Silence. I listen 

-Twisting River /曲江 

When I was spoken to in Spanish as a child, I would respond in English. When I was in a situation where English could not be spoken, I would become unnaturally quiet, reducing the flow of what I needed and wanted to say to a tiny trickle of response. Every sentence I spoke was first assembled in the silence of my head. The pause between thought and speech was unnaturally protracted because before saying anything, I had to be sure the language I was releasing sounded perfect and grammatically correct. As I grew up, naturally, the far shore of language grew along with me, giving voice to ideas that I wanted and needed to express. Though even as I began to comprehend greater territory, see more nuanced details, and recognize the varieties of expression, in Spanish, the part of me that spoke remained stunted, frozen in simplicity and in silence. Spanish, for me, was not a spoken language but rather one that I received.

It was assumed by my family that this situation would be remedied when I was no longer a child. That when I became an adult, once and for all I would push my silent self to finally speak all that she knew, learn to express herself, and finally release all the years of language that must have been stored inside her. This did, in fact, happen, though not in the way I expected. It took years for me to be convinced that I had anything to say in Spanish, and in those years, I shifted my then untethered interest in languages and translation (strong enough to be a character-forming trait) and channeled it into the study of Chinese.

Chinese is the only language in which I don't feel shame. Which is to say, in Chinese, I feel no should, no pressure of my blood, no reckoning with my past. It is the only language I speak that I am not related to. And in this way the math of it for me is simple and straightforward. Output of effort equals ability. Mistakes are simply opportunities to learn from; ignorance is just a space that can be filled with diligence. It was all a bit heady at first; this new linguistic atmosphere was free from baggage. I could think about words with objectivity and curiosity and nothing else. 

I began the study of Classical Chinese in graduate school. A few semesters of coursework were a requirement of my program, and it was a requirement I put off as long as possible as I was not looking forward to fulfilling it. Knowing that my interests lay in the meeting places between languages and specifically in translation, I assumed my focus should stay with the contemporary—Classical Chinese being a language that is read, witnessed, and recited but is no longer spoken or created. I had been applying myself for several years at that point to the uphill climb of making myself literate in Modern Chinese using the strategy of retaining the widest and most superficial swathe of vocabulary possible. However, Classical Chinese would require a major strategic and philosophical shift. To begin with, the grammar of the language is its own and must be learned on its own (Modern Chinese grammar is only tangentially helpful when reading these texts). But more intimidating still, the characters were familiar and yet foreign, the word meanings connected only beneath the surface, requiring a depth of knowledge I did not yet have. And in the case of Classical Chinese poetry, where my interest was inevitably drawn from the first, the language becomes even more removed from the contemporary. 

Formalism in Classical Chinese poetics requires a constraint of language that can leave an English-speaking reader feeling unmoored without her expected linguistic signposts to decipher meaning (to give a few examples: subject pronouns are only rarely used, a word can shift its grammatical role easily serving as a noun in one phrase and a verb in another, there is no original punctuation, etc., etc.). For the modern reader, the silence in these texts can be both intimidating and deafening. Yet, a strange byproduct of the sparseness of classical Chinese is that it has the double effect of expanding both the imagery and the meaning of the poem. Imagery, in that there is a greater resonance between the elements of the poem as each word reads brighter, undiluted by the dross of participles and directives. Meaning, in that this lack of signifiers creates an untroubling ambiguity; multiple meanings lie alongside each other easily, occupying the same territory.

Submerged in this new linguistic world, which, of course, I had never before encountered, I was shocked to find a sense of the familiar. The reader and the translator of this language will always be outside of it, as it is a language that can only be received. As a heritage learner (the term for someone who grows up hearing one language and speaking another), I found the interior and unreachable silence within Classical Chinese unexpectedly reminiscent of home. 

*

Silhouetted, alone,

words with a lingering fragrance.

-First Month, Chongrang Residence /正月崇讓宅

Unlike the practice of creative writing, which begins with a blankness and builds a text upwards and outwards, the creation of a translation is a reductive process. The translator is constantly winnowing, thinning the cacophony of various readings as to the meaning inherent in the original text, selecting from the limitless ways of depicting such facets in a new language, deciding between all the possibilities available to her of building equivalencies between the two. Out of her reading of the text, a system of prioritization of those aspects of the text she most wants to render emerges, and these become the tools she uses to carve her translation. Through this process of reduction, the translator finally arrives, not at any answers, but rather at those questions she most wants to depict. I enjoy thinking about translation this way, as a questioning of a text, because it allows for the fact that there is some sort of conversation happening between a text and its translator, even if this conversation is one-sided. Even if the original always remains silent. 

*

True pearls: secreted words.

Lotus flowers: volumes.

