Oito Elegias Chinesas de Camilo Pessanha, II: 王守仁的"登閱江樓"

In the fine Chinese tradition of commenting on the commentaries to an original work, here's another Chinese elegy translated into Portuguese by Camilo Pessanha, with comments by yours truly on the original poem and Pessanha's interpretation. Like the first, it is the work of 王守仁 Wang Shouren, better known as 王陽明 Wang Yangming. Wang wasn't known for his poetry, but for his contributions to neo-Confucian thought, so I'm not sure why the individual who assembled this short collection decided to include two of his poems; perhaps he chose them to remind the recipient of the book of the importance of poetry in a scholar-bureaucrat's life, or there was something within the poems that resonated with him.


The 江 jiang referred to in the poem is none other than the 長江 Yangtze, and the titular 閱江樓 River-Gazing Tower, located near 南京 Nanjing, appears to not have actually existed until recently, which is kind of weird given that it's been referred to in Chinese sources since the Ming dynasty. Pessanha calls it a "miradouro," which is a scenic overlook rather than a particular kind of structure, but in context it makes sense. (Incidentally, there are a number of miradouros scattered around Lisbon, and even a few in Macau.) Pessanha says that the 新亭 "New Pavilion," which dates back to the 晉 Jin dynasty and thus is not old at all, was a gathering place for patriotic poets to mourn the woes befalling their country, and was also located on the Yangtze.

I don't think the River-Gazing Tower and the abandoned tower discussed in the poem are the same place, but they serve analogous poetic functions in that they both represent the kinds of far-flung postings Chinese officials might expect to receive sometime during the course of their careers. Climbing the River-Gazing Tower, our poet recalls a similar place, one separated by a great deal of time and space and steeped in the grandeur of imperial China's early years (the Han dynasty, founded by 漢高祖 Han Gaozu, who's the 高皇 Great Han Emperor mentioned in the poem, was China's second imperial dynasty).

Pessanha links 道德, the "virtue of the way," to the emperor, something I didn't do but maybe should have; after all, Wang Yangming wouldn't have been talking about 道德 in a Daoist context, i.e., 道德 as referenced in the title of the 道德經 Daodejing/Tao Te Ching. I think my rendering of the line about the tower's defenses sounds more poetic, since Pessanha decoupled 虛, generally read as "empty," as from 天, "sky" or "heaven," and used it in a broader sense to apply to 塹 "moat," whereas I applied 虛天 to 塹 and got, literally "empty sky moat." I considered the possibility that the moat was "empty to the sky," but liked the image of the sheer emptiness surrounding the tower serving as a moat better.

蠻夷 are the Man and Yi peoples, the sort of non-Han "barbarians" that the Chinese empire was constantly worried about. Pessanha seems to think that stone walls are useless, since the place was guarded by barbarians; I read the line as the poet saying that stone walls were useless against foreign incursions, especially given how remote the place was behind its airy moat. I'm not sure which is right, though I suspect that my interpretation may be taking liberties that Wang wouldn't have, as it might be taken as criticism of imperial policy—something an orthodox bureaucrat probably would've avoided.

I'm less thrilled about my version of the last two lines, as they don't quite hit the mark (the final line especially, which feels abrupt), but Pessanha's rendering of these same lines doesn't do it for me either. In the penultimate line he ascribes certain emotions to the poet's visit that aren't explicit, but admittedly could be there since, after all, this is classical Chinese. The duplication he uses for emphasis in the last line feels unnecessary, too. That said, I like his translation overall. His grasp of the material is firm (firmer than mine, for sure), his notes give much-appreciated background information that bolsters his poetic arguments, and his reading differs enough from mine to make things interesting.

Enjoy, folks!


微臣
史大偉/D.A. Smith



王守仁 (王陽明)

登閱江樓

絕頂樓荒舊有名
高皇曾此駐龍旌
險存道德虛天塹
守在蠻夷豈石城
山色古今余王氣
江流天地變秋聲
登臨授簡誰能賦
千古新亭一愴情

---

Uang-Shau-Jen (Uang-Iang-Ming)
"Ascensão ao Miradoiro do Kiang"

Este altíssimo torreão abandonado foi outrora célebre.
Aqui plantou seus estandartes, ornados de dragões, o fundador da dinastia Han.
Defendia-o, como inultrapassável fosso, a virtude do rei... Eram supérfluos os circundantes canais.
Faziam-lhe guarda as próprias tribos bárbaras. De que serviriam muralhas de pedra?

Hoje, como então, a montanha esplende de régia majestade.
Rolam do Kiang as águas; e céu e terra confundem as suas vozes outonais.
Da comoção que sente, assomando no alto, quem poderia ordenar o poema?
Pavilhão novo, pavilhão novo! - de pungentes mágoas milenárias...

