A Far Stretch
Well Worth the Effort
by June Jordan

I'd heard forever about T'ang poetry. It seems that no poems were ever so
beloved or so marvelously composed, as these. There were 300 of them, I was
told, and Chinese children memorized huge numbers of the jewels, as a matter
of course. But everywhere I looked I could not find an English translation
even suggesting such amazing accomplishent. Yes, here and there, the imagery
astounded this reader, but nowhere did I encounter a river of poetry to
carry me, pellmell, into ecstatic delight and sensual enlightenment. And
then, one efternoon, a guest speaker came to my class at UC Berkeley, to
describe distinguishing attributes of the Chinese language. I listened
almost in disbelief.

Roughly, summarizing what he said:

There is no gender, and no pronouns, and no past or future tense / no
inflections of verbs, and no plural case, and no prepositions, and no
definite or indefinite articles, and this is the language. The carrier of
the consciousness, of the majority population of the world!

Fantastic!

Haphazardly, but with tremendous excitement, I continued my readings.
Finally I ran into an introduction to T'ang poetry that described these
poems as extremely musical. A fixed end-rhyme scheme, a fixed number of
lines, and all stress syllables -- because, in the Chinese, there would be
no possibility of a two-syllable "word."

Then, in a phone conversation with my best friend's husband, who is a T'ang
poetry scholar, I learned that these poems were always "sung" aloud, and not
intended as written and silently absorbed events.

With this information, I felt, as I certainly do feel, tonight, the chasmic
separation between myself -- a captive of the English language -- and the
absolute trasure of poetry that human beings have created in languages I
cannot even imagine.

Translation, then, becomes a necessity, and, at the same time, a chimerical
undertaking that we embrace because something -- faithfully attempted -- is
sometimes, although not always, better than nothing.

In relation to T'ang poetry, I decided to assign myself and my students the
entirely humbling task of writing Chinese in English: T'ang poems that hold
to the most strikingly clear attributes of the Chinese language, but written
in English.

A few weeks ago, my students and I confronted this assignment, once again.
First, we thought we should decipher The World View bespoken by Chinese
attributes of the Chinese language.

We concluded that in T'ang poetry there is NO: personal subject, no
pronouns, no subject/object, or fixed/fluid syntax, no subject acting on
object, no subject distince from a predicate, no poet apart from his or her
environment, and, therefore, no acceptable English translation of a T'ang
poem.

On the other hand, we decided that, in T'ang poetry, you will find: fluid
interrelationships, equality in value among all elements ( world), humility,
the poet as a part of all that is, collective cultural allusion, precision
in multiplicity of meanings versus either/or formulation, or surmise, and
eminently musical composition.

Well, one of my students wondered, how would you say, "She Followed Me
Home?" So, with my students, I worked out the answer to this question. This
is what we composed:

She Followed Me Home
foot step sound skirt flare
run near dare path share
stare eye flirt sneak smile
find face flush heart bare

And, later that night, on my own, I wrote this other T'ang poem, just for
the thrill of it:

heat sound pound plum spill
ground rise fruit fall fill
air splash branch rain wash
chance start heart kill chill

And, by the way, another wonderful thing about T'ang poetry, in English, is
that the poem can work on the vertical as well as the horizontal. For
example, to return to our collectiely composed T'ang poem, you can also read
it: foot run stare find / step near eye face / sound dare flirt flush /
skirt path sneak heart / flare share smile bare.

And with a bit more work, you can make the vertical lines abide by the same
rhyme scheme that governs the horizontal. I hope that some of the happiness
provided by and provoked by translation issues of need and differences
appears, perhaps, a bit more obvious, and less daunting, now.