Something in me says there should be more new pieces here since the last post, as I have several partially completed things, but the distress of folks around me pulls me several ways away from that. The distress hints that this music and poetry stuff should yield to more pressing problems, and then the unpredictability of the distress primes a sense of anxious alertness mixed with weariness. Though I’m at home, I feel like I’m in a medical waiting room, perhaps outside an Emergency Department, waiting for what it is that will be, in some not predictable soon, be said. As waiting people do, I read and do random things, anything having nothing to do with the matters at hand. Nothing too absorbing, for I don’t know when I will need to put it down.
But I’ll also say this, poetry has managed to stick itself into this state nonetheless. Poems can be as small as house mice, there’s always some place they can sift or scrunch their way in. And so it was early this morning when I saw this poem by Frank O’Hara “Now that I am in Madrid and I can think.” I found it could be fit to an already composed musical piece I had done late last month, and so I put them together this afternoon. If you’d like to read the text of this poem, here’s a link to that.
This is a love poem, and more specifically a poem about separation from the beloved, and O’Hara’s language is as beautifully askew and full of charming scatteration as any of his more well-known poems. If I had time and an inclined mood, I could write at length about his musical language here and his turns of phrase: “The slender heart you are sharing my share of, “See (sea) a vast bridge stretching,” and “The lungs I have felt sonorously, subside, slowly.” There’s this intimacy interrupted, the separation of bodies and their encased lives. The title says the speaker in the poem can now think. Well, they have constructed a fine thing, something that takes some smarts, some wit, but what they have constructed is a set of feelings outweighing any thoughtful aesthetic pleasures of travel.
The exciting places in Madrid Frank O’Hara is ignoring to think of his beloved. Oh— this is Madrid, Iowa! Iowans can tell out-of-staters by how they can’t get the French pronunciation of Des Moines right, and then they’ll see if they’ll correctly say this town’s name as “Mad-Rid.”
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Perhaps this is why this poem snuck in between the trivia and my nervous time-passers. Here the illustrious culture of Spain is obscured by the distress and longing of separation. The poem finishes with one of O’Hara’s fine last lines. Do I want the empty world, the world without art? Yes, sometimes, but only by the choices of joined desire.
From the times I’ve listened to recordings of Frank O’Hara reading, I suspect he’d be more off-hand and playful in reading his poem than I was, but my reading reflects my current mood. The music for today’s performance is dense and urgent, I will not dance much about its architecture right now, but you can hear it with the player gadget below — or if that’s not visible as you read this, with this alternative highlighted link.
What if you were to find out that a famous, much-loved poem was not a singleton, but that it was instead part of a pair?
“The River Merchant’s Wife, A Letter” is perhaps the most famous Chinese poem in English, and it’s been widely anthologized since Ezra Pound published it in his 1915 collection of translations Cathay. It’s not hard to see why. It’s a lovely piece of free verse, and though it holds to the Modernist style of showing not telling its sentiments, most readers can easily divine the emotions of the young wife displayed in the poem, separated and longing for her partner.
Be patient with me, reader. I feel I must deal with a few peripheral issues with this poem, which I too admire, for as close as it is to many of its readers’ hearts, there are a few issues. While it’s reasonably frank in its Imagist way about a woman’s desire, one could look at it as an endorsement of patriarchal marriage, rather than a portrayal of two people at a particular moment of time.* One could conclude that the woman’s agency in the poem is limited to the feelings her tale evokes in us.
If you, like I’m sure some readers here and elsewhere are, seeking art as a break from social issues, there is also a literary issue, one of the nature of translation. I would discuss even more things I happen to think about when I consider this famous poem, but to keep this post to a reasonable length, I’ll just speak to the translation controversy.