—Heyang Poem/河陽詩 

When I first encountered the work of the late Tang poet Li Shangyin, it was in an introductory seminar on Classical Chinese literature. At first, I credited the mystery I encountered in his poetry to my ignorance and any gaps in understanding to my rudimentary language skills, supposing as those developed that the texts would focus themselves and come into sharp relief. Instead, what I found was that the more I learned, the further he receded, his poetry becoming a horizon line which I could move towards but never reach. The more I read, the more I began to understand that this unknowableness was an integral part of his poetics. In the words of the scholar and writer Liang Qichao (梁啟超, 1873–1929): "What Li Shangyin's poems are about I cannot determine. I cannot even explain the literal meaning line by line. Yet I feel they are beautiful, and when I read them, they give me a new kind of pleasure in my mind." 

That first encounter led me to over a decade of work translating Li Shangyin's poetry. I ultimately undertook this work because the translations I could find of his poetry, of which there were not many, seemed to me to be more records of the translator's compromises with the language than renditions of the poems themselves. I have since come to believe that the motto of the translator is the opposite of the motto of the mountain climber. That, "because it is there," for the translator, is changed to, "because it is not there."

*

What by nature

Is gracefully remote,

Transforms to bitterness

With distant gazing.

I turn my head.

I ask the winnowing gleam.

The winnowing gleam

Grows hollow.

—Hibiscus: Two Poems/槿花二首 

One of the tropes that I frequently encounter in Li's poetry is a turn in the closing lines of the poem, shifting from the lush settings, symbols, and imagery of the opening stanzas to an atmosphere of finality and loss in the closing stanza. This turn typically depicts the speaker's failure to capture or hold the desired, often as a result of the implacable passing of time. By dissipating the focus from the visual to include the emotional, Li creates a multi-dimensional poetic form: a foreground of images and symbols set against a background of nostalgia or grief.

All of the poems in this portfolio illustrate this approach. In "Drunk Under Flowers," pleasure is contrasted with the inevitable passage of time as drunken euphoria is set against the slanting sun or the enjoyment of flowers happening on the cusp of their demise. Alternatively, in "Xie Fang Of The Senior Examination Class…," the feeling of disappointment is not anticipated; it has already been arrived at, thus the feeling of regret, "If, dear sir, you hold regret let this poem express it." Regret is an emotion that is felt with hindsight, it is a longing to repeat an action differently and a desire to relive what has already ended. The fact that this feeling is part of the author's directive to the reciter of the poem implies that it is a recurrent, almost cyclical emotion in the life of the author. 

In "Untitled (Come...)," the cyclicality is elaborated on: "Young Liu had despised the distance to Peng mountain, yet on the far side of Peng mountain, ten thousand iterations more." Ten thousand is a number used in Classical Chinese to express an amount beyond comprehension, comparable to our modern usage of a million. Here, it emphasizes the scope of emotion, moving from the individual occurrence to an endless vista of disappointment.  In the poem "Untitled (Rush, rustling...)," Li presents the equation in the final stanza, "one measure of longing, one measure of ash." In a kind of Newton's Third Law of emotion, this line implies that any exertion toward beauty or the desired will be met with an equal obliteration. Regret is inevitable. This equation is repeated in "Retirement," where the question of whether the spring belongs to the laughing or to the crying is raised and then answered with silence.

And yet, the poems are not purely pessimistic. A crosscurrent of almost hedonistic aestheticism is as pervasive as the author's fatalism, resulting in a simultaneity of pleasure and grief, a nostalgia for the present moment.  In "Brocaded Zither," arguably Li Shangyin's most famous poem, the author creates a piece of temporal weaving or embroidery in its last lines. He subverts the action/reaction model to create one where failure and desire are concurrent: "I could consider this feeling a memory sought / Only by this time, I was already wavering."

Despite the repeated edict that to pursue beauty is to fail, the repetition of his reaching toward the desired in so many of his poems seems to be proof of the necessity of this endeavor, even in the face of that inevitable failure. Li Shangyin's poetry tells and retells a journey where the poet, though able to perceive another almost mystical plane, is not able to exist within it and so must remain in the reality from which he longs to depart, endlessly tracing and retracing, in a one-sided conversation with time, the omnipresent longing that arcs between the real and the wished for. 

*

A spring ode 

I dared to lightly compose. 

But the lines I'd held in my mouth

Fell into my half-drained cup.

