Even Greek verse might have fared equally ill had its purveyors been per- force content with provincial
standards
of English rhym- ing.
Ezra-Pound-Instigations
Theyhavenotdonethisintheir prefaces, and if any mention is made of the sixteenth- century scholars, it is very effectually buried somewhere in the voluminous Latin notes, which I have not gone throughintoto.
Theiredition(Glasgow,1814)is,how- ever, most serviceable.
TRANSLATION OF AESCHYLUS
A SEARCH for Aeschylus in English is deadly, ac- cursed, mind-rending. Browning has "done" the Aga- memnon, or "done the Agamemnon in the eye" as the criticmaychoosetoconsider. Hehaswrittenamodest and an apparently intelligent preface:
"I should hardly look for an impossible transmission of the reputed magniloquence and sonority of the Greek and this with the less regret, inasmuch as there is abun- dant musicality elsewhere, but nowhere else than in his poem the ideas of the poet. "
He quotes Matthew Arnold on the Greeks : "their ex- pression is so excellent, because it is so simple and so well subordinated, because it draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it conveys . . . not a word wasted, not a sentiment capriciously thrown in, stroke on stroke. "
* Reading ipyv(piourtii, variant ipyupkouriv, offered in footnote. In any case argentea is closer than Candida.
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? 346 INSTIGATIONS
He is reasonable about the Greek spelling. He points out that tbvov iBav KaXKiffrov avdpSiv sounds very poorly as "Seeing her son the fairest of men'' but is out- shouted in "Remirando il figliuolo bellissimo degli uomini," and protests his fidelity to the meaning of Aeschylus.
His weakness in this work is where it essentially lay in all of his expression, it rests in the term "ideas" "Thought" as Browning understood it--"ideas" as the term is current, are poor two dimensional stuff, a scant, scratch covering. "Damn ideas, anyhow. " An idea is only an imperfect induction from fact.
The solid, the "last atom of force verging off into the first atom of matter" is the force, the emotion, the ob- jective sight of the poet. In the Agamemnon it is the whole rush of the action, the whole wildness of Kassan- dra's continual shrieking, the flash of the beacon fires burning unstinted wood, the outburst of
Tpoiav Axaiwv oiaav,
or the later
Tpoiav 'Axatot rr/S' exova' iv iiTtpa.
"Troy is the greeks'. " Even Rossetti has it better than Browning: "Troy's down, tall Troy's on fire," anything, literally anything that can be shouted, that can be shouted uncontrolledly and hysterically. "Troy is the Greeks' " is an ambiguity for the ear. "Know that our men are in Ilion. "
Anything but a stilted unsayable jargon. Yet with Browning we have
:
? TRANSLATORS OF GREEK "Troia the Achaioi hold," and later,
"Troia do the Achaioi hold," followed by
"this same day
I think a noise--no mixture--reigns i' the city
Sour wine and unguent pour thou in one vessel
1347
Anditdoesnotendhere. Infactitreachesthenadirof its bathos in a later speech of Klutaimnestra in the line
"The perfect man his home perambulating! "
We may add several exclamation points to the one which Mr. Browning has provided. But then all translation is a thankless, or is at least most apt to be a thankless and desolate undertaking.
What Browning had not got into his sometimes ex- cellent top-knot was the patent, or what should be the patent fact that inversions of sentence order in an unin- flected language like English are not, simply and utterly are not any sort of equivalent for inversions and per- turbations of order in a language inflected as Greek and Latin are inflected. That is the chief source of his error. In these inflected languages order has other cur- rents than simple sequence of subject, predicate, object; and all sorts of departures from this Franco-English natural position are in Greek and Latin neither confus-
ing nor delaying ; they may be both simple and emphatic, they do not obstruct one's apperception of the verbal relations.
Obscurities not inherent in the matter, obscurities due not to the thing but to the wording, are a botch, and are
"
? 348 INSTIGATIONS
not worth preserving in a translation. The work lives not by them but despite them.
Rossetti is in this matter sounder than Browning, when he says that the only thing worth bringing over is the beauty of the original; and despite Rossetti's pur- ple plush and molasses trimmings he meant by "beauty" something fairly near what we mean by the "emotional intensity" of his original.
Obscvurities (inherent in the thing occur when the author is piercing, or trying to pierce into, uncharted regions ; when he is trying to express things not yet current, not yet worn into phrase; when he is ahead of the emotional, or philosophic sense (as a painter might be ahead of the color-sense) of his contemporaries.
As for the word-sense and phrase-sense, we still hear workmen and peasants and metropolitan bus-riders re- peating the simplest sentences three and four times, back and forth between interlocutors : trying to get the sense "I sez to Bill, I'm goin' to 'Arrow" or some other such subtlety from one occiput into another.
"You sez to Bill, etc. " "Yus, I sez . . . etc. "
! "
"O
The first day's search at the Museum reveals "Aeschylus" printed by Aldus in 1518; by Stephanus in 1557, no English translation before 1777, a couple in the 1820's, more in the middle of the century, since 1880 past counting, and no promising names in the list. Sophocles falls to Jebb and does not appear satisfactory.
From which welter one returns thankfully to the Thomas Stanley Greek and Latin edition, with Saml. Butler's notes, Cambridge, "typis ac sumptibus acade- micis," 1811--once a guinea or half a guinea per vol- ume, half leather, but now mercifully, since people no
:
? TRANSLATORS OF GREEK
349
longer read Latin, picked up at 2s. for the set (eight volumes in all), rather less than the price of their postage. Quartos in excellent type.
Browning shows himself poet in such phrases as "dust, mud's thirsty brother," which is easy, perhaps, but is English, even Browning's own particular English, as "dust, of mud brother thirsty," would not be English at all; and if I have been extremely harsh in dealing with the first passage quoted it is still undisputable that I have^readJBrowning off and on fqrjeycnteati, years with no small pleasure and admiration, and am one of the few people who know anything about his Sordello, and have never read his Agamemnon, have not even now when it falls into a special study been able to get through his Agamemnon.
Take another test passage
OStos kaiv Ayaftkuvuv, k/xds ILSais, veKpds Sk rrjaSe de|ias x<<P^s
"Epyov SiKalvas riKTOvos. Tad' SiS ? x<<- ^415
"Hicce est Agamemnon, maritus Mens, hac dextra mortuus,
Facinus justae artificis. Haec ita se habent. " We turn to Browning and find:
"--^this man is Agamemnon,
My husband, dead, the work of this right hand here. Aye, of a just artificer : so things are. "
To the infinite advantage of the Latin, and the com- plete explanation of why Browning's Aeschylus, to say nothing of forty other translations of Aeschylus, is un- readable.
? INSTIGATIONS Any bungling translation:
"This is Agamemnon, My husband,
Dead by this hand.
And a good job. These, gentlemen, are the facts. "
No, that is extreme, but the point is that any natural wording, anything which keeps the mind off theatricals and on Klutaimnestra actual, dealing with an actual situation, and not pestering the reader with frills and festoons of language, is worth all the convoluted tush- ery that the Victorians can heap together.
I can conceive no improvement on the Latin, it saves by dextra for 5e|ta$ x^posi it loses a few letters in "se habent," but it has the same drive as the Greek.
The Latin can be a whole commentary on the Greek, or at least it can give one the whole parsing and order, and let one proceed at a comforable rate with but the most rudimentary knowledge of the original language. And I do not think this a trifle; it would be an ill day if men again let the classics go by the board; we should fall into something worse than, or as bad as, the counter- reformation: a welter of gum-shoes, and cocoa, and Y. M. C. A. and Webbs, and social theorizing commit- tees, and the general hell of a groggy doctrinaire ob- fuscation; and the very disagreeablizing of the classics, every pedagogy which puts the masterwork further from us, either by obstructing the schoolboy, or breeding af- fectation in dilettante readers, works toward such a detestable end. I do not know that strict logic will cover all of the matter, or that I can formulate anjrthing beyond a belief that we test a translation by the feel, and particularly by the feel of being in contact with
350
! ::
? TRANSLATORS OF GREEK
351
the force of a great original, and it does not seem to me that one can open this Latin text of the Agamemnon without getting such sense of contact
"Mox sciemus lampadum luciferarum
Signorumque per faces et ignis vices,
An vere sint, an somniorum instar,
Gratum veniens illud lumen eluserit animum nostrum. Praeconem hunc a littore video obumbratum Ramisolivae: testaturautemhaecmihifrater
Luti socius aridus pulvis,
Quod neque mutus, neque accendens facem Materiae montanae signa dabit per fumum ignis. "
or
"Apollo, Apollo!
