In Eliot Weinberger’s rather sublime The Ghosts of Birds, there is this one sentence that I keep turning over in my thoughts:
The Kabbalists say the world was created with twenty-two letters, which are stones ‘quarried from the name of God.
This idea—of letters being quarried from God, transposed and rearranged endlessly as we talk, memorize, and create language—has a sense of truth in it, even with or without a belief in God. Socrates worried about the impact of writing on memory; we worry about the impact the floods of information from our glowing screens are having on our attention. And yet still, when it comes down to it we’re seeking to understand the world around us with what really is a finite combination of letters that are infinitely used to understand, create, and know the world around us.
These quarried letters exist in different languages, grammar, syntaxes, contexts, and histories. So much that is then open to interpretation, layers upon layers of what might be reality but can’t be pinned down with any certainty. Poetry and art keep this ambivalence—there is always something that is left open, left to the reader/viewer to graft their experience, creativity, unknowing on to it. And in translation, poems sometimes take hundreds of different translations—even translated into another language and translated back to the original—to find new meanings, a new turn of idea that cracks open the meaning of a word—unearthing a synthesis in what appears opposite.
Great poetry is grounded and then left open to migrate, rise, and transcend into something different at an unexpected turn. And sometimes those open endings, the cracks where the light comes in, take centuries to become illuminated. Particularly when they are poems or works that have been ignored or hidden, or not well known.
Translated poetry, in particular, often feels like a kind of alchemy—a communion between translator and writer, between writer and reader, as if triangulated through a magnifying glass, intensifying the light of the poem to hidden corners, perhaps even directed away from the original intent, but illuminating something wholly new. I felt this way when I first read Kenneth Rexroth’s translations of the poet Li Ch’ing-chao, or Li Qingzhao (李清照, 1084 – c. 1155) a woman considered one of the greatest poets in Chinese history.
I first felt the revelation of the light in her poems when I read Quail Sky:
The ice sun rises silently
Across the closed window.
The Autumn leaves are falling fast
After last night's black frost
A little wine makes the return
To tea more enjoyable.
I lay aside my bitter revery,
And enjoy the perfume that rises to my head.
Autumn ends, the nights grow long
If I indulged my sad heart
The days would be still more
Frozen and sad. It is better
To encourage my frivolity,
And get drunk with the aroma
Of my wine cup.
I refuse to be burdened
By the yellowing heart
Of the chrysanthemum
Along the wall.
Refusing the yellowing heart of the chrysanthemum along the wall has become a type of koan I return to often. A reminder, a challenge, a recognition, an acceptance without truth becoming a burden. I love this poem.
Li Qingzhao’s life was colorful, privileged with education and a connected, scholarly family; at the same time, like so many lifetimes, her life was struck with loss, exile, death, war, and political turmoil.
She was born in Zhangqui, in what is now the Shandong province. Her mother also wrote and had a reputation as a poet; her father was a prose writer and a member of a prominent literary and scholarly circle, who was an administrator in the Imperial Academy at the capital. There are histories of her that depict her first writing at seventeen, when she wrote poems to rhyme with a prominent poet and friend of her father’s, on the discovery of a monument erected in the eighth century. Despite daring to criticize her father's friend’s work and ignore the somewhat restrictive Confucian morés for an elite woman, her poems were appreciated and she was encouraged to continue writing.
At eighteen, Li Qingzhao married Chao Ming-ch’eng, a 21-year old student in the Imperial Army, the son of a prominent politician. Their marriage is rather famously celebrated as a happy one—both wrote poetry and shared passions for history, art, and calligraphy. They spent time searching for rubbings of ancient inscriptions on stone and bronze monuments, cataloging them at home, and studying the writings. They collected books, art, and calligraphy, creating what was later considered one of the finest collections in the nation, filling ten storage rooms.
In an essay, “The Postscript to The Study of Bronze and Stone Inscriptions,” Li Qingzhao wrote of this time:
Whenever paintings or calligraphic works were bought, we rolled and unrolled the scrolls time and again. Whenever an ancient wine pot was acquired, we examined it with great attention. We corrected mistakes in the books, pointed out the faults in the antiques, and limited the time of appreciation to the burning of one candle. In the evening, after dinner, we sat together and played a game we had invented… in front of a pile of books…pointing out in which volume, on which page, and in which line such or such an event was mentioned. The one who guessed correctly was the winner and had the privilege of taking a sip of jasmine tea. Sometimes we enjoyed ourselves so immensely and laughed so much that we caused the tea cup to tumble from our laps.
