François Cheng’s Poetics of the Breath Between

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park and Sarah McKibben for their wise words and support.

Notes

1. 1. Translation mine.

2. 2. Cheng, Le Dialogue, 27.

3. 3. Establishing how Cheng’s translations, scholarly work, and poetry inform one another is, alas, beyond the scope of this essay. I will briefly situate Cheng’s poetry to concentrate on the challenges that Cheng’s poetry, born of two distinct poetic traditions, pose to the translator.

4. 4. “Au coeur de mon aventure linguistique orientée vers l’amour pour la langue adoptée, trône un thème majeur: le dialogue. Ce thème a illuminé mon long cheminement; il m’a procuré maintes occasions d’exaltation et le ravissement chaque fois que la symbiose patiemment recherchée se réalisait comme par miracle” (Cheng, Le Dialogue, 8).

5. 5. Cheng does not include any Chinese characters in his poetry. I include them here for greater clarity.

6. 6. Cheng, Le Dialogue, 8.

7. 7. Here I use Red Pine’s English translation of the Chinese characters (zhongqi). Laozi, Lao-tzu’s Taoteching, 84.

8. 8. “Certes, chaque être est unique, ce qui fait la riche fécondité de l’ordre de la Vie, mais, paradoxalement, cette unicité de chacun ne peut prendre sens, n’est à même de se révéler et de s’épanouir que dans l’échange avec d’autres unicités, et la langue et la culture, valables pour une collectivité, ont précisément pour fonction de fixer des règles et des croyances communes, afin de communiquer cet échange et cette circulation” (Cheng, Le Dialogue, 13).

9. 9. “En nous fondant sur une conception unitaire et organiciste de l’univers en marche, avancée par les anciens penseurs chinois, nous nourrissons la confiance—peut-être naïve mais indéracinable—en la possibilité de communication et de circulation entre les entités vivantes de cet univers, aussi bien qu’entre les produits culturels qui en découlent” (Cheng, Le Dialogue, 80).

10. 10. “Telle est la vision idéale que propose la pensée chinoise. D’aucuns la trouveront peut-être simpliste, naïve. [ … ] Elle affirme la confiance en l’ordre universel de la Vie, fondé non sur la séparation étanche entre les unités constituées mais sur la reliance qui permet la circulation et l’interaction” (Cheng, Le Dialogue, 17).

11. 11. “[D]eux traditions poétiques symbiosées” (Cheng, Le Dialogue, 39).

12. 12. The collection was reprinted by Albin Michel in 2009. The Gallimard edition came out in the Poésie/Gallimard collection.

13. 13. Cheng, “The Reciprocity of Subject and Object in Chinese Poetic Language,” 17.

14. 14. Vide médian is not a common transcription; it is Cheng’s penetrating translation of this Chinese concept.

15. 15. Cheng, “The Reciprocity of Subject and Object in Chinese Poetic Language,” 18.

16. 16. Ibid., 18–19.

17. 17. “[C]omparaison par laquelle l’homme cherche dans la nature un élément pour illustrer un sentiment jailli en lui” (Cheng, Le Livre du Vide médian, 10).

18. 18. “[I]ncitation par laquelle certains éléments de la nature éveillent en l’homme des sentiments latents” (Cheng, Le Livre du Vide médian, 10). Cheng refers to these two rhetorical approaches as drawing as far back as the Livre des Odes (Shijing or The Book of Odes).

19. 19. “[S]entiment-paysage” (Cheng, Le Livre du Vide médian, 10). Cheng traces its initial development to the Song Dynasty (960–1279). For the English translation of the terms bi, xing, and qing jing, see Wayne Schlepp and Clive Thomson in Cheng’s “The Reciprocity of Subject and Object in Chinese Poetic Language,” 17–18.

20. 20. Cheng, Le Livre du Vide médian, 19.

21. 21. Laozi, Lao-tzu’s Taoteching, 84. Cheng quotes this passage of the Daodejing in French in L’écriture poétique chinoise: “Le Dao d’origine engendre l’Un / L’un engendre le Deux / le Deux engendre le Trois / Le Trois produit les Dix mille êtres / Les dix milles êtres s’adossent au Yin / Et serrent sur leur poitrine le Yang: / L’Harmonie nait du Souffle du Vide médian” (29).

22. 22. For the use of cadence, odd, and even syllables, see Cheng, L’écriture poétique chinoise, 61–62.

23. 23. See Wayne Schlepp and Clive Thomson in Cheng’s “The Reciprocity of Subject and Object in Chinese Poetic Language.”

24. 24. The poem’s meter cannot always be of prime concern for the translator here because Cheng’s partial adherence to reliable patterns, such as meter, and his partial rejection of other patterns, such as fixed forms and end rhymes, are only visual and audible components of a loose, yet intricate nexus of opposites echoing the ternary flow. Needless to say, no single translation strategy can empower the translator to recreate Cheng’s visual and metric sense of motion, transformation, and balance throughout his entire collection.

25. 25. Cheng, Le Livre du Vide médian, 143.

26. 26. “La ‘beauté’ est essentiellement considérée comme un processus de devenir résultant d’une rencontre” (Cheng, Le Livre du Vide médian, 11).

27. 27. Cheng, Le Livre du Vide médian, 17.

28. 28. Cheng, L’écriture poétique chinoise, 55.

29. 29. “Reconstituting a whole on the basis of fragments that became separated at the moment of the agreement [ … ]. What one must try to do is to reconstitute a symbolon, a symbolic alliance or wedding ring between languages, but reconstitute it in such a way that the whole is greater than the original itself, and of course, than the translation itself. [ … ] this impossible possibility nevertheless holds out the promise of the reconciliation of tongues. Hence the messianic character of translation. The event of a translation, the performance of all translations, is not that they succeed. [ … A] translation succeeds in promising success, in promising reconciliation” (Derrida, The Ear of the Other, 123).

30. 30. “The translation augments and modifies the original, which, insofar as it is living on, never ceases to be transformed and to grow [ … ] This process—transforming the original as well as the translation—is the translation contract between the original and the translating text. In this contract it is a question of neither representation nor reproduction nor communication; rather, the contract is destined to assure a survival, not only of a corpus or a text or an author but of languages. Benjamin explains that translation reveals in some way the kinship of languages” (Derrida, The Ear of the Other, 122).

31. 31. Derrida, The Ear of the Other, 153.

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Anne Magnan-Park

Anne Magnan-Park is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Indiana University South Bend (USA). She earned her PhD in English literature from Université Rennes 2, France. With Jean Anderson, she translated Patricia Grace’s Electric City into French (Electrique Cité, Au vent des îles, 2006). She also translated Grace’s Small Holes in the Silence, which is due to come out in 2014 (Des petits trous dans le silence, Au vent des Îles).