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Update on Li Bai.
As i had feared, i disliked the translation by Hinton. It maybe good, but it’s just not enjoyable at all. Hinton has a tendency to move the last word from one line to the beginning of the next line. For me it messed up the reading experience. He also has a tendency to not translate certain concepts, or over translate certain nouns, like the name of cities. It makes the reading even more obscure. So i ended up, having a very bad impression of Li Bai. But i started to read Ha Jin’s biography of him, The Banished Immortal, it’s a very easy read, it has a lot of simple but very beautiful translations of his poems, and slowly but surely i started to love the guy. The fact that it weaves Li Bai’s poem in a narrative about his life, makes it all the more interesting. I find that Contra to Du Fu, Li Bai’s poetry is very much situated. He’s always mentioning things, places and people, and unless you have a deep understanding of Chinese history, geography and culture, you are at lost, and his poems are undecipherable. Ha Jin’s does a very good job of giving you all the info needed to understanding the setting in which Li Bai wrote his poetry. So, I suggest you don’t go for Hinton’s, and go straight to Ha Jin’s book.Update on Su Dongpo.
Tanner, you had mention that you think there isn’t any good english translation of him. Did you read David Young and Jiann I. Lin’s translation (Listening All the Night to the Rain) ? It came out in 2020. It’s the translation i’ll be reading. I loved Young’s work on Du Fu, so i hope that this translation is has good.
I’ll be reading it side by side with Su Dongpo’s biography, The Gay Genius, by Lin Yutang.Update on the project. I just finished reading Du Fu : A Life in Poetry, and will start reading Li Po (translation by D. Hinton). I really feel that David Young has done an amazing job at translating the spirit of Du Fu’s poetry. It’s true I don’t read Chinese, but i read in parallel, Young’s and Hinton’s translation, as well as Awakened Cosmos by Hinton (fascinating endeavour, by the way), where he gives a literal translation of some of Du Fu’s poems, so one can get a sense of what the original chinese is. Hinton’s translation seem like they are filled with too many words. Young is at ease with the economy of words in Du Fu’s poems, and he conveys the imagery and the feelings very well. Hintons rendering though are hard to read, and a bit stifling. So I’m a bit scared that having now to read his translation of Li Po, I will not be able to enjoy it as much as I should. In poetry a good translation is so important !
Thinking back on the last 2 month i spent reading Du Fu, what is most impressive, is the way he weaves together simple sceneries with the complexity of human emotions. It’s as if there is always both an ironic and yet very soothing smile in every poem, as if he’s saying life is shit, but don’t worry it’s ok.I also finished reading the original SGYY (the first 80 chapters that are known to be from Cao Xueqin, that correspond to the first 3 volumes of the Penguin edition). What an incredible book. I’m not done, but I can’t wait to reread it again !
Hi James, I LOVE Du Fu ! I never read much poetry, and all the poetry i had read was French, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Ronsard, Hugo, Saint John Perse (Vents is probably my favorite poetry book). So my opinion doesn’t mean much. But Du Fu has been the real revelation of the past few months ! He puts so much intensity is so little words. In a poem you can go from sarcasm to awe in a minute and it doesn’t feel weird. He’s both a young foul and a mature sage, idealist and realist.
I am somewhat aphantasic, so it’s always hard to appreciate long and detailed descriptions in novels, as they never evoke anything in me. I have to rely on the music of words to feel a novel, and poetry is sometime highly visual. Hafez’ was for exemple, it’s full of sights and perfumes. But in the case of Du Fu, the economy of words makes it very easy to “see” because it leaves a lot to the mind. Proust, and Cao are putting images in your mind, the level of precision of their vocabulary when they talk about objects, surroundings etc. is insane. But with Du Fu, you are actually in charge of building the images on top of the words he uses. Take this line from Facing Snow (p. 71 of A life in poetry) :
the swirling wind conducts
a mad dance of snowflakes
the clouds, confused by it all,
crowd toward the sunset
What’s left to say ? There’s not much yet it fills the mind with everything it needs to build on the word.It’s interesting what you say about love, I had thought it was central. But there is a footnote in A life in poetry on page 69 that says that Moonlight night, a poem about Du Fu’s wife, might be the first Chinese poem to address romantic sentiment to a wife (usually those were reserved to male friends and courtesan). So it might not be that important. As for its disappearance, i feel like we live in a world were romantic emotions seem overrated, were everything has to be sarcastic or ironic, and nothing is ever taken seriously. Hard to write poetry (and even more romantic poetry) in such a world, so poets just write about other things.
