Rereading Bai Juyi

‘I wondered if she was dreaming, and what Chinese dreams were like. I hoped they were like Chinese poetry, full of wicket gates and rock pools and chirruping cicadas, and warm rice wine and love’.

— from Richard Mason, The World of Suzie Wong

Ancient Chinese poetry had never seemed to me full of warm rice wine and love. In primary school, it had been panicked memorisation. It had been flicking through the textbook minutes before the weekly test and hoping that my short-term memory would serve me, for we were deducted one point per missed punctuation mark and two per incorrectly written character, even if just one stroke was misplaced. We had to put down the poet’s name as well as his dynasty, and points could be docked if we misremembered these also.

Every other child in my year had attended Chinese kindergarten, which had already taught them basic writing. But I vividly remember my first day of school: going hot and cold by turns as everyone around me copied the characters the teacher wrote on the board. For all I understood them, they might as well have been hieroglyphs. In the flurry of memorisation that marked my childhood, what clung to me were only the shape of the characters and the correct order in which I should put down their strokes.

In that local school in China, all the meanings for which one is supposed to read poetry were lost. And it is only when I have forgotten much of my Chinese, when sometimes on the phone to my mother I have trouble remembering the word for things like kettle, that the poems have begun to rearrange themselves, resurface so that they are not merely words that years of frantic memorisation have imprinted on me. But I am surrounded on one side by the distaste which Chinese education gave me for China’s own poetry, and on the other side by the West’s inattention to Chinese literature, the unspoken but unsubtle implication that China is too alien for its ancient literature to be relevant.

Only 1-2% of works translated into Western languages are of Eastern and Southern origin. I am not qualified to comment on translations of Southern works. But it is blatantly obvious to me that, when Western cultures do decide to translate and read Chinese literature, they largely select works that conform to Westerners’ preconceived expectations of cultural difference, and translate those works in a manner that highlights their fundamental differences, their incomprehensibility, their mystery. ‘O, that way madness lies, let me shun that’ - this is the attitude of the West towards China’s literature, and accordingly all except the ‘bravest’ and ‘maddest’ of academics shun it.

When I tried to reread Bai Juyi, the quotidian poet of my own and every other Chinese child’s schooldays, I was shocked and confused to find that Westerners conceived of his simplicity and joie de vivre in terms of ‘wicket gates’ and ‘rock pools’, ‘warm rice wine and love’. Bai Juyi is all this - he delights and revels in warm rice wine and love - but calling Chinese poetry the poetry of ‘warm rice wine and love’ is like calling Things Fall Apart a novel of ‘dried yams and hatred’. An exotic foodstuff that serves as metonymy for a gross thematic overgeneralization - this is what non-Western cultures become when the West holds them gingerly, at an arm’s-length, as if they were easily breakable mirrors.

How can Bai Juyi be translated into English so that his ‘Oriental’ love for warm rice wine does not define him? I cannot pretend to be equal to the task; I can only try to assure you that he is like us, even though his world was one of cicadas and wicket gates. I have tried to translate one of his easiest poems, the simplest one even a first-grader could read. It is written in a common structure: five characters per line, four lines to the poem. It is impossible, with my increasingly limited fluency, to carry over to English the rigid symmetry and rhyme pattern with which the poet says:

Fresh brewed wine with green-tinged foam

Small clay stove with flame-red glow.

Evening comes, the sky threatens snow -

Drink a cup with me, or no?

— Bai Juyi, ‘An Invitation to Mr. Li’ 

Editor’s Note: Below, we have enclosed the original Chinese version of Bai Juyi’s poem, ‘An Invitation to Mr. Li’. 

《問劉十九》

白居易

綠蟻新醅酒，

紅泥小火爐。

晚來天欲雪，

能飲一杯無？