Agyieu Apollo mi
Ah! quo me tandem duxisti? ad qualem domum?
109s
"Heu, heu, ecce, ecce, cohibe a vacca 1134 Taurum: vestibus involens
Nigricornem machina
Percutit; cadit vero in aquali vase.
Insidiosi lebetis casum ut intelligas velim.
Heu, heu, argutae lusciniae fatum mihi tribuis:
"Heu nuptiae, nuptiae Paridis exitiales 1165 Amicis! eheu Scamandri patria unda! "
All this howling of Kassandra comes at one from the page, and the grimness also of the Iambics
"Ohime! lethali intus percussus sum vulnere. " 1352 "Tace: quis clamat vulnus lethaliter vulneratus? "
498
? /352 INSTIGATIONS
"Ohime! iterum secundo ictu sauciatus. "
"Patrari facinus mihi videtur regis ex ejulatu. 1355 "At tuta communicemus consilia. "
"Ego quidem vobis meam dico sententiam," etc.
Here or in the opening of the play, or where you like in this Latin, we are at once in contact with the action, something real is going on, we are keen and curious on the instant, but I cannot get any such impact from any part of the Browning.
"In bellum nuptam,
Auctricem que contentionum, Helenam: 695 Quippe quae congruenter
Perditrix navium, perditrix virorum, perditrix urbium, E delicatis
Thalami ornamentis navigavit
Zephyri terrigenae aura.
Et numerosi scutiferi,
Venatores secundum vestigia,
Remorum inapparentia
Appulerunt ad Simoentis ripas
Foliis abundantes
Ob jurgium cruentum. "
"War-wed, author of strife,
Fitly Helen, destroyer of ships, of men. Destroyer of cities.
From delicate-curtained room
Sped by land breezes.
"Swift the shields on your track. Oars on the unseen traces.
And leafy Simois
? TRANSLATORS OF GREEK Gone red with blood. " *
Contested Helen, 'Aam^imik^.
"War-wed, contested,
(Fitly) Helen, destroyer of ships; of men;
Destroyer of cities,
"From the delicate-curtained room Sped by land breezes.
"Swift on the shields on your track. Oars on the unseen traces.
"Red leaves in Simois! "
"Rank flower of love, for Troy. "
353
"Quippe leonem educavit . . . 726 Mansuetum, pxieris amabilem . . .
. . . divinitus sacerdos Ates (i. e. Paris)
In aedibus enutritus est.
"Statim igitur venit
Ad urbem Ilii,
Ut ita dicam, animus Tranquillae serenitatis, placidum Divitiarum ornamentum Blandum oculourimi telum,
746
* "H. D. 's" translations from Euripides should be mentioned either here or in connection with "The New Poetry" ; she has obtained beautiful strophes for First Chorus of Iphigenia in Aulis, 1-4 and 9, and for the first of the second chorus. Else- where she retains certain needless locutions, and her versifica- tion permits too many dead stops in its current.
? 354
INSTIGATIONS
Animum pungens flos amoris (Helena)accubitura. Perfecitautem Nuptiarum acerbos exitus,
Mala vicina, mafaque socia,
Irruens in Priamidas, Ductu Jovis Hospitalis, Erinnys luctuosa sponsis. "
It seems to me that English translators have gone wide in two ways, first in trying to keep every adjective, when obviously many adjectives in the original have only melodic value, secondly they have been deaved with syn- tax; have wasted time, involved their English, trying first to evolve a definite logical structure for the, Greek and secondly to preserve it, and alt its grammatical re- lations, in English.
One might almost say that Aeschylus' Greek is agglu- tinative, that his general drive, especially in choruses, is merely to remind the audience of the events of the Tro- jan war; that syntax is subordinate, and duly subordi- nated, left out, that he is not austere, but often even ver- bose after a fashion (not Euripides' fashion).
A reading version might omit various things which would be of true service only if the English were actually to be sung on a stage, or chanted to the movements of the choric dance or procession.
Above suggestions should not be followed with intem- perance. Butcertainlymoresenseandlesssyntax(good or bad) in translations of Aeschylus might be a relief.
Chor. Anapest:
"O iniquam Helenam, una quae multas, 1464
Multas admodum animas
Perdidisti ad Trojam!
Nunc vero nobilern memorabilem (Agam. animam).
: ;
? TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 3S5
Deflorasti per caedem inexpiabilem. Talis erat tunc in aedibus
Eris viri domitrix aerumna. "
Clytemnestra
"Nequaquam mortis sortem exopta 1470
Hisce gravatus
Neque in Helenam iram convertas, Tanquam viriperdam, ac si una multorum Virorum animas Graecorum perdens, Intolerabilem dolorem effecerit. "
Clytertmestra
"Mortem baud indignam arbitrar 1530
Huic contigisse:
Neque enim ille insidiosam cladem Aedibus intulit; sed meum ex ipso Germen sublatum, multum defletam Iphigeniam cum indigne affecerit, Digna passus est, nihil in inferno Glorietur, gladio. inflicta
Morte luens quae prior perpetravit. "
1
"Death not unearned, nor yet a novelty in this house Let him make talk in hell concerning Iphigenia. "
(If we allow the last as ironic equivalent of the literal "let him not boast in hell. ")
"He gets but a thrust once given (by him) Back-pay, for Iphigenia. "
One can further condense the English but at the cost of obscurity.
;
? 356 INSTIGATIONS
Morshead is bearable in Clytemnestra's description of the beacons.
"From Ida's top Hephaestos, Lord of fire,
Sent forth his sign, and on, and ever on,
Beacon to beacon sped the courier-flame
From Ida to the crag, that Hermes loves
On Lemnos; thence into the steep sublime
Of Athos, throne of Zeus, the broad blaze flared. Thence, raised aloft to shoot across the sea
The moving light, rejoicing in its strength
Sped from the pyre of pine, and urged its way, In golden glory, like some strange new sun, Onward and reached Macistus' watching heights. "
? IX
THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER AS A MEDIUM FOR POETRY
BY ERNEST FENOLLOSA
[This essay was practically finished by the late Ernest Fenol- losa; I have done little more than remove a few repetitions and shape a few sentences.
We have here not a bare philological discussion, but a study of the fundamentals of all (esthetics. In his search through un- known art Fenollosa, coming upon unknown motives and prin- ciples unrecognised in the West, was already led into many modes of thought since fruitful in "new" western painting "^and poetry. He was a forerunner without knowing it and without being known, as such.
He discerned principles of writing which he had scarcely time toputintopractice. Inlapanherestored,orgreatlyhelpedto restore, a respect for the native art. In America and Europe he cannot be looked upon as a mere searcher after exotics. His mind was constantly filled with parallels and comparisons between eastern and zvestern art. To him the exotic was always a means of fructification. He looked to an American renais- sance. The vitality of his outlook can be judged from the fact that although this essay was written some time before his death in 1908 / have not had to change the allusions to western con- ditions. The later movements in art have corroborated his theories. --Ezra Pound. ]
This twentieth century not only turns a new page in the book of the world, but opens another and a startling chapter. Vistas of strange futures unfold for man, of world-embracing cultures half weaned from Europe, of hitherto undreamed responsibilities for nations and races.
357
? 358
INSTIGATIONS
The Chinese problem alone is so vast that no nation can afford to ignore it. We in America, especially, must face it across the Pacific, and master it or it will master us. And the only way to master it is to strive with pa- tient sympathy to understand the best, the most hopeful and the most human elements in it.
It is unfortunate that England and America have so long ignored or mistaken the deeper problems of Ori- ental culture. We have misconceived the Chinese for a materialistic people, for a debased and worn-out race. We have belittled the Japanese as a nation of copyists. We have stupidly assumed that Chinese history affords no glimpse of change in social evolution, no salient epoch of moral and spiritual crisis. We have denied the es- sential humanity of these peoples; and we have toyed with their ideals as if they were no better than comic songs in an "opera bouffe. "
The duty that faces us is not to batter down their forts or to exploit their markets, but to study and to come to sympathize with their humanity and their generous as- pirations. Their type of cultivation has been high. Their harvest of recorded experience doubles our own. The Chinese have been idealists, and experimenters in the making of great principles; their history opens a world of lofty aim and achievement, parallel to that of
the ancient Mediterranean peoples. We need their best ideals to supplement our own--ideals enshrined in their art, in their literature and in the tragedies of their lives.
We have already seen proof of the vitality and practi- cal value of oriental painting for ourselves and as a key to the eastern soul. It may be worth while to approach their literature, the intensest part of it, their poetry, even in an imperfect manner.
