Scattered Open and Falling

Enjoying reading David Hinton's new collection Classical Chinese Poetry on this summer morning, warm enough to burn the mists off of T'ang China. Still, it's nice to find those cool mountains in Hinton's free, but lovely, translations. Here's my old friend Wang Wei:





Golden-Rain Rapids
Wind buffets and blows autumn rains.
Water cascading thin across rocks,

waves lash at each other. An egret
startles up, white, then settles back.

I love the way something almost happens at the end of the poem, then just doesn't . It's also a testament to the egret, refusing to be moved by wind and the water. It can't ignore them, but it can find its place again. In Hinton's version (and really no one else's), the Wheel-Rim River sequence ends with this quatrain.

Magnolia Slope
Lotus blossoms adrift out across treetops
flaunt crimson calyxes among mountains.

At home behind this stream, quiet, no one
here. Scattered. Scattered open and falling.

I do miss the Lord of the Clouds from the end of Pepper Tree Garden , the final image in the sequence as I've encountered it until this point, though I admit that I don't know what order the poems appear on the scroll where the Wang River Sequence was painted. Moreover, Hinton's conclusion comports better with the expectations of a secular audience, unschooled in the Book of Songs. I always liked the fact that Wang Wei makes his literary past inseparable from his natural surroundings by invoking the Book of Songs here, but I admit that the first time I read the sequence I paused over Magnolia Slope and thought, "That's fantastic." It would be hard for any poet today to resist letting that end the poem.

We're not much today for the idea that cultivation of sensibility is a necessary precursor for apt perception, that rawness is just unshaped rather than authentic. So it makes sense to end this translation not with an allusion but with a fruitful dissolution, a beautiful decay that can be read without recourse to footnotes or history.