One corner of my bedroom is occupied by a pair of bookcases which
formerly stood in my living room at Oude Singel 112, Leiden, back in the dear
days when I was a young student who still believed ‘paper books’ had a future.
The shelves still contain much of the American, British, Chinese, Dutch, and
German poetry which I bought and devoured in those days, as well as ‘many a
quaint volume’ which testifies to the development of my life in later years – a
wonderful bound set of Wen Yiduo’s 聞一多 complete works, a copy of Tu
Fu: China’s Greatest Poet[1]
which formerly belonged to the Dutch poet Willem Hussem, and a copy of the 1909
printing of A. E. Taylor’s Elements of
Metaphysics which I bought in Shanghai in 1979, to name but three.
Does a house, as the
Chinese believe a person does, reincarnate from time to time, the accidentalia assuming each time a new
configuration while traces of an underlying motif remain? The bookshelves, when
I first built them, stood beside a canal in what had once been the residence of
the Dutch Idealist philosopher G. J. P. J. Bolland (1854-1922, also called ‘The
Dutch Hegel’). Now they stand in an upstairs room on a noise-wracked approach
route to Schiphol Airport; but the sun that falls upon them in the afternoon, and
the love of poetry that brought them into being, is the same.
But if my house is the
metempsychosis of a former house, the institute where I worked till 2004 was no
less a reincarnation of another ambience: the legendary Sinologisch Instituut
lodged on the Third Binnenvestgracht in what had formerly been the operating
rooms of a hospital. How well I remember, one sunlit afternoon in that upstairs
library, searching among the volumes of Chinese poetry to see whether James J.
Y. Liu’s The Poetry of Li Shang-yin,[2]
long listed as ‘borrowed, overdue’, had been returned! The answer was no; and
when I enquired at the desk, I was told the book had been borrowed ‘by somebody
at the Jelgersma Clinic,’ and the tone in which the librarian pronounced those
words was as if to say: once a book gets into the hands of one of them, you’ll never see it again! (‘The
Jelgersma’ is a famous insane asylum; one of its most famous denizens, for a
while, was the great twentieth-century Dutch poet Gerrit Achterberg.) I had
visions of someone in a straitjacket, perhaps frothing at the mouth, whose one
remaining link with reality was ‘Peonies Damaged by Rain at Hui-chung’ in
Professor Liu’s translation.
It was not till years
later that I discovered the borrower of that book had been Hans Faverey
(1933-1990), who was not a patient but a therapist at the Jelgersma Clinic in
addition to being, of course, one of the great Dutch poets of our time. The
time came when thin volumes of Hans’ poetry, signed in his fittingly
half-legible hand, appeared in my bookshelves alongside the already-fading,
already read-to-pieces paperback copy of A. C. Graham’s Poems of the Late T’ang[3]
that I had bought in Oude Singel days and my very own copy of The Poetry of Li Shang-yin: for by then
I was teaching Chinese at the university, and although I no longer had the time
to read books, I could finally afford to buy them in hardcover.
That little book by
Graham was one of the handful of things that decisively captured my heart for
Sinology. Even after the passage of decades, there are lines in Graham’s
translation which thrill me all over again each time I read them. And though I
am grateful to James Liu for his helpfully detailed explications of the poems,
his translations, lucid and admirable as many of them really are, do not speak
to my heart. The reason, as I will shortly explain, is to be sought in my
character.
Let us consider some of
my favorite lines in Graham, side by side with Liu’s versions. In Graham’s
rendering of the first poem of The Walls
of Emerald, the final couplet reads:
If the pearl of dawn should shine and never leave its place,
All life long we shall gaze in the crystal dish.
Liu (his title is The Green
Jade City) has:
If the morning pearl were not only bright but also fixed,
One would always face the crystal plate all one’s life.
In ‘The Patterned Lute,’ Graham’s final couplet reads:
Did it wait, this mood, to mature with hindsight?
In a trance from the beginning, then as now.
In Liu’s phrasing (the poem’s title is ‘The Ornamented Zither’) this
is:
This feeling might have become a thing to be remembered,
Only, at the time you were already bewildered and lost.
What is obvious in both these examples is that because of the verb
tenses and moods used, in Graham’s versions the sense of amazement, the
fundamentally passive state of mixed wonder and uncertainty, is still actual,
still going on, whereas Liu sounds more distant, more in rational control. Liu
has stopped wondering whether the ‘bright morning pearl’ might ever turn out to
be ‘fixed,’ as clearly shown by his use of the subjunctive or conditional ‘were’
and ‘would.’ And in the second example, evidently he feels in a position to
designate what the feeling ‘might have become’: he has already left it behind,
and almost as if telling a child there is no Santa Claus, he tells himself: you
were bewildered, that’s all!
In other words, Graham
ends each poem on a note of potentially endless uncertainty, but with a hint
that in the very uncertainty, something precious is still present. ‘Mature’ and
‘hindsight’ suggest that something has accrued; one’s feeling not only ‘might
have’ but actually has become ‘a thing to be remembered.’
That feeling of
uncertainty, paradoxically combined with gratitude for what I can only call the
blessedness of my ‘lost’ experience, lies at the very heart of my character, so
that it is understandable I prefer the creative irresolution of Graham to the
workaday reasonableness of Liu.
I am aware, of course,
that not everybody likes that sort of thing. When Hans Faverey was still alive
in this world, once in a while we would get together to drink a bit and talk.
One afternoon soon after my book Wijl wij
dansen was published,[4]
he came to my house to tell me what he thought was strong and weak in it. I was
amazed to hear he especially liked the poem ‘Cézanne: pommes,’ which begins:
Door de tijd lijkt de appel
rond, in het onvoltooide.
Scheppen is dus dulden: murwe dingen
murw laten blijken.
I have tried many times to translate these lines into English verse
and have never been satisfied with the result. But let’s just say the literal
meaning is something like:
In time the apple seems
round: in the unfinished.
So, creation
is toleration –
letting worn-down things
show up worn-down.
But though Hans liked the poem, he very much disliked the word ‘dus,’
meaning ‘so’ or ‘thus,’ and called it an ‘error’ in an otherwise perfect poem.
He thought ‘dus,’ implying a conclusion passively drawn, weakened and diluted
the third line, which could otherwise have been so emphatic: creation isn’t
just thus or so; it is toleration! I
remember he said: je moet het wél weten (you have to know).
I know, Hans. I know
This World wants us to know the Answers, and to know them fast. No ‘creative
irresolution’ here, create is
tolerate, period!
But that poem was
inspired by a long-faded, incurably curling, partly torn Cézanne reproduction
which hangs in a different corner of my bedroom from the bookcases. It was
written, undoubtedly, during one of the sleepless nights without which I might
be somewhat less ‘bewildered and lost’ than I so often am. And you will just
not hear me say – sorry here, Hans – that creation is this or is that. The
kind of person to whom ‘creation’ (with its aura of muscular deliberateness in
action) is a household word, is not going to share my idea that creation, like
creations, somehow mysteriously ‘shows up’ in its own time.
In other words, that
little word ‘dus,’ that ‘thus’ or ‘so, evidently’ was my way of translating
into my terms what the People of This World say we ‘artists’ or ‘poets’ do when
we ‘make’ something. I say we do not actually ‘make’ anything: we just finally
bear the full brunt of the rich irreparability of things – perhaps indeed, as
the ninth-century Li Shangyin whispers through Graham’s
twentieth-century words, after they have ‘matured with hindsight.’
-- Lloyd Haft