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 359
I feel that I should perhaps apologize * for presuming to follow that series of brilliant scholars, Davis, Legge, St. Denys and Giles, who have treated the subject of Chinese poetry with a wealth of erudition to which I can proffer no claim. It is not as a professional linguist nor as a sinologue that I humbly put forward what I have to say. As an enthusiastic student of beauty in Oriental culture, having spent a large portion of my years in close relation with Orientals, I could not but breathe in something of the poetry incarnated in their lives.
I have been for the most part moved to my temerity by personal considerations. An unfortunate belief has spread both in England and in America that Chinese and Japanese poetry are hardly more than an amusement, trivial, childish, and not to be reckoned in the world's serious literary performance. I have heard well-known sinologues state that, save for the purposes of profes- sional linguistic scholarship, these branches of poetry are fields too barren to repay the toil necessary for their cul- tivation.
Now my own impression has been so radically and di- ametrically opposed to such a conclusion, that a sheer en- thusiasm of generosity has driven me to wish to share withotherOccidentalsmynewlydiscoveredjoy. Either I am pleasingly self-deceived in my positive delight, or else there must be some lack of aesthetic sympathy and of poetic feeling in the accepted methods of presenting thepoetryofChina. Isubmitmycausesofjoy.
Failure or success in presenting any alien poetry in English must depend largely upon poetic workmanship in the chosen medium. It was perhaps too much to
* [The apology was unnecessary, but Professor Fenollosa saw fit to make it, and I therefore transcribe his words. --E. P. ]
:
? 36o INSTIGATIONS
expect that aged scholars who had spent their youth in gladiatorial combats with the refractory Chinese charac- ters should succeed also as poets.
Even Greek verse might have fared equally ill had its purveyors been per- force content with provincial standards of English rhym- ing. Sinologues should remember that the purpose of poetical translation is the poetry, not the verbal defini- tions in dictionaries.
One modest merit I may, perhaps, claim for my work it represents for the first time a Japanese school of study in Chinese culture. Hitherto Europeans have been some- what at the mercy of contemporary Chinese scholarship. Several centuries ago China lost much of her creative self, and of her insight into the causes of her own life, but her original* spirit still lives, grows, interprets, trans- ferred to Japan in all its original freshness. The Japa- nese to-day represent a stage of culture roughly corre- sponding to that of China under the Sung dynasty. I have been fortunate in studying for many years as a pri- vate pupil under Professor Kainan Mori, who is prob- ablythegreatestlivingauthorityonChinesepoetry. He has recently been called to a chair in the Imperial Uni- versity of Tokio.
My subject is poetry, not language, yet the roots of poetry are in language. In the study of a language so alien in form to ours as is Chinese in its written charac- ter, it is necessary to inquire how those universal ele- ments of form which constitute poetics can derive appro- priate nutriment.
In what sense can verse, written in terms of visible hierogl3rphics, be reckoned true poetry? It might seem that poetry, which like music is a time art, weaving its unities out of successive impressions of sound, could
:--
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 361
with difficulty assimilate a verbal medium consisting largely of semi-pictorial appeals to the eye.
Contrast, for example, Gray's line:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day
with the Chinese line
Moon Rays Like Pure Snow Moon rays like pure snow.
Unless the sound of the latter be given, what have they in common ? It is not enough to adduce that each con- tains a certain body of prosaic meaning; for the ques- tion is, how can the Chinese line imply, as form, the very element that distinguishes poetry from prose?
On second glance, it is seen that the Chinese words, though visible, occur in just as necessary an order as thephoneticsymbolsofGray. Allthatpoeticformre- quires is a regular and flexible sequence, as plastic as thought itself. The characters may be seen and read, silently by the eye, one after the other:
Moon rays like pure snow.
Perhaps we do not always sufficiently consider that thought is successive, not through some accident or weak- ness of our subjective operations but because the opera- tions of nature are successive. The transferences of force from agent to object which constitute natural phe- nomena, occupy time. Therefore, a reproduction of them in imagination requires the same temporal order. *
* [Style, that is to say, limpidity, as opposed to rhetoric. E. P. ]
:
? 362 INSTIGATIONS
Suppose that we look otit of a window and watch a man. Suddenlyheturnshisheadandactivelyfixeshis attention upon something. We look ourselves and see that his vision has been focussed upon a horse. We saw, first, the man before he acted; second, while he acted; third, the object toward which his action was directed. In speech we split up the rapid continuity of this action and of its picture into its three essential parts or joints in the right order, and say :
Man sees horse.
It is clear that these three joints, or words, are only three phonetic symbols, which stand for the three terms of a natural process. But we could quite as easily de- note these three stages of our thought by symbols equally arbitrary, which had no basis in sound; for example, by three Chinese characters
Man / Sees Horse
If we all knew what division of this mental horse- picture each of these signs stood for, we could communi- cate continuous thought to one another as easily by draw- ingthemasbyspeakingwords. Wehabituallyemploy the visible language of gesture in much this same man- ner.
But Chinese notation is something much more than arbitrary symbols. It is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature. In the algebraic figure and in the spoken word there is no natural con- nection between thing and sign: all depends upon sheer
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 363
convention. But the Chinese method follows natural suggestion. First stands the man on his two legs. Sec- ond, his eye moves through space: a bold figure repre- sented by running legs under an eye, a modified picture of an eye, a modified picture of running legs but unfor- gettable once you have seen it. Third stands the horse on his four legs.
The thought picture is not only called up by these signs as well as by words but far more vividly and concretely. Legs belong to all three characters : they are alive. The group holds something of the quality of a continuous moving picture.
The untruth of a painting or a photograph is that, in spite of its concreteness, it drops the elejnent of natural succession.
Contrast the Laocoon statue with Browning's lines: "I sprang to the saddle, and Jorris, and he
And into the midnight we galloped abreast. "
One superiority of verbal poetry as an art rests in its getting back to the fundamental reality of time. Chinese poetry has the unique advantage of combining both ele- ments. Itspeaksatoncewiththevividnessofpainting, and with the mobility of sounds. It is, in some sense, moreobjectivethaneither,moredramatic. Inreading1 Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters,
but to be watching things work out their own fate. Leaving for a moment the form of the sentence, let us look more closely at this quality of vividness in the structureofdetachedChinesewords. Theearlierforms of these characters were pictorial, and their hold upon the imagination is little shaken, even in later conventional
? 364 INSTIGATIONS
modifications. It is not so well known, perhaps, that the great fiumber of these ideographic roots carry in them a verbal idea of action. It might be thought that a picture is naturally the picture of a thing, and that there- fore the root ideas of Chinese are what grammar calls nouns.
But examination shows that a large number of the primitive Chinese characters, even the so-called radicals, are shorthand pictures of actions or processes.
For example, the ideograph meaning "to speak" is a mouth with two words and a flame coming out of it. The sign meaning "to grow up with difficulty" is grass with a twisted root. But this concrete verb quality, both in nature and in the Chinese signs, becomes far more striking and poetic when we pass from such simple, orig- inal pictures to compounds. In this process of com- pounding, two things added together do not produce a third thing but suggest some fundamental relation be- tween them. For example, the ideograph for a "mess- mate" is a man and a fire.
A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in na- ture. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross-sections cut through ac- tions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them.
The sun underlying the bursting forth of plants = spring.
The sun sign tangled in the branches of the tree sign = east.
"Rice-field" plus "struggle"=male.
"Boat" plus "water," boat-water, a ripple.
Let us return to the form of the sentence and see what
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 365
power it adds to the verbal units from which it builds. I wonder how many people have asked themselves why the sentence form exists at all, why it seems so univer- sally necessary in all languages? Why must all possess it, and what is the normal type of it ? If it be so univer- sal it ought to correspond to some primary law of nature.
I fancy the professional grammarians have given but a lame response to this inquiry. Their definitions fall into two types : one, that a sentence expresses a "com- plete thought"; the other, that in it we bring about a union of subject and predicate.
The former has the advantage of trying for some nat- ural objective standard, since it is evident that a thought cannotbethetestofitsowncompleteness. Butinna- ture there is no completeness. On the one hand, prac- tical completeness may be expressed by a mere inter- jection, as "Hi! there! ", or "Scat! ", or even by shaking one's fist. No sentence is needed to make one's mean- ing more clear. On the other hand, no full sentence reallycompletesathought. Themanwhoseesandthe horse which is seen will not stand still. The man was planning a ride before he looked. The horse kicked whenthemantriedtocatchhim. Thetruthisthatacts aresuccessive,evencontinuous; onecausesorpassesinto another. And though we may string never so many clauses into a single compound sentence, motion leaks everywhere, like electricity from an exposed wire. All processesinnatureareinter-related; andthustherecould be no complete sentence (according to this definition) save one which it would take all time to pronounce.
