When I who loved you no word can speak, Can give no help, though my heart should break You were shy of strangers-and who will come Through the long years when my lips are dumb But it is the war that takes her and breaks her, and it is on a note of war that one is forced to take one's leave of her : God, the earth shakes with it! Down in the hellish pit, Where the red river ran, Break him with knife or fire! Babes in their golden hour Slow the moon's shadows pass. From the deep hedge is heard. Here we see Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted in very truth: forgotten or dismissed is the glamour: only the gnawing horror of pain and separation remains behind: if it is the test of genius that it feels more acutely than the rest of us, Dora Sigerson must stand at the head of the geniuses of our time. VI A HUNDRED AND SEVENTY T CHINESE POEMS 10 read Mr Arthur Waley's translation of ancient Chinese poetry after seeing some such ridiculous presentation of the East as we get in Mr Wu and The Chinese Puzzle is to escape from inept, ludicrous falsities into the clear light of day. 66 Those who wish to assure themselves that they will lose nothing by ignoring Chinese literature, often ask the question: Have the Chinese a Homer, an Eschylus, a Shakespeare or Tolstoy?' The answer must be that China has no epic and no dramatic literature of importance. The novel exists and has merits, but never became the instrument of great writers. . . . In mind, as in body, the Chinese were for the most part torpid mainlanders. Their thoughts set out on no strange quests and adventures, just as their ships discovered no new continents. To most Europeans the momentary flash of Athenian questioning will seem worth more than all the centuries of Chinese assent. Yet we must recognise that for thousands of years the Chinese maintained a level of rationality and tolerance that the West might well envy. . . . In the poems of Po Chü-i no close reasoning or philosophic subtlety will be discovered; but a power of candid reflection and self-analysis which has not been rivalled in the West. "Turning from thought to emotion, the most conspicuous feature of European poetry is its preoccupa tion with love. . . . The Chinese poet has a tendency different, but analogous. He recommends himself not as a lover, but as a friend. He poses as a person of infinite leisure and free from worldly ambitions. He would have us think of him as a boon companion, a great drinker of wine, who will not disgrace a social gathering by quitting it sober. To the European poet the relation between man and woman is a thing of supreme importance and mystery. To the Chinese it is something commonplace, obvious-a need of the body, not a satisfaction of the emotions. . . . We idealise love at the expense of friendship, and so place too heavy a burden on the relation of man and woman. The Chinese erred in the opposite direction, regarding their wives and concubines simply as instruments of procreation. For sympathy and intellectual companionship they looked only to their friends . . . half the poems in the Chinese language are poems of parting or separation. The poet usually passed through three stages of existence. In the first we find him with his friends at the capital, drinking, writing, and discussing: . . . next, having failed to curry favour with the Court, he is exiled: ... finally, having scraped together enough money to buy husbands for his daughters, he retires to a small estate. In the first four centuries of our era the poetess flourished her theme varies little she is almost always a 'rejected wife' . . . there was no place for unmarried women in the Chinese social system: the moment which produced such poems was one of supreme tragedy in a woman's life." Thus far Mr Waley in a preface which is a most masterly précis of the salient features of a literature which has hitherto been a sealed book to most of us. To turn for a moment to technique. The expedients used by the Chinese before the sixth century were rhyme and length of line. A third element was "tone." The rhyme was a vowel assonance: words in different consonants rhymed so long as the vowelsound was exactly the same. Mr Waley aims at literal translation, which is bound to be to some extent rhythmical, for the rhythm of the original always obtrudes itself. On the other hand, he does not attempt rhyme because of the impossibility of rendering adequately any notion of Chinese rhyming : nor does he employ "blank verse" because that would demand variation of pause, whereas in Chinese the stop always comes at the end of the couplet. 66 We English might well desire to take a leaf out of their book if the following is typical of Chinese prose : The girl next door would be too tall if an inch were added to her height, and too short if an inch were taken away. Another grain of powder would make her too pale; another touch of rouge would make her too red. Her eyebrows are like the plumage of the kingfisher, her flesh is like snow. Her waist is like a roll of new silk, her teeth are like little shells. A single one of her smiles would perturb the whole city of Yang and derange the suburb of Hsia-ts'ai." That was written in the third century before Christ. General Su Wu's poem To his Wife might have been written during the Great War instead of two thousand years: Since our hair was plaited and we became man and wife I suddenly remember the distance that I must travel |