Cloud Gate Song: The Verse of Tang Poet Zhang Ji
by Jonathan Chaves
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jonathan ChavesEdition: Paperback
Audio: Mandarin Chinese (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2006-10-29
ISBN: 1891640445
Number of pages: 192
Publisher: Floating World Editions
Book Reviews of Cloud Gate Song: The Verse of Tang Poet Zhang Ji
Book Review: An Ancient Poet Brought to Life
Summary: 5 Stars
This book belongs on the shelf of every serious reader of Chinese literature, and every serious student of the art of translation. Really a very fine book, it does for us two things: it brings to life a major Tang dynasty (618-907) poet hitherto virtually unstudied, and certainly unread, in the West; and it makes an important statement about the art of translation from Classical Chinese to English.
The book begins with a provocative essay on the art of translation the purpose of which is to explain and justify the unorthodox decision to render Zhang Ji's (766-830) poetry into metered and rhyming English verse rather than American style free verse. The debate this decision has provoked has begun to work itself out in these little Amazon reviews. I would here refer readers to the other contributions to this site, and point out that Chaves' discussion raises key questions about how we want to understand the writers we translate. The standard practice is to seek a contemporary idiom and sound. Chaves reacts against that practice. He seeks to revive the sound, sense, and flavor of the language and cultural world of Zhang Ji's original works in older modes of English and American poetry that approximate the Classical Chinese in interesting ways. He wants to sound not like an American poet writing today, but as much like the Zhang Ji of the eighth and ninth centuries as possible, much of whose poetry was written in highly regulated forms. This is a worthy enterprise that amounts to a restoration of the diversity that used to reign in the field of translation in decades past. One need only peruse Minford and Lau's Classical Chinese Literature; An Anthology of Translations, Volume I: from Antiquity to the Tang Dynasty, or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, put together by Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz, to see the range of translation practices and styles pioneered by missionaries, writers and scholars from the eighteenth century to the present. This is a rich tradition that Chaves' volume does much to revive. I would only add that this is the achievement of one who stood, and still stands, as a major figure in the pantheon of free verse translators. I leave it to the reader to see for himself how well these versions of Zhang Ji's poetry work -- lucid, rhythmic and rhyming all at once, bringing to life in the present the sense of a poet far removed from modern America.
And this raises the second thing this book does for us. With these translations Chaves provides a generous sampling of the works of a major late Tang poet as yet unavailable to Western readers. Chaves' introduction to the poet and his works concentrates on two aspects of Zhang's poetry. The first concerns Zhang's Music Bureau, or ballad, poetry. Zhang's collection of ballads stands with that of Bai Juyi (772-846) as one of the most important and best collections in the Chinese literary tradition. Chaves' essay explains how Zhang and Bai differ, and how they both stem from the ancient tradition of serious political and social balladry first revived in the Tang by Du Fu (712-770). Chaves' renderings of Zhang's ballads (poems 7-64) are especially successful. The second aspect of Zhang's poetry Chaves introduces us to is Zhang Ji's status as a forerunner of the "even and bland" style that became a major aesthetic value in Chinese literature often pursued by writers of the succeeding Song dynasty (960-1279) and beyond. Zhang, again drawing on Du Fu, wrote a great number of poems in the regulated forms popular in the mid-to-late Tang period. Many of these are not easy for the Western reader to fully appreciate without some knowledge of this aesthetic ideal. The superb translations in this volume for the general reader could be richly supplemented by a look at Chaves' scholarly (yet eminently readable) discussion of late Tang and early Song aesthetics in his earlier Mei Yaochen and the Development of Early Sung (Song) Poetry, Columbia Press, 1976. All things considered, this is a worthy contribution to poetry and to Sinology much appreciated by this reviewer and highly recommended to poetry and Chinese culture mavens of all types.
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