In the second definition of the sentence, as "uniting a subject and a predicate," the grammarian falls back on pure subjectivity. We do it all ; it is a little private jug- glingbetweenourrightandlefthands. Thesubjectis
? 366 INSTIGATIONS
thataboutwhich/amgoingtotalk; thepredicateisthat which / am going to say about it. The sentence accord- ing to this definition is not an attribute of nature but an accident of man as a conversational animal.
If it were really so, then there could be no possible test of the truth of a sentence. Falsehood would be as specious as verity. Speech would carry no conviction.
Of course this view of the grammarians springs from the discredited, or rather the useless, logic of the middle ages. According to this logic, thought deals with ab- stractions, concepts drawn out of things by a sifting process. These logicians never inquired how the "qual- ities" which they pulled out of things came to be there. The truth of all their little checker-board juggling de- pended upon the natural order by which these powers or properties or qualities were folded in concrete things, yet they despised the "thing" as a mere "particular," or pawn. ItwasasifBotanyshouldreasonfromtheleaf- patterns woven into our table-cloths. Valid scientific thought consists in following as closely as may be the actual and entangled lines of forces as they pulse through things. Thought deals with no bloodless concepts but watches things move under its microscope.
The sentence form was forced upon primitive men by nature itself. It was not we who made it; it was a re- flection of the temporal order in causation. All truth has to be expressed in sentences because all truth is the transferenceofpomer. Thetypeofsentenceinnature is a flash of lightning. It passes between two terms, a cloud and the earth. No unit of natural process can be less than this. All natural processes are, in their units, as much as this. Light, heat, gravity, chemical affinity, human will have this in common, that they redistribute force. Their unit of process can be represented as:
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 367 term
? 368 INSTIGATIONS
cation, were it not the natural order--that is, the order * ofcauseandeffect.
^ It is true that there are, in language, intransitive and passive forms, sentences built out of the verb "tb be," and, finally, negative forms. To grammarians and logi- cians these have seemed more primitive than the transi- tive, or at least exceptions to the transitive. I had long suspected that these apparently exceptional forms had grown from the transitive or worn away from it by alteration or modification. This view is confirmed by Chinese examples, wherein it is still possible to watch the
transformation going on.
The intransitive form derives from the transitive by
dropping a generalized, customary, reflexive or cognate object. "He runs (a race). " "The sky reddens (it- self). " "We breathe (air). " Thus we get weak and incomplete sentences which suspend the picture and lead us to think of some verbs as denoting states rather than acts. Outside grammar the word "state" would hardly be recognized as scientific. Who can doubt that when we say, "The wall shines," we mean that it actively re- flects light to our eye?
The beauty of Chinese verbs is that they are all tran- sitive or intransitive at pleasure. There is no such thing as a naturally intransitive verb. The passive form is evidently a correlative sentence, which turns about and makes the object into a subject. That the object is not in itself passive, but contributes some positive force of its own to the action, is in harmony both with scientific
lawandwithordinaryexperience. TheEnglishpassive voice with "is" seemed at first an obstacle to this hy- pothesis, but one suspected that the true form was a gen- eralized transitive verb meaning something like "re-
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 369
ceive,"whichhaddegeneratedintoanauxiliary. Itwas a delight to find this the case in Chinese.
In nature there are no negations, no possible transfers of negative force. The presence of negative sentences in language would seem to corroborate the logicians' view that assertion is an arbitrary subjective act. We can assert a negation, though nature can not. But here again science comes to our aid against the logician: all apparently negative or disruptive movements bring into play other positive forces. It requires great effort to annihilate. Therefore we should suspect that, if we could follow back the history of all negative particles, we should find that they also are sprung from transitive verbs. It is too late to demonstrate such derivations in the Aryan languages, the clue has been lost, but in Chi- nese we can still watch positive verbal conceptions pass- ing over into so-called negatives. Thus in Chinese the sign meaning "to be lost in the forest" relates to a State of non-existence. English "not"=:the Sanskrit na, which may come from the root na, to be lost, to perish.
Lastly comes the infinitive which substitutes for a spe- cific colored verb the universal copula "is," followed by a noun or an adjective. We do not say a tree "greens itself," but "the tree is green;" not that "monkeys bring forth live young," but that "the monkey is a mammal. " Thisisanultimateweaknessoflanguage. Ithascome from generalizing all intransitive words into one. As "live," "see," "walk," "breathe," are generalized into states by dropping their objects, so these weak verbs nre in turn reduced to the abstractest state of all, namely,
bare existence.
There is in reality no such verb as a pure copula, no
such original conception, our very word exist means "to stand forth," to show oneself by a definite act. "Is"
? 370
INSTIGATIONS
comes from the Aryan root as, to breathe. "Be" is from bhu, to grow.
In Chinese the chief verb for "is" not only means actively "to have," but shows by its derivation that it expresses something even more concrete, namely, "to snatchfromthemoonwiththehand. " Herethebald- est symbol of prosaic analysis is transformed by magic into a splendid flash of concrete poetry.
I shall not have entered vainly into this long analysis of the sentence if I have succeeded in showing how po- etical is the Chinese form and how close to nature. In translating Chinese, verse especially, we must hold as closely as possible to the concrete force of the original, eschewing adjectives, nouns and intransitive forms wherever we can, and seeking instead strong and indi- vidual verbs.
Lastly we notice that the likeness of form between Chinese and English sentences renders translation from one to the other exceptionally easy. The genius of the two is much the same. Frequently it is possible by omitting English particles to make a literal word-for- word translation which will be not only intelligible in English, but even the strongest and most poetical Eng- lish. Here, however, one must follow closely what is said, not merely what is abstractly meant.
Let us go back from the Chinese sentence to the indi- vidualwrittenword. Howaresuchwordstobeclassi- fied? Aresomeofthemnounsbynature,someverbs and some adjectives ? Are there pronouns, and preposi- tions and conjunctions in Chinese as in good Christian languages ?
One is led to suspect from an analysis of the Aryan languages that such differences are not natural, and that they have been unfortunately invented by grammarians
? tHE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 371
to confuse the simple poetic outlook on life. All nations have written their strongest and most vivid literature be- fore they invented a grammar. Moreover, all Aryati etymology points back to roots which are the equivalents of simple Sanskrit verbs, such as we find tabulated at the back of our Skeat. Nature herself has no grammar. * Fancy picking up a man and telling him that he is a noun, a dead thing rather than a bundle of functions ! A "part of speech" is only what it does. Frequently our lines of cleavage fail, one part of speech acts for an- other. They act for one another because they were orig- inally one and the same.
Few of us realize that in our own language these very differences once grew up in living articulation ; that they still retain life. It is . only when the difficulty of placing some odd term arises or when we are forced to translate into some very different language, that we attain for a moment the inner heat of thought, a heat which melts down the parts of speech to recast them at will.
One of the most interesting facts about the Chinese language is that in it we can see, not only the forms of sentences, but literally the parts of speech growing up, buddingforthonefromanother. Likenature,theChinese words are alive and plastic, because thing and action are notforiiiallyseparated. TheChineselanguagenaturally knows no grammar. It is only lately that foreigners, European and Japanese, have begim to torture this vital speech by forcing it to fit the bed of their definitions.
* Even Latin, living Latin had not the network of rules they foist upon unfortunate school-children. These are borrowed sometimes from Greek grammarians, even as I have seen Eng- lish grammars borrowing oblique cases from Latin grammars. Sometimes they sprang from the grammatizing or categorizing passion of pedants. Living Latin had only the feel of the cases: the ablative and dative emotion. --E. P.
? 372 INSTIGATIONS
We import into our reading of Chinese all the weakness ofourownformalisms. Thisisespeciallysadinpoetry, because the one necessity, even in our own poetry, is to keep words as flexible as possible, as full of the sap of nature.
Letusgofurtherwithourexample. InEnglishwe call "to shine" a verb in the infinitive, because it gives the abstract meaning of the verb without conditions. If we want a corresponding adjective we take a different word, "bright. " If we need a noun we say "luminosity," whichisabstract,beingderivedfromanadjective. * To get a tolerably concrete noun, we have to leave behind the verb and adjective roots, and light upon a thing arbi- trarily cut off from its power of action, say "the sun" or "themoon. " Ofcoursethereisnothinginnaturesocut off, and therefore this nounizing is itself an abstraction. Even if we did have a common word underlying at once
the verb "shine," the adjective "bright" and the noun "sun," we should probably call it an "infinitive of the infinitive. " According to our ideas, it should be some- thing extremely abstract, too intangible for use.