Pound wasn’t a Chinese scholar, didn’t speak the language, and didn’t have any knowledge in depth about the history or culture of that vast country. What he was instead was a poet who had what musicians call, and I’ll repeat with punning intent, “great chops.” Particularly at the time literary Modernism was getting underway in the early 20th century, he had a sense of how to pare things back, to express something vital minus a lot of useless extra baggage. Pound likely recognized a kindred spirit in Li Bai,** the 8th century Chinese poet, and so thought it all right to speak for him in English.*** The poem he produced from Li Bai’s work is a loose translation, missing nuance that more informed scholars find in the original. There have been other attempts at better, or at least more accurate translations. None have produced as widely an effective poem.
But it was in looking at that this past week, while trying to better understand Li Bai’s work and intents, that I had a remarkable discovery. It was probably around midnight, when I should have been sleeping, reading a .PDF scan of a 1922 book of Li Bai translations by Shigeyoshi Obata.**** His translation of the poem Pound made famous is rendered as “Two Letters from Chang-Kan,” the first of which is Obata’s rendering of “The River Merchant’s Wife, a Letter.” But, But But—what! There’s another letter! Did Li Bai intend this to be from another persona, another river merchant’s wife, or is it a second letter written by the same character? Either could make sense. The situation is the same, absent traveling merchant partner, young wife left at home. The speaker’s mood has similarities to the well-known poem too, but there are differences. In my reading of more Li Bai poetry this month I’ve come to believe that he works in subtle associations, subtle parallels, implied metaphors not necessarily made into explicit similes.
Harry Partch kicks out the jams, Li Bai considers the abyss, Ezra Pound looking like he’s ready to write yet another crank letter to the editor
In this poem, the speaker is a bit more angry with the situation and more wary. She’s not fallen out of love, no, but her expressions seem to mix frank longing for her missing partner, with suspicion that it might not be mutual. Was Li Bai contrasting two women, or expressing that the human heart can hold all those emotions at once?
I’m indebted to Obata for making this Li Bai poem known, and since I know of no other translations, I based my version I use today on his English language one—though I, like Pound but having only my own talents—took liberties. I wanted to tell a story that worked as a song, one that would pull the listener in and bring forward in both the text and performance the wider meaning of what is said by the river merchant’s wife in this purported letter. So, my version has a stronger if not strict meter, occasional rhymes, and I try to emphasize those parallels that serve as images that I think are part of Li Bai’s poetic sense-making. Parallelism, refrains, rhymes—these are all musical tactics that can work to bring some things to the foreground that were undercurrents in Obata’s version of Li Bai.
My performance of what I call “The River Merchant’s Wife, Another Letter” is available with the player gadget below. As this is already a long and much-delayed post, I’m not including texts yet for this, but I hope the performance will work in its way.
*I’m sure some have written critiques on this basis, because there is matter there for this, including that the wife is a teenager (though the poem indicates the husband is roughly the same age.) I wonder if anyone has written that the husband’s absence is based on the needs of commerce, asking if this is a veiled attack on capitalism or a cultured acceptance of it?
**Li Bai is the now preferred way to write the poet’s name in western characters. Many works of Pound’s time use a different scheme to render the same poet’s name as Li Po. There are more variations too. Same guy. Confusing.
***Yes, one of the things I could talk about, instead of getting on to the pleasure of the resulting poetry, would be the cultural appropriation in that assumption. Big subject, worthy of a longer treatment.
****The Works of Li Po the Chinese poet done into English verse. Obata was of Japanese heritage, but writes he had access to Chinese-speaking friends and other resources while studying at the University of Wisconsin. When he encounters Cathay he realized Pound’s artistry, but also knew how loose Pound’s translations were, and how they missed certain cultural nuances. “I confess that it was Mr. Pound’s little book that exasperated me and at the same time awakened me to the realization of new possibilities so that I began seriously to do translations myself.” Despite reading both Arthur Waley and Pound’s Chinese translations as a young man, I had never heard of Obata, and there is little available in Internet searches to indicate he made any lasting impact—save for one thing: his translations have been used for settings of Li Bai poems by Constant Lambert and Harry Partch, which seems like remarkably rich company to the likes of me.
Frank Hudson 