"Let's make love and listen to death from above"

[larryhammer]

This post has my attempt at an English equivalent of lüshi, the eight-line jintishi Chinese verse form, literally "modern verse" but more usually translated as "regulated verse".* Not all the regulations work in English -- specifically the tone patterns, as English isn't tonal -- but other features can be translated. More or less: eight homometric lines, which in Chinese are either five or seven characters long -- iambic tetrameter or pentameter seem to have about the same semantic density; even-numbered lines all rhyme together (and optionally the first as well); and each of the central two couplets (ll. 3-4 and 5-6) must be a semantic and syntact antithesis.

That last constraint makes it an interesting challenge, as it's all to easy to stop forward movement while antithecating. Du Fu** is called one of China's greatest poets, rightly so as far as I'm concerned, in part because he manages to keep things moving and still sound natural. Here's one that does by Li Bai (aka Li Po, usually) translated by Arthur Waley:

Clearing at Dawn

The fields are chill; the sparse rain has stopped;
The colours of Spring teem on every side.
With leaping fish the blue pond is full;
With singing thrushes the green boughs droop.
The flowers of the field have dabbled their powdered cheeks;
The mountain grasses are bent level at the waist.
By the bamboo stream the last fragment of cloud
Blown by the wind slowly scatters away.

No rhyme and only (very) loosely metrical,*** but it shows the two central antitheses to a T. And, well, Waley has a very good ear in English.


* Possibly because it was named "modern" in the early Tang dynasty, roughly 1300 years ago. Eventually we're going to have to figure out what to call all that "Modernist" poetry from the 20th century.

** Tu Fu if you're still reading Wade-Giles instead of pinyin.

*** Far too many English translations fail to bring out that traditional Chinese poetry was rhymed -- and for shi forms, strongly metered. Many don't even acknowledge the issue.

---L.

Comments

[oracne.livejournal.com]

By the bamboo stream the last fragment of cloud
Blown by the wind slowly scatters away.

I like this a lot.

[larryhammer]

Yes -- that dismount was nailed without a bobble.

---L.

[tabouli.livejournal.com]

traditional Chinese poetry was rhymed

What counts as 'rhymed' in Chinese? Does the rhyming syllable need to match in tone as well as sound?

[larryhammer]

I haven't been able to confirm that -- even books on Chinese poetics are frustratingly vague on this point -- but I think just sound, unless there's a tone pattern that requires those match.

---L.

[oyceter]

I love you forever for talking Chinese poetry, which I amazingly still love despite having to memorize tons and tons of explanations of it back in high school. But yes yes to the antitheses and the rhyming and the tones, and apparently Tang Chinese had even more tones than Chinese now, which makes things even more interesting.

[larryhammer]

From what I've read (in multiple places), Tang Chinese* had four tones -- but they were different from modern Mandarin's four. There were rising and falling tones like now, but only one "level" tone, which has split into the low and high tones, and an "entering" tone which has gotten distributed across the other tones. Since Tang tonal patterns were based on patterns of level vs. the others, a character that had been pronounced with an entering tone might be now one of the level tones, making the poem look like it didn't fit the regulated pattern.

Not to mention, vowel drifting has messed up a lot of rhymes, just like in English in the few centuries since Elizabethan times.

What sorts of poetry did you have to memorize? Was there a focus on any particular period or style?

* ETA pendantic footnote: or at least, the Chinese spoken by the scholar class during the Tang dynasty.

---L.

[oyceter]

Oh ok! I am not too good about knowing about older Chinese; all I remember is someone telling me once that Cantonese or Taiwanese are actually closer to Tang Chinese than modern Mandarin is.

What sorts of poetry did you have to memorize? Was there a focus on any particular period or style?

Ah hahahaha /bitter laughter. Tang, Tang, and more Tang. Li Bai and Bai Juyi and Du Fu and Wang Wei and more I can't remember. Some Song stuff. Su Dongpo. A lot of four-line and eight-line poetry (we usually got started out with the four-line ones, then moved on), both the five-character and the seven-character ones.

Also, I think everyone starts of memorizing Li Bai's Jing Ye Si and Meng Haoran's Chun Xiao! There's also a pretty widely known version that makes fun of Chun Xiao (something about getting bitten by a lot of mosquitoes) that reminds me a lot of kids' redone Christmas carols ("Jingle bells, Batman smells," etc.).

We did go on to more "irregular" poetry later on; I think the 4-line five-character Tang poems are much easier to memorize for younger kids. And we memorized a ton of Confucius sayings and assorted bits of old Chinese prose. And in eighth grade, my teacher had the whole class memorize all of Bai Juyi's Pi Pa Xing!! I still remember the first two lines even now.

[larryhammer]

Sounds like the sort of mix that makes up smaller anthologies of general Chinese poetry in translation. And like a lot more memorization than we had to do of English poetry (we did, at least, do some).

"Pi Pa Xing" is which? (translation pls?)

---L.

[oyceter]

Yeah, I'm guessing we went through a lot of the "best hits" or something of Tang poetry.

Oh, sorry! Pi Pa Xing is, um. "Song of the Pipa" or something? (Pipa is a sort of gourd-shaped string instrument, named either after the fruit pipa, or the fruit was named after the instrument because of their similarity in shape.) http://www.philmultic.com/pipa/pipa_song.html

[larryhammer]

Ah, that one. Doesn't seem to be as popular in translation as "Song of Everlasting Sorrow," but that might be because of the latter's extreme popularity in Japan.

BTW, the Kiplingesque translation I mentioned in my latest post is one of Bai Juyi's poems. Just for your added crogglement.

---L.