TheChinesehaveoneword,mingormet. Itsideo- graph is the sign of the sun together with the sign of the
moon.
TRANSLATION OF AESCHYLUS
A SEARCH for Aeschylus in English is deadly, ac- cursed, mind-rending. Browning has "done" the Aga- memnon, or "done the Agamemnon in the eye" as the criticmaychoosetoconsider. Hehaswrittenamodest and an apparently intelligent preface:
"I should hardly look for an impossible transmission of the reputed magniloquence and sonority of the Greek and this with the less regret, inasmuch as there is abun- dant musicality elsewhere, but nowhere else than in his poem the ideas of the poet. "
He quotes Matthew Arnold on the Greeks : "their ex- pression is so excellent, because it is so simple and so well subordinated, because it draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it conveys . . . not a word wasted, not a sentiment capriciously thrown in, stroke on stroke. "
* Reading ipyv(piourtii, variant ipyupkouriv, offered in footnote. In any case argentea is closer than Candida.
--
? 346 INSTIGATIONS
He is reasonable about the Greek spelling. He points out that tbvov iBav KaXKiffrov avdpSiv sounds very poorly as "Seeing her son the fairest of men'' but is out- shouted in "Remirando il figliuolo bellissimo degli uomini," and protests his fidelity to the meaning of Aeschylus.
His weakness in this work is where it essentially lay in all of his expression, it rests in the term "ideas" "Thought" as Browning understood it--"ideas" as the term is current, are poor two dimensional stuff, a scant, scratch covering. "Damn ideas, anyhow. " An idea is only an imperfect induction from fact.
The solid, the "last atom of force verging off into the first atom of matter" is the force, the emotion, the ob- jective sight of the poet. In the Agamemnon it is the whole rush of the action, the whole wildness of Kassan- dra's continual shrieking, the flash of the beacon fires burning unstinted wood, the outburst of
Tpoiav Axaiwv oiaav,
or the later
Tpoiav 'Axatot rr/S' exova' iv iiTtpa.
"Troy is the greeks'. " Even Rossetti has it better than Browning: "Troy's down, tall Troy's on fire," anything, literally anything that can be shouted, that can be shouted uncontrolledly and hysterically. "Troy is the Greeks' " is an ambiguity for the ear. "Know that our men are in Ilion. "
Anything but a stilted unsayable jargon. Yet with Browning we have
:
? TRANSLATORS OF GREEK "Troia the Achaioi hold," and later,
"Troia do the Achaioi hold," followed by
"this same day
I think a noise--no mixture--reigns i' the city
Sour wine and unguent pour thou in one vessel
1347
Anditdoesnotendhere. Infactitreachesthenadirof its bathos in a later speech of Klutaimnestra in the line
"The perfect man his home perambulating! "
We may add several exclamation points to the one which Mr. Browning has provided. But then all translation is a thankless, or is at least most apt to be a thankless and desolate undertaking.
What Browning had not got into his sometimes ex- cellent top-knot was the patent, or what should be the patent fact that inversions of sentence order in an unin- flected language like English are not, simply and utterly are not any sort of equivalent for inversions and per- turbations of order in a language inflected as Greek and Latin are inflected. That is the chief source of his error. In these inflected languages order has other cur- rents than simple sequence of subject, predicate, object; and all sorts of departures from this Franco-English natural position are in Greek and Latin neither confus-
ing nor delaying ; they may be both simple and emphatic, they do not obstruct one's apperception of the verbal relations.
Obscurities not inherent in the matter, obscurities due not to the thing but to the wording, are a botch, and are
"
? 348 INSTIGATIONS
not worth preserving in a translation. The work lives not by them but despite them.
Rossetti is in this matter sounder than Browning, when he says that the only thing worth bringing over is the beauty of the original; and despite Rossetti's pur- ple plush and molasses trimmings he meant by "beauty" something fairly near what we mean by the "emotional intensity" of his original.
Obscvurities (inherent in the thing occur when the author is piercing, or trying to pierce into, uncharted regions ; when he is trying to express things not yet current, not yet worn into phrase; when he is ahead of the emotional, or philosophic sense (as a painter might be ahead of the color-sense) of his contemporaries.
As for the word-sense and phrase-sense, we still hear workmen and peasants and metropolitan bus-riders re- peating the simplest sentences three and four times, back and forth between interlocutors : trying to get the sense "I sez to Bill, I'm goin' to 'Arrow" or some other such subtlety from one occiput into another.
"You sez to Bill, etc. " "Yus, I sez . . . etc. "
! "
"O
The first day's search at the Museum reveals "Aeschylus" printed by Aldus in 1518; by Stephanus in 1557, no English translation before 1777, a couple in the 1820's, more in the middle of the century, since 1880 past counting, and no promising names in the list. Sophocles falls to Jebb and does not appear satisfactory.
From which welter one returns thankfully to the Thomas Stanley Greek and Latin edition, with Saml. Butler's notes, Cambridge, "typis ac sumptibus acade- micis," 1811--once a guinea or half a guinea per vol- ume, half leather, but now mercifully, since people no
:
? TRANSLATORS OF GREEK
349
longer read Latin, picked up at 2s. for the set (eight volumes in all), rather less than the price of their postage. Quartos in excellent type.
Browning shows himself poet in such phrases as "dust, mud's thirsty brother," which is easy, perhaps, but is English, even Browning's own particular English, as "dust, of mud brother thirsty," would not be English at all; and if I have been extremely harsh in dealing with the first passage quoted it is still undisputable that I have^readJBrowning off and on fqrjeycnteati, years with no small pleasure and admiration, and am one of the few people who know anything about his Sordello, and have never read his Agamemnon, have not even now when it falls into a special study been able to get through his Agamemnon.
Take another test passage
OStos kaiv Ayaftkuvuv, k/xds ILSais, veKpds Sk rrjaSe de|ias x<<P^s
"Epyov SiKalvas riKTOvos. Tad' SiS ? x<<- ^415
"Hicce est Agamemnon, maritus Mens, hac dextra mortuus,
Facinus justae artificis. Haec ita se habent. " We turn to Browning and find:
"--^this man is Agamemnon,
My husband, dead, the work of this right hand here. Aye, of a just artificer : so things are. "
To the infinite advantage of the Latin, and the com- plete explanation of why Browning's Aeschylus, to say nothing of forty other translations of Aeschylus, is un- readable.
? INSTIGATIONS Any bungling translation:
"This is Agamemnon, My husband,
Dead by this hand.
And a good job. These, gentlemen, are the facts. "
No, that is extreme, but the point is that any natural wording, anything which keeps the mind off theatricals and on Klutaimnestra actual, dealing with an actual situation, and not pestering the reader with frills and festoons of language, is worth all the convoluted tush- ery that the Victorians can heap together.
I can conceive no improvement on the Latin, it saves by dextra for 5e|ta$ x^posi it loses a few letters in "se habent," but it has the same drive as the Greek.
The Latin can be a whole commentary on the Greek, or at least it can give one the whole parsing and order, and let one proceed at a comforable rate with but the most rudimentary knowledge of the original language. And I do not think this a trifle; it would be an ill day if men again let the classics go by the board; we should fall into something worse than, or as bad as, the counter- reformation: a welter of gum-shoes, and cocoa, and Y. M. C. A. and Webbs, and social theorizing commit- tees, and the general hell of a groggy doctrinaire ob- fuscation; and the very disagreeablizing of the classics, every pedagogy which puts the masterwork further from us, either by obstructing the schoolboy, or breeding af- fectation in dilettante readers, works toward such a detestable end. I do not know that strict logic will cover all of the matter, or that I can formulate anjrthing beyond a belief that we test a translation by the feel, and particularly by the feel of being in contact with
350
! ::
? TRANSLATORS OF GREEK
351
the force of a great original, and it does not seem to me that one can open this Latin text of the Agamemnon without getting such sense of contact
"Mox sciemus lampadum luciferarum
Signorumque per faces et ignis vices,
An vere sint, an somniorum instar,
Gratum veniens illud lumen eluserit animum nostrum. Praeconem hunc a littore video obumbratum Ramisolivae: testaturautemhaecmihifrater
Luti socius aridus pulvis,
Quod neque mutus, neque accendens facem Materiae montanae signa dabit per fumum ignis. "
or
"Apollo, Apollo!
Agyieu Apollo mi
Ah! quo me tandem duxisti? ad qualem domum?
