Chunwang (poem)
"Chunwang" (Chinese: 春望; pinyin: Chūnwàng) is a poem by Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, written after the fall of Chang'an to rebel forces led by An Lushan, as part of the civil war that began in 755. Literary critics have recognised it as one of Du's best and best-known works.
Background
[edit]Du Fu was a Chinese poet who was active in the Tang dynasty. In 755, during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong, Du was in the capital city of Chang'an (present-day Xi'an) when the An Lushan Rebellion began.[1][2] "Chunwang" was written in 757,[3][4] nine months after the fall of Chang'an to An's army.[5] Its title comprises the Chinese characters for "spring" ("chun" or 春) and "looking into the distance" ("wang" or 望).[6] In the poem, Du laments the rapid defeat of the imperial forces and what, to his mind, signals the end of the Tang dynasty.[1]
Structure
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A kingdom smashed, its hills and rivers still here,
spring in the city, plants and trees grow deep.
Moved by the moment, flowers splash with tears,
alarmed at parting, birds startle the heart.
War's beacon fires have gone on three months,
letters from home are worth thousands in gold.
Fingers run through white hair until it thins,
cap-pins[a] will almost no longer hold.— Du Fu (translated by Stephen Owen)[1]
"Chunwang" is an example of what was known in the Tang dynasty as wuyan lüshi (五言律詩),[b] a genre known for its strict and complex structural rules.[11] The poem is made up of eight lines consisting of five characters each,[12][13][14] creating four couplets, with the second and third couplets containing parallelism.[10][15] For instance, the verbs meaning "feel" and "hate" are paired together, as are the nouns for "bird" and "flower".[10] There is also a change of grammatical construction: the subjects of the second couplet ("bird" and "flower") appear in the middle of each line, whereas those of the third couplet ("beacon fire" and "letter from home") appear in the beginning of each line.[16]
However, the poem's exact rhyme scheme is unclear because the pronunciation of classical Chinese characters using pinyin (a modern transliteration system introduced in the 1950s) is distinct from what they would have sounded like in the Tang dynasty.[11] 21st-century Chinese literary critic Zong-Qi Cai posited that the poem follows a "conventional" ABCB DBEB pattern.[11]
Legacy
[edit]According to Timothy Wai Keung Chan, "Chunwang" is "one of Du Fu's most famous poems".[17] Alice Su of The Economist described it as "one of the greatest poems in the Chinese literary canon",[2] while Zong-Qi Cai called it one of the best-known and most commonly recited Chinese poems.[5]
In Matsuo Bashō's Oku no Hosomichi (1689), the opening lines of "Chunwang" are subverted to instead highlight the "instability of the nonhuman world and the resilience ... of poetry itself".[18] The opening scene of Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town (1948) is, according to film critic Jie Li, patterned after "Chunwang".[4]
Translation
[edit]French translator Nicolas Chapuis remarked that "Chunwang" is "seemingly very simple but is one of the hardest poems to translate".[2] Similarly, British translator David Hawkes observed that the poem's "perfection of form lends it a classical grace which unfortunately cannot be communicated in translation".[15] Still, "Chunwang" has been translated into English multiple times, under titles as "Gazing in Spring",[19] "Spring Prospect",[20] "Spring Scene",[7] "The View in Spring",[21] and so forth.
American translator Burton Raffel considered "Chunwang" to be an appropriate case study of the "outer limits of syntactical translatability".[12] In particular, he wrote that Nee Wen-yei's "obviously half-desperate" translation "ruined the poetry" by contriving a "tense structure" while trivialising the "poignant wry humour" of the final two lines.[12] Raffel also criticised Arthur Cooper for his "exceedingly lame attempt to employ English meter and rhyme and even English quatrains".[12] However, Raffel complimented C. K. Kwock and Vincent McHugh's translation, which he thought "echoed not only the structure but also the bite and passion of the Chinese original."[12]
Notes
[edit]- ^ Until the seventeenth century, Chinese people "dressed their hair in a top-knot on the crown of the head", with the top-knot being held in place by a pin that passed through it.[7] David Hawkes translates this couplet thus: "My white hair is getting so scanty from worried scratching that soon enough there won't be enough to stick my hatpin in!"[8]
- ^ Zong-Qi Cai described the poem as "pentasyllabic regulated verse",[9] while Arthur Cooper likened it to a "Chinese sonnet".[10]
References
[edit]Citations
[edit]- ^ a b c Owen 1996, p. 420.
