THE SHAMBHALA ANTHOLOGY OF CHINESE POETRY - J.P.SEATON (trans. & editor)

Back on my poetry shit. This was a great book to pick up when I had a few minutes for myself to get a quick blast of poetry. The task here is pretty monumental, Seaton tries to survey all of Chinese poetry, from poems that stretch back to the 11th century BCE, up until poems written in the Republic period of the early 20th century. He does not, suspiciously, include any poetry from after the communist revolution, which I would have been quite interested in, nor does he really explain why. Surely people are writing poems in China these days, what are those poems like? But despite this oversight, what is here is great. Seaton does a good job selecting and explaining without over explaining his selections and process. We’re not really exposed to any non-Western cultures here in Babylon, so he has a lot of information to fill us in on. He starts the book with an essay about translating Chinese more generally and the problems with this. As someone who knows a bit of Japanese (which is not actually very closely related to Chinese, linguistically, just fyi) I can attest to how tricky it is to move between languages that have such different structures and especially written structures. Chinese poems allow for a much more “stripped down” style than is possible in languages that are alphabetical. Seaton does a good job talking about this cogently and in an engaging manner but doesn’t go too deep. The star here is his translations. We could spend our whole lives thinking about how to translate Chinese. He breaks the poems up by dynasty, and each section has an intro essay that explains some of the political and historic background as well as some biographical information about the poets in each section. Each of these little essays could be a book and Seaton does a great job not getting too bogged down in this while still giving enough context to let the poems shine. And he did a great job selecting them. I’m not going to pretend that I know very much about Chinese poetry. I like Du Fu and Li Po which is basically like saying you like Shakespere, they’re pretty universally considered the greatest, liking them is a freezing cold take. But beyond them, I really enjoyed T’ao Ch’ien, Po Chu-i, Su Shih and Yuan Mei. Overall, was was struck by the frequency of a few themes. The first is wine drinking. I knew from Li Po that this was a major concern of golden age Chinese (Song dynasty) writing but it really is a through line over thousands of years. It’s interesting since I’ve been to China and drinking is not a big part of their culture anymore. Lots of smoking and gambling, vice-wise, but I didn’t see people really drinking like crazy, I would love to know why and how this fell off. Is it a communism thing? Secondly, there is a lot of poetry here, much of it quite beautiful and resonant with me, about just ignoring society and doing your own thing. Often this thing is drinking, but also just wandering the mountains or thinking about the clouds. There is a desire for detachment in so much of this I was wondering if it was a function of Seaton’s selection, or just a through line in Chinese art. This book really gave me what I wanted, which was a broad overview and some good leads on what poets to look up next. I’m planning on diving more into a handful of these writers. If only I was good at learning languages (I am, in fact, worse than average), Chinese would really be one to know. 

Flourishing and withering are fated

Stop coveting, stop plotting

Simply approach the thing in the cup”

- Kuan Yun-Shih

“Go find yourself a place to flop

And flop there” 

-Kuan Han-ch’ing

“To know things change is fine but

Not as good as 

Mornings, evenings,

Drinking wine” 

-Ch’en Ts’ao-an