Tang poetry with a Vietnamese accent

Tang Poetry with a Vietnamese Accent

I’ve had to explain to friends and enquirers that I translate Tang poetry without the benefit of speaking Chinese (Mandarin or otherwise) and knowing few written characters. My inquirers find this state of affairs interesting, so I'd like to write up the same comments here, for anyone who might be interested.

I think it makes sense to start at the beginning, when I first encountered Tang poetry in college. Having heard so much about classical Chinese poetry through 20th-century American poets (21st-century American poets seem less enamored), I went to the library and checked out a copy of Sun Zhu’s venerable anthology, 300 Tang Poems, in Peter Harris’s pellucidly clear English translations. I read the poems several times through, admiring their decorous simplicity and directness. Deep down, however, I was baffled. In their shallowness of thought and blandness of expression, or so I thought, they were ultimately quite boring! I returned the book to the library and put it all in the back of my head, saying that, surely, something crucial was missing.

Fast forward several years and, by chance, I ran into David Hinton’s translations of Du Fu, which made a far more memorable impression. (In my prior experience, Du Fu had been singularly disappointing.) As a translator, Hinton takes extraordinary liberties with the text, to the point of inventing his own meanings – and I think that his Du Fu is truly lachrymose – but there’s no denying that, in provoking interest through translations that are fascinating in their own right, Hinton has succeeded more than scads of translators. I set out to read as many translations of Du Fu as I can, and quickly found William Hung’s biography-anthology and David Hawkes’ incredibly useful primer.

Then something very fortuitous happened. I found at my mother’s house a book that belonged to one of my older brothers, called 100 Best Tang Poems, which reproduces the selection of a volume of the same title published in Beijing in the 1990s. For each poem, this extraordinarily useful book gave the original Chinese text, its phonetic transcription into Vietnamese, glosses on significant words, an exegesis of the poem in prose, and multiple verse translations. That’s quite a lot! I realized that I had always known Tang poetic forms through their reproduction in Vietnamese and, furthermore, that I could teach myself to read Tang poems in the original.

One of the most wonderful experiences of my life was the moment of epiphany when, in the sixth or seventh grade, I realized, standing in the hallway of my middle school listening to the voices around me, that I could understand what each one, in English, was saying. The wall of sound had miraculously resolved into a symphony of voices. Likewise, when I read Li Bai’s quatrain saying goodbye to his friend and fellow poet Meng Haoran, I experienced the awe of having a veil lifted and something being revealed. It was seeing, with my own eyes, a vista that I was seeking, yet could not have imagined.

I gradually worked up to reading longer poems, and found my way back to Du Fu, this time reading him in the original. Harris, as well as Hinton, had given little indication! What resulted were several years of reading and studying Du Fu. At the same time, I translated a number of poems in the poet’s signature form, the octave, for my own study and benefit. Du Fu remains an amazing experience for which I am simply humbled.

To make the story short, I am able to read Tang poetry due to several extraordinary circumstances:

• the similarity between Chinese and Vietnamese;
• the prevalence of Middle Chinese vocabulary in the Vietnamese language;
• the availability of web-based language tools that make it easy to reference Chinese characters (traditionally not an easy task);
• the radical simplicity of regulated poetry, which replaces grammar with meter and reduces language to the bare essentials;
• and finally, the Vietnamese system of pronouncing Chinese characters, which distinguishes the sounds and tones of Middle Chinese and enables Vietnamese speakers to access the aural experience of these poems.

Let’s look at this couplet from a poem by Xu Hun 許渾:

村徑繞山松葉暗
野門臨水稻花香

Transcribed phonetically into Vietnamese, the couplet looks like this:

Thôn kính nhiễu sơn tùng diệp ám
Dã môn lâm thuỷ đạo hoa hương.

Bolded in this example are words that are commonly found in Vietnamese. It’s akin, somewhat, to an English speaker today encountering Chaucer’s language. The Middle English would be recognizable, even if strange, and an edition with lots of notes and glosses surely helps. Here I look up the unknown words, and then am able to read the lines thus:

On village paths and surrounding hills, pine boughs are dark
A rustic gate verges on the water in wheat blossoms’ fragrance.

Forget Du Fu – this is what Tang poetry is really about! It’s this kind of stuff that has converted many generations of readers to the special language of Tang poetry.

This example leans toward one end of the scale, but you get the idea; given any Tang poem, a significant portion of the words would be known to Vietnamese readers. Furthermore, as mentioned, this system of pronunciation consistently distinguishes the tones and sounds of Middle Chinese, so that Vietnamese readers can fully access the remarkable aural experience of these poems, no less than, say, a speaker of Standard Mandarin. In fact, certain tones and sounds of Middle Chinese are clearly distinguished in Vietnamese pronunciation that are no longer distinguished in Mandarin.

So, this is how I have come to read and translate a fair amount of Tang poetry, specifically Tang regulated quatrains and octaves. To be sure, anything that’s not regulated poetry is beyond my reach. Tang old-style poetry, for example, is much more difficult; and Tang prose is another matter altogether. I do wish to have access to Chinese-language commentary on the poems, of course, though I’m not entirely deprived of this material, as referenced in works in English.

It is the genius of Tang poetry that readers like myself can read and appreciate poems that are more than a thousand years old, in another language and culture, in their original form. Something continues to inspire its translation into so many languages. Maybe because, as it has been said, Tang poetry crystalizes and reinvents language, that to read it is already to translate it. I’m sometimes tempted to say that Tang poetry is a primer of poetry in general – which certainly would too far, poetry being far more diverse a thing than we readily admit. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say, though, that Tang poetry is a primer of itself. I know of no other poetry that teaches you to read in a new way and guides your journey with such constant, reliable pleasures.

Tien Tran
Warwick, RI