—After the Banquet at River Hall 

Disperses, I Return to the Residence

Along a Willow Road, Chanting /江亭散席循柳路哈歸官舍

The creation of any piece of writing, original or translated, is proof that doubt was, at least in the moment of creation, vanquished. It must be for any written product to exist. Doubt is a common theme in the work of Li Shangyin. The matter-of-factly conveyed despair in so many of his poems implies that for the author, disappointment has long since curdled into bitterness. Yet the fact remains that poems exist. This bitterness and despair did not bury them in silence, as Li Shangyin was prolific in his output until the end of his life. The themes he returns to over and over again, longing, grief, separation, bitterness, and homesickness (for a place as well as a time), are amplified by the silences in his work, his lack of cohesive background, his refusal to give us a smooth narrative, his insistence on collage. The emotions he conveyed have only gathered momentum and more surfaces to reverberate as they are read throughout the years. 

In the second couplet of one of Li Shangyin's untitled poems (無題 [颯颯…]), we find two images oscillating between two symbols (the golden toad, the jade tiger) and two objects (a toad made of gold, a tiger made of jade). 

Golden Toad bites the lock, 

Burning perfume enters. 

Jade Tiger weights the cord, 

Above the well, circling. 

These images/ symbols exist in scenes pregnant with a gone presence, a recent exit, the one who lit the incense, and the one who touched the cord at the well. They then lead into the next couplet: two vignettes of great loves, the kind of love that myths are made of. However, both of these vignettes only focus on only the outset and the dénouement of this love. They serve as bookends for the unvoiced substance of the two stories.

This particular flavor of loss, of bereavement by temporal separation, of imprisoning the reader in the moments before or after the beloved is present is rampant in Li Shangyin's poetry. It is a loss made exquisite by the excruciating proximity to its desired object. He can still hear the sounds and the music, still smell the incense, and still see the places, the objects, and all the components of a moment never returned to and never arrived at. His repainting of these scenes just emphasizes the loss of what is not there, who is not there. They are depictions of a lacuna, a relief portrait of joy, which is, of course, a portrait of silence.

*

Edits complete

Everyone silent, still

Send it away

Down a road unbroken, unending. 

—Xie Fang of the Senior Examination 

Class Memorized and Recited Many of My 

Poems–One Day I Happened to Send Him This /謝先輩防記念拙詩甚多異日偶有此寄

In the time between beginning the project of translating selected poetry of Li Shangyin to its publication, I became a mother. And contrary to my, perhaps naïve, belief that poetry would flow seamlessly in and out of my new existence, writing increasingly felt like a vestige from another life. Not just the product but the very act itself was subject to question. My own writing was floundering. Then, the practice of translation became almost medicinal. With translation, I found I could sidestep the self-flagellation of creation and go directly to its heart. I could open a text, in whatever minutes accorded to me between the needs of my child, and be right there in the bliss of it.

During this time, I came upon a cache of poems by Li Shangyin on the subject of writing. Like his other poems, these poems depict the twinning of grief and hope, wanting and loss, but more concretely, they are about the disillusionment of being a poet. Over the months that these texts slowly unfolded into English (the first year of motherhood is a time of agonizingly slow production), they became a source of companionship in an unmoored time. They became precious to me because their translation, which began as an escape from my own poetic unease, unexpectedly and benevolently illuminated a path back into my own writing by showing me that the only viable way out of the silence of doubt is through it.

In one of these poems ("Xie Fang Of The Senior Examination Class …"), addressed to an admirer of his poetry, Li Shangyin, usually so opaque about his subject matter, becomes uncharacteristically transparent and gives the reader an unflinching look at the anguish behind his practice. And in another ("After The Banquet At River Hall Disperses…"), this gaze cuts even deeper to end in a harsh condemnation of the futility of poetry itself. And yet these denouncements come to us in the form of poetry, they are conveyed so violently and so exquisitely by the very form they condemn. The poems are irrefutable proof that the poet refused to allow his doubts to consume his words.

*

Silence. I listen

To the singing grief of midnight ghosts.

—Twisting River /曲江

One of the first poems I translated by Li Shangyin was "Twisting River." At the outset, I chose the poems I worked on by their knottiness, the questions they inspired in me. The couplet above was one of these knots. 

The line begins with silence (kong, 空) or rather, an emptiness, an absence of sound. Out of that emptiness, the grief songs of midnight ghosts are discerned (the "I" is my addition). That's the content in English generally, but it is important to emphasize the order of action in the original text. The second character means to listen, smell, or perceive (wen, 聞 ), so the reader moves directly from emptiness to a corporeal reaching for information, which then yields glimpses of the unperceivable. This is how, ultimately, I came to read that line: that the way a night landscape can slowly be discerned as the eyes acclimate to a lack of light, the silence of midnight can striate through the act of careful listening and that the silence of the past, the silence of ghosts, could rise like fish to the surface and somehow be heard. That all one needs to do in order to break a silence, is have enough faith to listen to it.