---

Wang Shouren (Wang Yangming)

"Climbing the River-Gazing Tower"

this lofty, abandoned tower was famous long ago
the dragon banners of the first Han emperor were once raised here
remote, it kept the virtue of the Way behind a moat of empty sky—
what use were stone walls in keeping out barbarians?
then, as now, the hills suffused with a regal atmosphere
the river flows on as the sounds of autumn fill heaven and earth
climbing the tower and gazing out, who could write poetry?
the new pavilion, forever mournful

Oito Elegias Chinesas de Camilo Pessanha, I: 王守仁的“龍潭夜坐”

Here is one of Camilo Pessanha's Oito Elegias Chinesas, or Eight Chinese Elegies. My work, like Pessanha's, is the fruit of the "imperfect notions of a simple amateur scholar, acquired at random in my spare time" ("imperfeitas noções de simples estudioso amador, adquiridas ao acaso das horas vagas"), so I'm going to use his translation and mine as tools to make a few general remarks on Pessanha and Chinese poetry. As much as I know you've been dying for one, this isn't a particularly in-depth study.

In his preface to the series, Pessanha tells us he bought the book of poems from which the eight elegies come for the princely sum of two patacas. The collection had been assembled as a gift from a high-ranking minister in Beijing to his protégé about a century before Pessanha's translations appeared in the newspaper O Progresso. It's not entirely clear why the minister included these particular poems—all of which date to the Ming dynasty, and none of which are by well-known poets—or why Pessanha decided to translate them, or even buy the book in the first place. In his Revista de Cultura article "Camilo Pessanha e Oito Elegias Chinesas", 姚京明 Yao Jingming attributes Pessanha's choice to curiosity and the "spiritual pleasure" of spending his idle time translating from Chinese, and/or the fact that the collection dealt with the "same traces of his life: solitude, sadness, exile, escape from the real world, and nostalgia for his abandoned homeland." Both of these reasons make sense to me.

In addition to the book I've been referencing, China: Estudos e Traduções, I've found the text of this poem in a couple places online, and there are some discrepancies. In the fourth line, Yao Jingming's article reads 烏 (crow) instead of 鳥 (bird), and in the sixth line, 松 (pine) sometimes appears instead of 春 (spring). In both cases I've gone with the latter character, as Pessanha did in his version, and because in the case of 松/春 the former doesn't make as much sense. Yao Jingming thinks Pessanha made a mistake by mentioning a "bird" instead of a "crow," but the text printed with Pessanha's translation looks to have used 鳥 instead of 烏 (Christ, they're hard to tell apart), so Yao's criticism strikes me as unfounded.

In Pessanha's footnotes, the location of 龍潭 Longtan (literally "dragon pool") can't be nailed down definitively, but he seems to think it's a spot along the 烏江 Wu River in 貴州 Guizhou, where the poem's author was posted. I kept the title pretty literal, which might be the wrong way to go, but it works, I think.

Chinese poetry usually doesn't bother providing an explicit subject, and this poem is no exception. I find it interesting that Pessanha treats the speaker as the object most of the time, but then briefly addresses a second person. It's a valid approach, and I like the image of the poet speaking to his wife, or a friend, that it entails, but in my version I've kept the subject to the individual poet, since I didn't see the need to interrupt his thinking by interpreting the fifth and sixth lines as being directed at someone else.

Another point of difference that demonstrates the flexibility of classical Chinese poetry is the initial line, specifically the first two characters. 何處 can be read as a question, which is what Pessanha does, but it can also mean "somewhere" (thanks to Archie Barnes' fantastic Chinese Through Poetry for reminding me of this). Pessanha and I differ on a number of other points as well, but honestly I don't feel like breaking down, character by character, those points of divergence. If you want to know more, dear reader, drop me a line.

The original Chinese, Pessanha's Portuguese, and my English versions of the poem follow. Enjoy, caro leitor, and I hope to have another elegia chinesa for you soon.

微臣
史大偉


王守仁 (王陽明)

龍潭夜坐

何處花香入夜清
石林茅屋隔溪聲
幽人月出每孤往
棲鳥山空時一鳴
草露不辭芒履濕
春風偏與葛衣輕
臨流欲寫猗蘭意
江北江南無限情


Uang-Shau-Jen (Uang-Iang-Ming) 
"À Noite, no Pego-Dragão"

De onde vem este perfume de flores, embalsamando a noite puríssima?
Entre bouças e fragas, uma cabana de ola, perto da qual um arroio murmura...
Como de costume, o eremita parte ao surgir a lua.
Em um covão do monte, um pássaro, poisado, ininterruptamente gorgeia.

Não lhe importa que as ervas, impregnadas do orvalho: lhe encharquem as alparcatas de junça.
As suas vestes de ligeiro cânhamo, soergue-as, enviezando, a brisa primaveril...
À borda da torrente, intento fazer versos ao viço das orquídeas.
Embargam-mo as saudades, violentas empolgando-me, do Kiang-Pei e do Kiang-Nan.


Wang Shouren (Wang Yangming)
"Sitting by the Dragon Pool at Night"

From somewhere, the scent of flowers fills the clear night
in the thatched house among the stones, I can't hear the brook
at every moonrise, the hermit turns inward
birds nesting in the empty hills sing unceasingly
my straw sandals get wet in the still-dewy grass
and the spring wind ruffles my hemp clothing
overlooking the stream, I want to write, recalling the orchids—
endless thoughts of Jiangbei and Jiangnan