Dislocating Language into Meaning: Difficult Anglophone Poetry and Chinese Poetics in Translation—Toward a Culturally Translatable Li Shangyin

ABSTRACT

T. S. Eliot wrote, “We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult” (“The Metaphysical Poets” 248). But what of poets outside “our” civilization? This article considers the translation of the famously—or infamously—difficult poet Li Shangyin (c. 813–858) in light of the history of poetry translation from Chinese into English, which, from Coleridge to Prynne, coincides with and even helped create the history of poetic difficulty in English. My argument here concerns the elements of Li Shangyin that can be crystallized and made relevant for the present through translation into English.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese poetry
• difficulty
• English and American poetry
• translation

Notes on contributor

Lucas Klein's work has appeared in Jacket, Rain Taxi, CLEAR, Comparative Literature Studies, and PMLA, and has been published by Fordham, Black Widow, Zephyr, and New Directions. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong. His translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize, and his October Dedications, translations of the poetry of Mang Ke, is recently out from Zephyr and Chinese University Press. He is currently translating the work of Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin.

Notes

1. Unusually for Pound, his poetic etymology of the character is not too inaccurate. It originally meant “dusk” (so, sundown), and he saw a person (大, from 人) beneath the sun 日, itself under the grass 艹. The second-century dictionary Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字 explains it as “the sun in the grass” 从日在茻中, as the 大 at the bottom is in fact a corruption of an earlier grass 艸.

2. The missing link here is Charles Olson raving about “what Fenollosa is so right about, in syntax, the sentence as first act of nature, as lightning, as passage of force from subject to object, quick” (244).