109s
"Heu, heu, ecce, ecce, cohibe a vacca 1134 Taurum: vestibus involens
Nigricornem machina
Percutit; cadit vero in aquali vase.
Insidiosi lebetis casum ut intelligas velim.
Heu, heu, argutae lusciniae fatum mihi tribuis:
"Heu nuptiae, nuptiae Paridis exitiales 1165 Amicis! eheu Scamandri patria unda! "
All this howling of Kassandra comes at one from the page, and the grimness also of the Iambics
"Ohime! lethali intus percussus sum vulnere. " 1352 "Tace: quis clamat vulnus lethaliter vulneratus? "
498
? /352 INSTIGATIONS
"Ohime! iterum secundo ictu sauciatus. "
"Patrari facinus mihi videtur regis ex ejulatu. 1355 "At tuta communicemus consilia. "
"Ego quidem vobis meam dico sententiam," etc.
Here or in the opening of the play, or where you like in this Latin, we are at once in contact with the action, something real is going on, we are keen and curious on the instant, but I cannot get any such impact from any part of the Browning.
"In bellum nuptam,
Auctricem que contentionum, Helenam: 695 Quippe quae congruenter
Perditrix navium, perditrix virorum, perditrix urbium, E delicatis
Thalami ornamentis navigavit
Zephyri terrigenae aura.
Et numerosi scutiferi,
Venatores secundum vestigia,
Remorum inapparentia
Appulerunt ad Simoentis ripas
Foliis abundantes
Ob jurgium cruentum. "
"War-wed, author of strife,
Fitly Helen, destroyer of ships, of men. Destroyer of cities.
From delicate-curtained room
Sped by land breezes.
"Swift the shields on your track. Oars on the unseen traces.
And leafy Simois
? TRANSLATORS OF GREEK Gone red with blood. " *
Contested Helen, 'Aam^imik^.
"War-wed, contested,
(Fitly) Helen, destroyer of ships; of men;
Destroyer of cities,
"From the delicate-curtained room Sped by land breezes.
"Swift on the shields on your track. Oars on the unseen traces.
"Red leaves in Simois! "
"Rank flower of love, for Troy. "
353
"Quippe leonem educavit . . . 726 Mansuetum, pxieris amabilem . . .
. . . divinitus sacerdos Ates (i. e. Paris)
In aedibus enutritus est.
"Statim igitur venit
Ad urbem Ilii,
Ut ita dicam, animus Tranquillae serenitatis, placidum Divitiarum ornamentum Blandum oculourimi telum,
746
* "H. D. 's" translations from Euripides should be mentioned either here or in connection with "The New Poetry" ; she has obtained beautiful strophes for First Chorus of Iphigenia in Aulis, 1-4 and 9, and for the first of the second chorus. Else- where she retains certain needless locutions, and her versifica- tion permits too many dead stops in its current.
? 354
INSTIGATIONS
Animum pungens flos amoris (Helena)accubitura. Perfecitautem Nuptiarum acerbos exitus,
Mala vicina, mafaque socia,
Irruens in Priamidas, Ductu Jovis Hospitalis, Erinnys luctuosa sponsis. "
It seems to me that English translators have gone wide in two ways, first in trying to keep every adjective, when obviously many adjectives in the original have only melodic value, secondly they have been deaved with syn- tax; have wasted time, involved their English, trying first to evolve a definite logical structure for the, Greek and secondly to preserve it, and alt its grammatical re- lations, in English.
One might almost say that Aeschylus' Greek is agglu- tinative, that his general drive, especially in choruses, is merely to remind the audience of the events of the Tro- jan war; that syntax is subordinate, and duly subordi- nated, left out, that he is not austere, but often even ver- bose after a fashion (not Euripides' fashion).
A reading version might omit various things which would be of true service only if the English were actually to be sung on a stage, or chanted to the movements of the choric dance or procession.
Above suggestions should not be followed with intem- perance. Butcertainlymoresenseandlesssyntax(good or bad) in translations of Aeschylus might be a relief.
Chor. Anapest:
"O iniquam Helenam, una quae multas, 1464
Multas admodum animas
Perdidisti ad Trojam!
Nunc vero nobilern memorabilem (Agam. animam).
: ;
? TRANSLATORS OF GREEK 3S5
Deflorasti per caedem inexpiabilem. Talis erat tunc in aedibus
Eris viri domitrix aerumna. "
Clytemnestra
"Nequaquam mortis sortem exopta 1470
Hisce gravatus
Neque in Helenam iram convertas, Tanquam viriperdam, ac si una multorum Virorum animas Graecorum perdens, Intolerabilem dolorem effecerit. "
Clytertmestra
"Mortem baud indignam arbitrar 1530
Huic contigisse:
Neque enim ille insidiosam cladem Aedibus intulit; sed meum ex ipso Germen sublatum, multum defletam Iphigeniam cum indigne affecerit, Digna passus est, nihil in inferno Glorietur, gladio. inflicta
Morte luens quae prior perpetravit. "
1
"Death not unearned, nor yet a novelty in this house Let him make talk in hell concerning Iphigenia. "
(If we allow the last as ironic equivalent of the literal "let him not boast in hell. ")
"He gets but a thrust once given (by him) Back-pay, for Iphigenia. "
One can further condense the English but at the cost of obscurity.
;
? 356 INSTIGATIONS
Morshead is bearable in Clytemnestra's description of the beacons.
"From Ida's top Hephaestos, Lord of fire,
Sent forth his sign, and on, and ever on,
Beacon to beacon sped the courier-flame
From Ida to the crag, that Hermes loves
On Lemnos; thence into the steep sublime
Of Athos, throne of Zeus, the broad blaze flared. Thence, raised aloft to shoot across the sea
The moving light, rejoicing in its strength
Sped from the pyre of pine, and urged its way, In golden glory, like some strange new sun, Onward and reached Macistus' watching heights. "
? IX
THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER AS A MEDIUM FOR POETRY
BY ERNEST FENOLLOSA
[This essay was practically finished by the late Ernest Fenol- losa; I have done little more than remove a few repetitions and shape a few sentences.
We have here not a bare philological discussion, but a study of the fundamentals of all (esthetics. In his search through un- known art Fenollosa, coming upon unknown motives and prin- ciples unrecognised in the West, was already led into many modes of thought since fruitful in "new" western painting "^and poetry. He was a forerunner without knowing it and without being known, as such.
He discerned principles of writing which he had scarcely time toputintopractice. Inlapanherestored,orgreatlyhelpedto restore, a respect for the native art. In America and Europe he cannot be looked upon as a mere searcher after exotics. His mind was constantly filled with parallels and comparisons between eastern and zvestern art. To him the exotic was always a means of fructification. He looked to an American renais- sance. The vitality of his outlook can be judged from the fact that although this essay was written some time before his death in 1908 / have not had to change the allusions to western con- ditions. The later movements in art have corroborated his theories. --Ezra Pound. ]
This twentieth century not only turns a new page in the book of the world, but opens another and a startling chapter. Vistas of strange futures unfold for man, of world-embracing cultures half weaned from Europe, of hitherto undreamed responsibilities for nations and races.
357
? 358
INSTIGATIONS
The Chinese problem alone is so vast that no nation can afford to ignore it. We in America, especially, must face it across the Pacific, and master it or it will master us. And the only way to master it is to strive with pa- tient sympathy to understand the best, the most hopeful and the most human elements in it.
It is unfortunate that England and America have so long ignored or mistaken the deeper problems of Ori- ental culture. We have misconceived the Chinese for a materialistic people, for a debased and worn-out race. We have belittled the Japanese as a nation of copyists. We have stupidly assumed that Chinese history affords no glimpse of change in social evolution, no salient epoch of moral and spiritual crisis. We have denied the es- sential humanity of these peoples; and we have toyed with their ideals as if they were no better than comic songs in an "opera bouffe. "
The duty that faces us is not to batter down their forts or to exploit their markets, but to study and to come to sympathize with their humanity and their generous as- pirations. Their type of cultivation has been high. Their harvest of recorded experience doubles our own. The Chinese have been idealists, and experimenters in the making of great principles; their history opens a world of lofty aim and achievement, parallel to that of
the ancient Mediterranean peoples. We need their best ideals to supplement our own--ideals enshrined in their art, in their literature and in the tragedies of their lives.
We have already seen proof of the vitality and practi- cal value of oriental painting for ourselves and as a key to the eastern soul. It may be worth while to approach their literature, the intensest part of it, their poetry, even in an imperfect manner.
