Book review: “Friends and Lovers: My China in Tang Poetry Volume III” by Susan Wan Dolling

Bai Juyi and his best friend Yuan Zhen, Chinese poets twelve hundred years ago, promoted a revival of folk culture, known as the New Music Bureau Movement. The Music Bureau was a government agency in charge of collecting folk poems and songs which Confucius had called “the voice of the people.”

For Bai Juyi (772-846), the interest in folk themes went back to his earliest years as a poet, such as the rhapsody that he wrote at the age of sixteen.

In Friends and Lovers, Susan Wan Dolling explains that rhapsody was an old poetic form that was something of a cross between an essay and a poem. An exam question might require the student to write one on a particular subject.  That’s what happened in this case.  Here is Dolling’s translation of Bai’s poem:

Seeing Off a Friend at the Ancient Grass Plain

 

Green, green the green grass grows:

a new year, a new crop comes and goes.

Wildfires may burn it, but it will not die.

Spring wind blows, and it comes alive.

Its fragrance breaches ancient highways.

Its liveliness splashes across old ruins.

Again, I say to you, farewell, my friend,

as we gulp down the sorrows of parting.

 

There is, in this poem, an exquisite contrast between the green grass — so green it must be mentioned three times in the first four words — and the sadness of goodbye. Between the undying vibrancy of the grass and the death, at least temporarily, of a friendship about to be sundered by distance.

This poem, Dolling writes, made Bai’s name and became so well known that it was called simply “Grass.”

 

“All birds gone”

Another famous poet Liu Zongyuan (773-819) wrote a short poem “River Snow” that inspired many famous Chinese paintings.  Indeed, Dolling notes that tourists to China will often find such scenes on scrolls with the poem in calligraphy. She offers two versions:

River Snow

 

Birds have all flown into the endlessly rolling hills.

Not a soul is seen along the empty mountain paths.

A lone boat, an old fisherman under a straw cape,

all by himself, fishing snow on half-frozen waves.

 

River Snow

 

A thousand peaks, all birds gone,

numerous paths, no sign of anyone,

just an old fisherman in a straw cape

fishing: a lone boat on a river of snow.

 

The first version seems to capture the thoughtful, quiet, patient tone of Tang poetry as exemplified in the many poems that Dolling presents in Friends and Lovers.

I think I prefer the second, for its concision, for the rhythm and music of “all birds gone” and for the mournful or, at least, wistful ending, “a lone boat on a river of snow.”

 

“Best!”

Before I opened Dolling’s Friends and Lovers, I knew nothing about Tang poetry.  I knew little about China, particularly the long-ago history of the nation and its people, especially during the era of the Tang poets 701-858 AD.

So why did I open the book?

As a physical object, the book is quiet but strong, simple and artistic. The cover is subtly inviting — white lettering against a blue background with large Chinese characters in a lighter shade of blue.

Inside, I could see a mix of prose and two sorts of poetry — a poem (or maybe two versions) presented in English and then in Chinese characters.

And the last of the nine blurbs in the pages before the book’s title was a hoot:

“Best book ever!” — Li Bai, poet and drunkard

I opened the book.

 

Three volumes

Dolling is a Chinese American writer, teacher and translator who was born in Hong Kong, studied in Japan, graduated from Princeton University and taught at Fordham University and the University of Texas at Austin.

Friends and Lovers is the final book in her three-volume set titled My China in Tang Poetry:

• Superstars, Volume I, featuring selections from the two greats of Tang poetry, Du Fu and Li Bai (he of the drunkard blurb), published last June by Earnshaw Books.
• Floating on Clouds, Volume II, with the work of two reclusive men and four women known as the Four Female Talents of the Tang Era, published in September.
• Friends and Lovers, Volume III, focusing on two pairs of poet friends and five other poets writing about friendship and love.

I mention these other books because, after reading Friends and Lovers, I’ll be reading them as well.

 

Visiting her ghosts

In an epilogue to Friends and Lovers, Dolling writes that classical poetry is a shortcut to the heart of Chinese culture, second for Chinese people only to its food. For instance, a recent popular rap performance in China featured lines from Li Bai’s poem “The Road to Shu is Hard.”