I love that we have this image of her life from the 12th century CE, of a couple, married long ago, who enjoyed one another’s company, who built themselves a city of books, studied history and archaeology, and collected and cataloged side by side. Too few historical accounts of marriage—particularly those written by women—are described with such equal joy and intellectual interest. Scholarly research and art collection were typically reserved only for gentry and officials—and most definitely not their wives. She is described in biographies as, without question, the most liberated woman of her time.
Political struggles, war, and shifting power factions later impacted their life. Li’s husband would become a political outcast for ten years—a time perhaps when they were the happiest, able to focus on their collecting and scholarship. Her husband later returned to the world of government after several years. But right before the capital was taken back during the Jin-Song wars, Li’s husband had traveled to Nanjing for his mother’s funeral. As a result, Li Qingzhao had to witness the destruction of the capital and flee alone, traveling to Nanjing to be reunited with her husband, taking whatever she could manage to bring of their collection. Their house and ten storage rooms were later all burned, along with the other civilian houses in the city. And, after months of flight, Li Qingzhao reached Nanjing and her husband, who had since been appointed Magistrate of the city.
Because of continued turmoil, Li also wrote political and satirical poems, addressing officials, including her father-in-law at times, imploring them to see the error of their actions. But her eye for beauty and poetry continued—there are accounts of her climbing up city walls in snowstorms so that she could better view the beauty of the surrounding snow-capped landscape. She’d encourage her husband to write a poem for each one that she wrote, to rhyme with hers. Yet after one year in Nanjing, Li’s husband fell ill and died, at age 49. Li Qingzhao was left alone, with their collection still sizable, in a time of increasing troubles and disorder, forced to continually be in flight. Much of the collection was stolen, abandoned, with parts of it ultimately donated to the Imperial Collection.
Very little is known about the remainder of her life—some stories remit a tale of an ill-fated second marriage to an abusive man whom she quickly divorced, but there is some belief that this was a fabrication by political enemies, who wished to tarnish her reputation: under Sung law, a woman who charged a husband, even if he committed the crime, was imprisoned as well as him. Such a story would have been enjoyed by factions who wished to silence the works of a woman whose intellectual and creative acts were so widely admired and well-known.
She later died at age 66.
Christian Wiman, in discussing his riveting and beautiful translations of Osip Mandelstam, writes that he is careful to call his translations of the poems “versions”—
hoping to skip over the abyss of argument that open underneath that distinction….Perhaps translations produced by people who don’t speak the original language can never be worthy of that word….some of these poems are in fact quite close to their originals. Others are more like liberal transcriptions of original scores, and still others are more like collisions or collusions between (I hope!) Mandelstam and me.
I’ve always loved that interpretation of translation—it hits at the tension, the relationship, and the conjuring that occurs when translating another’s work. There’s a sense of communion, of collaboration. I’ve often tried to trace the choices of words, the arrangement, notice the magic in one rearrangement versus another, wondering where one poets’ words end and another’s begins.
But I know that what I’m always struck by, each time I return to Li Qingzhao’s poetry—the translations of her poetry—is the suspended beauty of the moment, the sense of emotion within observation, of a kind of marriage between moment and individual, the universal as personal. And I’m thankful that in reading these translations, I’ve also come to learn more about a woman who lived in China in the 12th century CE, whose voice feels crystalline and clear, as if she is speaking to me across time that is not as distant or wide as one might think—as I watch the autumn leaves fall too quickly outside the windows, feeling the melancholy and beauty of a moment’s ephemerality—and suspended timelessness.
Autumn Evening Beside the Lake
Wind passes over the lake.
The swelling waves stretch away
Without limit. Autumn comes with the twilight,
And boats grow rare on the river.
Flickering waters and fading mountains
Always touch the heart of man.
I never grow tired of singing
Of their boundless beauty.
The lotus pods are already formed,
And the water lilies have grown old.
The dew has brightened the blossoms
Of the arrowroot along the riverbank.
The hersons and seagulls sleep
On the sand with their
Heads tucked away, as though
They did not wish to see
The men who pass by on the river.
thanks for the gift jest received, excellent work Freya