1) Thank you for the clarification regarding SGYY, it makes perfect sense. And I totally agree with your take on Dream. I don’t have your expertise on world literature, but reading it one has to agree that it is an amazing novel, it’s filled with so much. And i would gladly read it again, and go back to it from time to time.
2) Since my friend doesn’t read much French, we’ll be reading most of the work in english, but some of the books i already had in my collection, so i won’t buy another version. I did buy Hafez in french, but I find the translation awful, and i’m glad i read the Davis translation, otherwise i would have hated it. I looked at the Su Dongpo french translation, there seems to be a few, but at least one of them has a very bad amazon review. For poetry, a good translation is so important. Reading the 2 Du Fu translations, makes it very clear, Young’s translation are many times better than the Hinton, and i’m a bit sad that i’ll have to read his translation of Li Bai (the one you recommended seems to be either out of print or super expensive in Canada).
3) For the Indian additions, at least one of them (Akbar and Birbal stories) has no place on the list but my friend decided we had to read it because it was so important to Indian culture that I couldn’t go without reading it. Some of the translations on my list (most from penguin india) are not easily available in Canada, but the translation provides the full text and they seem highly rated (For instance Bibek Debroy’s translation for Mahabharata and Ramayana, but also Kalidasa, and Bhasa), so we had to ship them from India, thru a friend of ours.
I love this book. This is one of my favorite books, i go back to it very often. If i understand the project for the podcast, the idea is not to have one of the author on, but someone who read the book. If that’s the case, and if she has read it, i would love to hear Julia Galef talk to you about it.
Hi Tanner, thanks for the reference, I will definitly look it up.
I love Dream of the Red Chamber, and pretty much everything about it. I’m pretty sure i’m missing a lot since i know close to nothing about China, but the Rereading the Stone podcast was very helpful in the beginning. The level of details both in the description of the material environment and of the social relations in the Jia Household is breathtaking. The poems are lovely, and the language is very pleasant. Every page is filled with so much, yet it reads very easily. It’s a bit sad that it was never properly edited because plot wise the inconsistencies are sometimes a bit too obvious. Reading it side by side with Proust makes for an interesting comparison. Proust is harder to read, a bit more boring, but he’s more heavy on psychological analysis, which i think is a bit lacking from Dream. That’s probably my only reproach to Dream, it’s a bit lacking in psychological analysis of the character. Their motivations are never truly analyzed, we get how they are by the way they act, but their mental states are rarely given the same kind of attention to details. Don’t get me wrong, it’s way better on that particular aspect than so many books, but the contrast with Proust makes it striking.Here’s the list of the books and translation i’ll be reading : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vnfVUdnXTZJBifPYpcfb1PqbO3fmn1u_E7XPSq9Seys/edit?usp=sharing
In the notes section, i’ve added other books i’ll be reading to deepen my understanding of the books from the Canon. If any one has suggestions I would love to heard them.
As you can see, i’ve made one change to the Chinese canon, i’ve taken out the Japanese buddhist monks debate (the name of which escapes me), i still plan to read it, but not as part of the project, and I’ve added Basho (which I think had to be included). And we’ve made some changes (mostly addition) to the Indic canon. My friend being indian and a litt teacher objected to some of your choices and felt some essential readings were missing (Tagore being the most obvious).
I also had one question, Tanner, why did you leave The Romance of the 3 Kingdoms out of the Chinese canon ?
I’ve debated contributing to Greer’s Patreon for at least a few months now, and this forum just sold me on the idea, so I might as well go ahead and introduce myself. So Hey all, I’m Louis, or Niespika on Twitter. I teach philosophy in a French Highschool, in Quebec. I’ve been reading The Scholar’s stage for a few years now (maybe since 2017). I came for the China stuff, and stayed for the humanities stuff. In January, i decided with a friend, to read through the Non-Western Canon List that our host created (see that post : https://scholars-stage.org/a-non-western-canon-what-would-a-list-of-humanitys-100-greatest-writers-look-like/ ). And I would love to talk about that experience with any of you.