he’s not specifically American, he’s just human, and that’s a mark of all strong and all great poets.
Robert Hammond Dorsett was a medical officer in Vietnam before studying Chinese at the Yale-in-China Program at the Chinese University in Hong Kong. He holds an MFA from New York University and has been published in The Literary Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He is also a licensed medical doctor.
Stagnant Water and Other Poems can be purchased from Amazon or BrightCity Books.