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Arthur Cooper (translator), LI PO & TU FU; Penguin Books, 250pp., 40p.

From the point of view of research, Arthur Cooper’s book is excellent. Not only are there copious notes on the poems translated but there is a long and interesting introduction on Chinese poetics, the poets and the background of their times which takes up over a third of the book. In addition, the Chinese text of several poems is beautifully reproduced in various styles of calligraphy from the brush of Shui Chien-Tung. With so much illustrative matter there is, luckily as it happens, very little room left for poetry. Of a thousand poems by Li Po only 25 are translated, and of Tu Fu’s fourteen hundred only 18.

     The drawback is Cooper’s approach to translation. The section dealing with this in the introduction is by far the weakest and does not bear comparison with the masterly treatment by A C Graham of the same problem in ‘Poems of the Late T’ang’ (Penguin, 1965).

     Cooper’s main point is that translations by Arthur Valey (and his ‘school’) tend to misrepresent the form of, and that in order to maintain balance he has occasionally filled out, the original. One has sympathy with this line of attack until one realises where it is leading. Cooper is all for compression and, where forced to it, omission. Of a line which reads ‘I remember a year or so ago, where the road wound east round my Brocade River pavillion’ he renders only ‘I recall near my hut on Brocade River’ and expects us to approve. But it is the insistence on time and place, the precision with which the poet puts the reader in the scene exactly as he sees it, which is the stuff of Chinese poetry. Searching after fidelity of form, Cooper destroys the spirit of the original.

     More heinous still is the airy way he changes the image ‘pink as a peach’s flower’ to ‘skin’ for the sake of a rhyme. Such disdain for the poet’s intention can only be answered by a corresponding distrust of the translator on our side. Besides which, his ‘poematical’ versions are not worth the loss, It is no good blaming Waley for padding if, for similar reasons of form, one is going to butcher and lop. If a choice has to be made, I incline to Blake’s proverb, ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’

     I am not sure that the translations are even a faithful representation of the form. The compression results in tortured and clumsy language, halting rhythms and often a sing-song monotonous effect which, given the T’ang rules for variations in tone, belie the sound of the original:

For guests our path is yet
unswept of petals,
To you our wattle gate
the first time opens.

This is not only nursery-rhyme stuff, the last phrase is unpardonably ambiguous besides. It is no improvement on the undistinguished version of Kotewall and Smith (in ‘The Penguin Book of Chinese Verse’, 1962):

The flowery path has not yet been swept for a guest,
The wicker gate is only today opened for you.

And what are we to make of the desperate inanity of Cooper’s

And little son, Po-ch’in you are called,
Your big sister’s shoulder you must reach,

where the clumsiness and wrenched word order is due to a straining after rhyme?

     The main trouble, apart from the rhyming, is that Cooper is trying to keep close to the syllable count of the original, It is impossible, of course, to make a version with exactly the same number of syllables. Charles Metzger and Richard Yang attempted it in ‘50 Songs of the Yuan’ (Allen & Unwin, 1967) with results so appalling that it is doubtful whether such an experiment will be attempted again. The redeeming feature of their book is that one is given also the Chinese text of all the poems translated, a romanized transliteration, a word for word translation and a prose first draft so that one can at least see all the stages of the poem’s englishing. Cooper, however, believes he can get by adding just two syllables to each half line of Chinese verse (in which the caesura is so marked that he often breaks such lines into two in his translations). In practice, I believe he has restricted himself too severely and it is this, omissions apart, which leads him to make such a botch of his versions. Take, for example, a couplet from Li Po’s ‘The Waterfall on Lu Mountain’:

At first I feared Milky Way had dropped
And sprinkled stars, falling through the clouds!

     Artificial restraint must answer for the maladroitness here. There is no justification for the enjambment of ‘dropped and sprinkled’; each line of Chinese verse is an autonomous unit, and the foreign device is imported because, given the limitation of syllables, there is no other euphonious way of getting over the meaning. If, however, an extra syllable per half line had been allowed, the lines could have bean made to flow better as poetry, as language, and been faithful to the construction of the original:

Fearful at first the Milky Way had fallen,
Scattering stars in its tumble through the clouds!

It is only fair to say, in ending, that Cooper’s versions are not uniformly bad; on occasions he scores some notable successes. His rendering of Li Po’s ‘Fighting south of the ramparts’ cannot touch Waley’s, for all his carping, but there is an exciting ring to the couplet

But the Huns look on killing like tilling their fields,
White bones all they grow on their yellow sands,

where Waley is much slacker. Again, the ending of Tu Fu’s ‘Night Thoughts Afloat’ is a triumph :

Drifting, drifting,
what am I more than
A single gull
between sky and earth ?

This surpasses Cyril Birch’s rendering in the Waley manner (see ‘An Anthology of Chinese Literature’, Penguin, 1970)

Wandering, drifting, what can I take for likeness?
- A gull that wheels alone between earth and sky,

for all that Cooper enjambs again. This, and two or three more of the Tu Fu poems are very well done. By far the most exciting and vigorous work in the book, however, is the translation of Li Po’s ‘The Road to Shu’ and this is because it is written in a kind of Chinese free-verse which does not allow Cooper to backslide into his usual sing-song and slipshod ways.