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 359
I feel that I should perhaps apologize * for presuming to follow that series of brilliant scholars, Davis, Legge, St. Denys and Giles, who have treated the subject of Chinese poetry with a wealth of erudition to which I can proffer no claim. It is not as a professional linguist nor as a sinologue that I humbly put forward what I have to say. As an enthusiastic student of beauty in Oriental culture, having spent a large portion of my years in close relation with Orientals, I could not but breathe in something of the poetry incarnated in their lives.
I have been for the most part moved to my temerity by personal considerations. An unfortunate belief has spread both in England and in America that Chinese and Japanese poetry are hardly more than an amusement, trivial, childish, and not to be reckoned in the world's serious literary performance. I have heard well-known sinologues state that, save for the purposes of profes- sional linguistic scholarship, these branches of poetry are fields too barren to repay the toil necessary for their cul- tivation.
Now my own impression has been so radically and di- ametrically opposed to such a conclusion, that a sheer en- thusiasm of generosity has driven me to wish to share withotherOccidentalsmynewlydiscoveredjoy. Either I am pleasingly self-deceived in my positive delight, or else there must be some lack of aesthetic sympathy and of poetic feeling in the accepted methods of presenting thepoetryofChina. Isubmitmycausesofjoy.
Failure or success in presenting any alien poetry in English must depend largely upon poetic workmanship in the chosen medium. It was perhaps too much to
* [The apology was unnecessary, but Professor Fenollosa saw fit to make it, and I therefore transcribe his words. --E. P. ]
:
? 36o INSTIGATIONS
expect that aged scholars who had spent their youth in gladiatorial combats with the refractory Chinese charac- ters should succeed also as poets.
Even Greek verse might have fared equally ill had its purveyors been per- force content with provincial standards of English rhym- ing. Sinologues should remember that the purpose of poetical translation is the poetry, not the verbal defini- tions in dictionaries.
One modest merit I may, perhaps, claim for my work it represents for the first time a Japanese school of study in Chinese culture. Hitherto Europeans have been some- what at the mercy of contemporary Chinese scholarship. Several centuries ago China lost much of her creative self, and of her insight into the causes of her own life, but her original* spirit still lives, grows, interprets, trans- ferred to Japan in all its original freshness. The Japa- nese to-day represent a stage of culture roughly corre- sponding to that of China under the Sung dynasty. I have been fortunate in studying for many years as a pri- vate pupil under Professor Kainan Mori, who is prob- ablythegreatestlivingauthorityonChinesepoetry. He has recently been called to a chair in the Imperial Uni- versity of Tokio.
My subject is poetry, not language, yet the roots of poetry are in language. In the study of a language so alien in form to ours as is Chinese in its written charac- ter, it is necessary to inquire how those universal ele- ments of form which constitute poetics can derive appro- priate nutriment.
In what sense can verse, written in terms of visible hierogl3rphics, be reckoned true poetry? It might seem that poetry, which like music is a time art, weaving its unities out of successive impressions of sound, could
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with difficulty assimilate a verbal medium consisting largely of semi-pictorial appeals to the eye.
Contrast, for example, Gray's line:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day
with the Chinese line
Moon Rays Like Pure Snow Moon rays like pure snow.
Unless the sound of the latter be given, what have they in common ? It is not enough to adduce that each con- tains a certain body of prosaic meaning; for the ques- tion is, how can the Chinese line imply, as form, the very element that distinguishes poetry from prose?
On second glance, it is seen that the Chinese words, though visible, occur in just as necessary an order as thephoneticsymbolsofGray. Allthatpoeticformre- quires is a regular and flexible sequence, as plastic as thought itself. The characters may be seen and read, silently by the eye, one after the other:
Moon rays like pure snow.
Perhaps we do not always sufficiently consider that thought is successive, not through some accident or weak- ness of our subjective operations but because the opera- tions of nature are successive. The transferences of force from agent to object which constitute natural phe- nomena, occupy time. Therefore, a reproduction of them in imagination requires the same temporal order. *
* [Style, that is to say, limpidity, as opposed to rhetoric. E. P. ]
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Suppose that we look otit of a window and watch a man. Suddenlyheturnshisheadandactivelyfixeshis attention upon something. We look ourselves and see that his vision has been focussed upon a horse. We saw, first, the man before he acted; second, while he acted; third, the object toward which his action was directed. In speech we split up the rapid continuity of this action and of its picture into its three essential parts or joints in the right order, and say :
Man sees horse.
It is clear that these three joints, or words, are only three phonetic symbols, which stand for the three terms of a natural process. But we could quite as easily de- note these three stages of our thought by symbols equally arbitrary, which had no basis in sound; for example, by three Chinese characters
Man / Sees Horse
If we all knew what division of this mental horse- picture each of these signs stood for, we could communi- cate continuous thought to one another as easily by draw- ingthemasbyspeakingwords. Wehabituallyemploy the visible language of gesture in much this same man- ner.
But Chinese notation is something much more than arbitrary symbols. It is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature. In the algebraic figure and in the spoken word there is no natural con- nection between thing and sign: all depends upon sheer
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 363
convention. But the Chinese method follows natural suggestion. First stands the man on his two legs. Sec- ond, his eye moves through space: a bold figure repre- sented by running legs under an eye, a modified picture of an eye, a modified picture of running legs but unfor- gettable once you have seen it. Third stands the horse on his four legs.
The thought picture is not only called up by these signs as well as by words but far more vividly and concretely. Legs belong to all three characters : they are alive. The group holds something of the quality of a continuous moving picture.
The untruth of a painting or a photograph is that, in spite of its concreteness, it drops the elejnent of natural succession.
Contrast the Laocoon statue with Browning's lines: "I sprang to the saddle, and Jorris, and he
And into the midnight we galloped abreast. "
One superiority of verbal poetry as an art rests in its getting back to the fundamental reality of time. Chinese poetry has the unique advantage of combining both ele- ments. Itspeaksatoncewiththevividnessofpainting, and with the mobility of sounds. It is, in some sense, moreobjectivethaneither,moredramatic. Inreading1 Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters,
but to be watching things work out their own fate. Leaving for a moment the form of the sentence, let us look more closely at this quality of vividness in the structureofdetachedChinesewords. Theearlierforms of these characters were pictorial, and their hold upon the imagination is little shaken, even in later conventional
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modifications. It is not so well known, perhaps, that the great fiumber of these ideographic roots carry in them a verbal idea of action. It might be thought that a picture is naturally the picture of a thing, and that there- fore the root ideas of Chinese are what grammar calls nouns.
But examination shows that a large number of the primitive Chinese characters, even the so-called radicals, are shorthand pictures of actions or processes.
For example, the ideograph meaning "to speak" is a mouth with two words and a flame coming out of it. The sign meaning "to grow up with difficulty" is grass with a twisted root. But this concrete verb quality, both in nature and in the Chinese signs, becomes far more striking and poetic when we pass from such simple, orig- inal pictures to compounds. In this process of com- pounding, two things added together do not produce a third thing but suggest some fundamental relation be- tween them. For example, the ideograph for a "mess- mate" is a man and a fire.
A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in na- ture. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross-sections cut through ac- tions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them.
The sun underlying the bursting forth of plants = spring.
The sun sign tangled in the branches of the tree sign = east.
"Rice-field" plus "struggle"=male.
"Boat" plus "water," boat-water, a ripple.
Let us return to the form of the sentence and see what
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 365
power it adds to the verbal units from which it builds. I wonder how many people have asked themselves why the sentence form exists at all, why it seems so univer- sally necessary in all languages? Why must all possess it, and what is the normal type of it ? If it be so univer- sal it ought to correspond to some primary law of nature.
I fancy the professional grammarians have given but a lame response to this inquiry. Their definitions fall into two types : one, that a sentence expresses a "com- plete thought"; the other, that in it we bring about a union of subject and predicate.
The former has the advantage of trying for some nat- ural objective standard, since it is evident that a thought cannotbethetestofitsowncompleteness. Butinna- ture there is no completeness. On the one hand, prac- tical completeness may be expressed by a mere inter- jection, as "Hi! there! ", or "Scat! ", or even by shaking one's fist. No sentence is needed to make one's mean- ing more clear. On the other hand, no full sentence reallycompletesathought. Themanwhoseesandthe horse which is seen will not stand still. The man was planning a ride before he looked. The horse kicked whenthemantriedtocatchhim. Thetruthisthatacts aresuccessive,evencontinuous; onecausesorpassesinto another. And though we may string never so many clauses into a single compound sentence, motion leaks everywhere, like electricity from an exposed wire. All processesinnatureareinter-related; andthustherecould be no complete sentence (according to this definition) save one which it would take all time to pronounce.