Classical Chinese poetry, especially Tang poetry, is very much a part of contemporary Chinese life.  Beyond prosperity and power, the Tang dynasty is judged as significant also because of its receptive and adventurous characteristics.

Dolling ends Friends and Lovers with a paragraph that she also uses, with minor word changes, in the other books:

My China in Tang Poetry is the culmination of all of [her discoveries as a writer and translator], driven not only by my own love of the stories and poems but also by my desire to make what I know and love accessible to others who have no Chinese, at least, no classical Chinese and therefore have no way into that world.  This series is my offer to take you with me to visit my ghosts.

 

Singing girls and scholar-poet-wanderers

Part of what makes Friends and Lovers enthralling is the intricate dance of Dolling and the ancient poets, of Dolling and their poetry, of English and Chinese, of Dolling and the reader. It is as if we are walking through a literary art museum with her.  She stops at this work and that one and tells of their context and often of the way they touch her.

In her chapter titled, “Du Mu, a Sensual Man,” Dolling recounts the poet’s broken heart when his mother would not let him marry the woman he had loved since she was ten. Even before that, Du dallied often with young “singing girls,” i.e., prostitutes, and Dolling acknowledges that she has reservations about translating some of his poems about them.

For one thing, “the girls were so young, and in many cases, they were ‘entertainers’ ” and, for another, she doesn’t want to encourage the objectification of the “exotic Oriental” woman. Even so, she finds that the best of Du’s poems are “vivid and tender,” and it was an era when people died young and took on adult roles early.

Moreover, many of these scholar-poet-wanderers like Li Bai felt that they themselves were like these young women, forever on the asking or pleading end, trying to please, waiting for a morsel, forever looking in from the outside, on the fringes of society, looking into where they want to be in society.

 

“Ten thousand miles of warblers’ songs”

Du does objectify these girls as “thing[s] of beauty” or even like beautiful scenery, she writes.

The saving grace is that his feelings were true and tender….His appreciation of the beauty of young girls seems to come from the same place as his appreciation of the beauties in nature.

Here, for instance, is a poem about one such young girl — “I wish she were a little older, but she’s a young girl in a brothel”:

Parting Gift

 

Delicate and tender as a nutmeg in early spring,

she is just thirteen, the new year’s first new bud.

Spring wind blows on Yangzhou’s ten-mile-road,

lifting pearly blinds, and there’s no one like her!

 

And here is one of his poems about the beauty of nature:

Jiangnan Spring

 

Ten thousand miles of warblers’ songs, shades of greens and reds,

watery villages on hilly slopes, winery banners waving in the wind,

four hundred eighty temples and shrines left from Southern Dynasties,

and just as many pavilions and terraces are caught in the misty air.

 

The one poem hints at the transiency of the beauty of “the new year’s first new bud,” while the second brings to mind the great number of temples, shrines, pavilions and terraces as if to suggest that they are as nothing to the greens and reds, the watery villages and winery banners waving, the misty air and the ten thousand miles of warblers’ songs. The length and breadth and depth of these natural beauties is suggested by the poem’s unusually long lines.

 

“Greedy and generous”

In her epilogue, Dolling writes about the responsibility of the translator, “obliged to be true to the original even as they make the most of their own resources.” She sees her role as translator

not to give my voice to the original poet, but to borrow as I lend, that is, to reproduce in English with my ventriloquist’s skill the voice I hear in the Chinese, and to place again in the poem where I found it, in its historical and cultural contexts as best I can.

This, it seems to me, is what makes her such a delightful tour leader through the art museum of Tang poetry.  And one other thing: Dolling brings to the art of translation a deeper sense of communication of all sorts:

Still, the more I wrote and translated the more I came to realize the understanding translation demands is not so different from the discoveries that grow out of my own writings.

In other words, all writing is translation, from thoughts to words, and all translations, especially of poetry, are works of creative writing even though reading and understanding some other person’s work and his or her culture precede the translator’s creation. Translation is both greedy and generous, it wishes to appropriate as it wants to share and disseminate.

My life is richer for having the benefit of Dolling’s greed and generosity, her respect of her sources and her willingness to do her part to bring their poetry to me.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

3.24.25