- ^ a b c Rennie & Su 2022.
- ^ Lee 1989, p. 259.
- ^ a b FitzGerald 2013, p. 207.
- ^ a b Furniss & Bath 2022, p. 519.
- ^ Wei 2019, p. 81.
- ^ a b Hawkes 2016, p. 53.
- ^ Hawkes 2016, p. 54.
- ^ Furniss & Bath 2022, p. 518.
- ^ a b c Furniss & Bath 2022, p. 521.
- ^ a b c Furniss & Bath 2022, p. 520.
- ^ a b c d e Raffel 2010, p. 48.
- ^ Eber 2019, p. 81.
- ^ Kim & Fouser 2016, p. 39.
- ^ a b Wong 2016, p. 444.
- ^ Hawkes 2016, p. 52.
- ^ Chan 2007, p. 478.
- ^ Thornber 2020, p. 225.
- ^ Lam 2022, p. 143.
- ^ Varsano 2017, p. 417.
- ^ Wu 2020, p. 102.
Works cited
[edit]Articles
[edit]- Chan, Timothy (2007). "Wall Carvings, Elixirs, and the Celestial King: An Exegetic Exercise on Du Fu's Poems on Two Palaces". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 127 (4): 471–489. JSTOR 20297311.
- Lam, Lap (2022). "Local Sensibility and Nostalgia: The Tanshe Poetry Society in Colonial Singapore". Journal of Chinese Overseas. 18: 118–152. doi:10.1163/17932548-12341458. S2CID 247993110.
Books
[edit]- Eber, Irene (2019). Jews in China: Cultural Conversations, Changing Perceptions. Penn State University Press. ISBN 9780271085876.
- FitzGerald, Carolyn (2013). Fragmenting Modernisms: Chinese Wartime Literature, Art, and Film, 1937–49. Brill. ISBN 9789004250994.
- Furniss, Tom; Bath, Michael (2022). Reading Poetry: A Complete Coursebook. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9781000548990.
- Hawkes, David (2016). A Little Primer of Tu Fu. New York Review Books. ISBN 9789629966591.
- Kim, Hung-Gyu; Fouser, Robert (2016). Understanding Korean Literature. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9781315285320.
- Lee, Gregory (1989). Dai Wangshu: The Life and Poetry of a Chinese Modernist. Chinese University Press. ISBN 9789622014084.
- Owen, Stephen (1996). An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393038238.
- Raffel, Burton (2010). The Art of Translating Poetry. Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 9780271038285.
- Thornber, Karen Laura (2020). Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature. Brill. ISBN 9781684170517.
- Varsano, Paula (2017). "Moments". In Li, Wai-yee; Denecke, Wiebke; Tian, Xiaofei (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE–900 CE). Oxford University Press. pp. 403–423. ISBN 9780199356591.
- Wei, Weixiao (2019). An Overview of Chinese Translation Studies at the Beginning of the 21st Century: Past, Present, Future. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9780429559709.
- Wong, Laurence K. P. (2016). Where Theory and Practice Meet: Understanding Translation through Translation. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN 9781443899123.
- Wu, Shengqing (2020). Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition, 1900–1937. Brill. ISBN 9781684170722.
Podcasts
[edit]- Rennie, David; Su, Alice (19 December 2022). "Why a 1,000-year-old Chinese poem still resonates today" (Podcast). The Economist. Retrieved 21 December 2022.