In the second definition of the sentence, as "uniting a subject and a predicate," the grammarian falls back on pure subjectivity. We do it all ; it is a little private jug- glingbetweenourrightandlefthands. Thesubjectis
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thataboutwhich/amgoingtotalk; thepredicateisthat which / am going to say about it. The sentence accord- ing to this definition is not an attribute of nature but an accident of man as a conversational animal.
If it were really so, then there could be no possible test of the truth of a sentence. Falsehood would be as specious as verity. Speech would carry no conviction.
Of course this view of the grammarians springs from the discredited, or rather the useless, logic of the middle ages. According to this logic, thought deals with ab- stractions, concepts drawn out of things by a sifting process. These logicians never inquired how the "qual- ities" which they pulled out of things came to be there. The truth of all their little checker-board juggling de- pended upon the natural order by which these powers or properties or qualities were folded in concrete things, yet they despised the "thing" as a mere "particular," or pawn. ItwasasifBotanyshouldreasonfromtheleaf- patterns woven into our table-cloths. Valid scientific thought consists in following as closely as may be the actual and entangled lines of forces as they pulse through things. Thought deals with no bloodless concepts but watches things move under its microscope.
The sentence form was forced upon primitive men by nature itself. It was not we who made it; it was a re- flection of the temporal order in causation. All truth has to be expressed in sentences because all truth is the transferenceofpomer. Thetypeofsentenceinnature is a flash of lightning. It passes between two terms, a cloud and the earth. No unit of natural process can be less than this. All natural processes are, in their units, as much as this. Light, heat, gravity, chemical affinity, human will have this in common, that they redistribute force. Their unit of process can be represented as:
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 367 term
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cation, were it not the natural order--that is, the order * ofcauseandeffect.
^ It is true that there are, in language, intransitive and passive forms, sentences built out of the verb "tb be," and, finally, negative forms. To grammarians and logi- cians these have seemed more primitive than the transi- tive, or at least exceptions to the transitive. I had long suspected that these apparently exceptional forms had grown from the transitive or worn away from it by alteration or modification. This view is confirmed by Chinese examples, wherein it is still possible to watch the
transformation going on.
The intransitive form derives from the transitive by
dropping a generalized, customary, reflexive or cognate object. "He runs (a race). " "The sky reddens (it- self). " "We breathe (air). " Thus we get weak and incomplete sentences which suspend the picture and lead us to think of some verbs as denoting states rather than acts. Outside grammar the word "state" would hardly be recognized as scientific. Who can doubt that when we say, "The wall shines," we mean that it actively re- flects light to our eye?
The beauty of Chinese verbs is that they are all tran- sitive or intransitive at pleasure. There is no such thing as a naturally intransitive verb. The passive form is evidently a correlative sentence, which turns about and makes the object into a subject. That the object is not in itself passive, but contributes some positive force of its own to the action, is in harmony both with scientific
lawandwithordinaryexperience. TheEnglishpassive voice with "is" seemed at first an obstacle to this hy- pothesis, but one suspected that the true form was a gen- eralized transitive verb meaning something like "re-
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 369
ceive,"whichhaddegeneratedintoanauxiliary. Itwas a delight to find this the case in Chinese.
In nature there are no negations, no possible transfers of negative force. The presence of negative sentences in language would seem to corroborate the logicians' view that assertion is an arbitrary subjective act. We can assert a negation, though nature can not. But here again science comes to our aid against the logician: all apparently negative or disruptive movements bring into play other positive forces. It requires great effort to annihilate. Therefore we should suspect that, if we could follow back the history of all negative particles, we should find that they also are sprung from transitive verbs. It is too late to demonstrate such derivations in the Aryan languages, the clue has been lost, but in Chi- nese we can still watch positive verbal conceptions pass- ing over into so-called negatives. Thus in Chinese the sign meaning "to be lost in the forest" relates to a State of non-existence. English "not"=:the Sanskrit na, which may come from the root na, to be lost, to perish.
Lastly comes the infinitive which substitutes for a spe- cific colored verb the universal copula "is," followed by a noun or an adjective. We do not say a tree "greens itself," but "the tree is green;" not that "monkeys bring forth live young," but that "the monkey is a mammal. " Thisisanultimateweaknessoflanguage. Ithascome from generalizing all intransitive words into one. As "live," "see," "walk," "breathe," are generalized into states by dropping their objects, so these weak verbs nre in turn reduced to the abstractest state of all, namely,
bare existence.
There is in reality no such verb as a pure copula, no
such original conception, our very word exist means "to stand forth," to show oneself by a definite act. "Is"
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INSTIGATIONS
comes from the Aryan root as, to breathe. "Be" is from bhu, to grow.
In Chinese the chief verb for "is" not only means actively "to have," but shows by its derivation that it expresses something even more concrete, namely, "to snatchfromthemoonwiththehand. " Herethebald- est symbol of prosaic analysis is transformed by magic into a splendid flash of concrete poetry.
I shall not have entered vainly into this long analysis of the sentence if I have succeeded in showing how po- etical is the Chinese form and how close to nature. In translating Chinese, verse especially, we must hold as closely as possible to the concrete force of the original, eschewing adjectives, nouns and intransitive forms wherever we can, and seeking instead strong and indi- vidual verbs.
Lastly we notice that the likeness of form between Chinese and English sentences renders translation from one to the other exceptionally easy. The genius of the two is much the same. Frequently it is possible by omitting English particles to make a literal word-for- word translation which will be not only intelligible in English, but even the strongest and most poetical Eng- lish. Here, however, one must follow closely what is said, not merely what is abstractly meant.
Let us go back from the Chinese sentence to the indi- vidualwrittenword. Howaresuchwordstobeclassi- fied? Aresomeofthemnounsbynature,someverbs and some adjectives ? Are there pronouns, and preposi- tions and conjunctions in Chinese as in good Christian languages ?
One is led to suspect from an analysis of the Aryan languages that such differences are not natural, and that they have been unfortunately invented by grammarians
? tHE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 371
to confuse the simple poetic outlook on life. All nations have written their strongest and most vivid literature be- fore they invented a grammar. Moreover, all Aryati etymology points back to roots which are the equivalents of simple Sanskrit verbs, such as we find tabulated at the back of our Skeat. Nature herself has no grammar. * Fancy picking up a man and telling him that he is a noun, a dead thing rather than a bundle of functions ! A "part of speech" is only what it does. Frequently our lines of cleavage fail, one part of speech acts for an- other. They act for one another because they were orig- inally one and the same.
Few of us realize that in our own language these very differences once grew up in living articulation ; that they still retain life. It is . only when the difficulty of placing some odd term arises or when we are forced to translate into some very different language, that we attain for a moment the inner heat of thought, a heat which melts down the parts of speech to recast them at will.
One of the most interesting facts about the Chinese language is that in it we can see, not only the forms of sentences, but literally the parts of speech growing up, buddingforthonefromanother. Likenature,theChinese words are alive and plastic, because thing and action are notforiiiallyseparated. TheChineselanguagenaturally knows no grammar. It is only lately that foreigners, European and Japanese, have begim to torture this vital speech by forcing it to fit the bed of their definitions.
* Even Latin, living Latin had not the network of rules they foist upon unfortunate school-children. These are borrowed sometimes from Greek grammarians, even as I have seen Eng- lish grammars borrowing oblique cases from Latin grammars. Sometimes they sprang from the grammatizing or categorizing passion of pedants. Living Latin had only the feel of the cases: the ablative and dative emotion. --E. P.
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We import into our reading of Chinese all the weakness ofourownformalisms. Thisisespeciallysadinpoetry, because the one necessity, even in our own poetry, is to keep words as flexible as possible, as full of the sap of nature.
Letusgofurtherwithourexample. InEnglishwe call "to shine" a verb in the infinitive, because it gives the abstract meaning of the verb without conditions. If we want a corresponding adjective we take a different word, "bright. " If we need a noun we say "luminosity," whichisabstract,beingderivedfromanadjective. * To get a tolerably concrete noun, we have to leave behind the verb and adjective roots, and light upon a thing arbi- trarily cut off from its power of action, say "the sun" or "themoon. " Ofcoursethereisnothinginnaturesocut off, and therefore this nounizing is itself an abstraction. Even if we did have a common word underlying at once
the verb "shine," the adjective "bright" and the noun "sun," we should probably call it an "infinitive of the infinitive. " According to our ideas, it should be some- thing extremely abstract, too intangible for use.
TheChinesehaveoneword,mingormet. Itsideo- graph is the sign of the sun together with the sign of the
moon.
