Carol Rumen on Li Po

This is Carol Rumen's 'Poem of the Week'-

Old PoemAt fifteen I went with the army,
At fourscore I came home.
On the way I met a man from the village,
I asked him who there was at home.
“That over there is your house,
All covered over with trees and bushes.”
Rabbits had run in at the dog-hole,
Pheasants flew down from the beams of the roof.
In the courtyard was growing some wild grain;
And by the well, some wild mallows.
I’ll boil the grain and make porridge,
I’ll pluck the mallows and make soup.
Soup and porridge are both cooked,
But there is no-one to eat them with.
I went out and looked towards the east,
While tears fell and wetted my clothes.
“I have aimed at literal translation,” Arthur Waley wrote in his introductory notes to One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918). “Above all, considering imagery to be the soul of poetry, I have avoided either adding images of my own or suppressing those of the original.” On the subject of rhythm, he added: “In a few instances where the English (line) insisted on being shorter than the Chinese, I have preferred to vary the metre of my version, rather than pad out the line with unnecessary verbiage.” These comments emphasise Waley’s fundamental aim: fidelity. Nothing added, nothing padded.

Returning to Waley’s translations this week, once again I’m reminded of Ezra Pound’s marvellously evergreen Rihaku/Li Po translation, The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.
Fifteen is the significant age for both protagonists. The river merchant’s wife “stopped scowling” then and began to love her husband. The speaker in Old Poem went into military service. Although, for a contemporary Chinese reader, 15 might not have been considered the tender age it is in western societies now, it was still young enough, and the reference underlines the pathos of the situations. Waley’s narrative style seems casual: comma-splices and word repetitions may suggest Old Poem had oral origins. The story is simple and affecting. The narrator “went with” the army at 15: when demobbed at the age of 80, he’d been in military service for an astonishing 65 years. His encounter with the neighbour is beautifully understated. Asked “who there was at home”, the neighbour doesn’t answer, but tactfully points to the near-derelict house. 

The narrator’s tone remains optimistic. Rabbits and pheasants are harmless interlopers. (Is that “dog-hole” a kind of early cat-flap?).The weeds include wild grain and mallow, an edible plant. The resourceful old man knows what to do.

There are rapid, easy tense-shifts, from the past of the first 10 lines, to future and present in lines 11 and 12: “I’ll pluck the mallows … Soup and porridge are both cooked.” The narrative ordering makes psychological sense. It’s only when the old man sits down with his dishes that he realises, in the inescapable present, “there is no-one to eat them with”. The tense reverts to the past after that, as it must, leaving unsaid regrets to echo round the time-gap. The melancholy is less pervasive than in Pound’s Letter but hits harder when it arrives.
The old soldier went out, probably leaving the meal unfinished. Gazing east, he recalled more hopeful times. But this small-print interpretation of mine is reader-padding: the poet-speaker merely “went out and looked towards the east”. Pound would have approved.
The last line, however, is explicit and perhaps exaggerated in a manner that Pound might have avoided. Tears sufficient to wet a man’s clothes would need to be torrential, after all. A dampened collar or shirt-front would have been convincing, but “wetted … clothes” suggests, less than credibly for us, that his entire outfit was drenched.
Waley, unlike Pound, has chosen not to “cross the border of textual translation into cultural translation”, writes Wai-lim Yip, revealingly quoting extracts from their different renderings of the Letter. The Waley seems heavier-handed. It strikes the modern imagination less precisely.
The last line of Old Poem is painfully moving, but it leaves me with the sense of reading across a chasm. Because I trust Waley’s literal fidelity, I wonder if the poet was exaggerating. If so, was it because he or she wanted to register a protest against militarism? Pound, as we know, published his Cathay translations in a similar spirit. They were a non-combatant’s covert protest against the first world war. Perhaps Anonymous wanted readers or listeners not simply to mourn a possibly wasted life and a desolate old age, but to see, beyond the page, the image of “the ultimate sacrifice” – a soldier’s battle-dress soaked with blood?

Is Carol's reception of this poem credible? Does she really believe it herself? What's more does she expect us to believe that any army will retain an eighty year old? She herself objects to the image of an old man wetting his clothes with tears rather than... well, blood is what she decorously suggests.

Can this poem really be about how like militarism is bad, okay? Don't do militarism. It's so not cool.

Surely, there is something more to it than that? Perhaps it is a Shi Jing poem- something lapidary and ablaze in its every facet though it yet calls to us out of Seir, in the tongue of that Dumah which darkness has long effaced.

Indeed, it seems to me, this is how Carol actually receives it for she shrewdly, picks up the significance of fifteen as a chronological age mentioned both in this anonymous poem as well in Li Po's famous 'River Merchant's wife'.

She may not know this quotation from Confucius, but surely it is an 'unthought known' for us all?

“At fifteen I set my heart upon learning.
At thirty, I had planted my feet firm upon the ground.
At forty, I no longer suffered from perplexities.
At fifty, I knew what were the biddings of Heaven.
At sixty, I heard them with docile ear.
At seventy, I could follow the dictates of my own heart; for what I desired no longer overstepped the boundaries of right.”

― Confucius

Li Po- the 'exiled immortal' who saw himself as the Vimalakirti of his age- achieved what Confucius, by dint of an unremitting and effortful praxis of civic paideia, only managed to accomplish at the age of  Seventy. As Arthur Waley tells us elsewhere, the poet attained 'windwheel samadhi'- simply by doing a bit of Zen meditation with a 'white eye-browed' monk on some mountain top. Indeed, Li Po went further yet. But where?

Ved Vyasa edits the Vedas and witnesses the War in which that 'upside down hymn leaved banyan whose roots are in heaven and branches here below' is condignly cut down by the axe of non attachment. He mourns not for his biological descendants- the uprooted tree that was the Kaurava lineage- but for Shuka, his mind born son, who has already flown beyond the net of hypokiemenon, leaving his father, though at the morning of the world, already cheerless and bereft.

Li Po's River Merchant's wife, similarly, is a jivanmukta precisely because she is a viyogini, just as Li Po exceeds the Buddha Maitreya because he is already liberated from that inevitable terminus ad quem.

But then so is this eighty year old soldier. His tears drive the rain-cycle which determines the Mandate of Heaven. His house will rise into prosperity around him only to wither and perish as another arid period brings another round of invasion and insurrection. Like the River Merchant's wife he will abide all things for he is at their origin and return.

What is remarkable about the Chinese is that didn't just equal the Sanskrit poets; they better expressed, nay exemplified!, a 'dhvani' theory which most of us Hindus are either ignorant of, or regarding which we can at best quote the one or two examples from Valmiki which the scholiasts have rendered canonical.

Why? Indians didn't need to bother with Poetry or Politics or anything useful. They could pretend instead to be battling Casteism and Sexism and Environmental degradation by writing boring shite. It is a mark of India's inherent superiority to China in this respect that the Anglo-Saxon world has rejected the path of Li Po and followed that of Sarojini Naidu who handed off Fenellosa's manuscripts to Longfellow's nephew and, as punishment, ended her days in the U.P Governor's mansion. A prouder pied a terre, for a poet, would have been St. Elizabeth's padded cell.

There is a lesson here, as the Mahatma was wont to say, which all who run may read.