Compilation and introductory article: L. Eidlin.
Interlinear translations: G. Monzeler, B. Pankratov, E. Serebryakova, V. Sukhorukov, A. Karapetyants, Tan Ao-shuang, I. Smirnova.
Notes: I. Smirnov, V. Riftin.
Chinese classical poetry
Chinese poetry is known in the world. The period of its heyday, the centuries of its greatest artistic achievements, the centuries of closeness and attention to human life fell to the share of this collection.
What is important and most attractive to us in Chinese classical poetry? Unusualness, national acerbity, all that it reflected from customs, from worldview, from nature, and what distinguishes it from all other poetry of East and West? If it were only so, then nothing but curiosity, and it would not cause a non-native reader. But we see how translations of her beautiful samples attract hearts to themselves. And this means that the main thing in Chinese poetry is still its universal human principle, which is contained in it and before translation is hidden from an unprepared look behind a mysteriously bewitching ornamental wall of hieroglyphs.
Is it really so much to know in order to feel the beauty and naturalness of the lines of a building or a vase, to delve into the meaning of a painted picture, if they were created even by the genius of a people far from us? Here there are no clear barriers between the viewer and the object of his admiration, here even a stranger can sometimes be no less a connoisseur than an artist's compatriot. The poetry of another people, in order to communicate with oneself, requires the translation of words and the transmission of thoughts, which is always difficult and not always accessible. Thanks to translation, the literatures of countries and peoples, in their totality, rightfully become the literature of the whole world, that is, the literature of all mankind.
Thanks to the translation, we also learned Chinese poetry. And they realized that her national identity is only a frame for our common thoughts and feelings with her. And, having understood this, without the slightest prejudice, but rather in anticipation of new joys, we bow to what the translator of Chinese poets was able to convey to us.
And now we are reading the poems of Cao Zhi, placing him at the entrance to that rather unsteady space that is called the Middle Ages and begins in the 3rd century: in the first decades it was created by an outstanding poet. Next to Cao Zhi, the pinnacle of Chinese poetry, perhaps the highest, is Tao Yuan-ming. He shocks us with the unexpected simplicity of a word that expressed a strong thought, the certainty and pure uncompromisingness of this thought, always aimed at finding the truth.
So we are approaching the threshold of the Tang state, with an abundance of poets, whose mind and art, it seems, can no longer be surpassed, but they are followed by the Sung poets, with their new view of the world, and then the Yuan and Ming, although repeating a lot, but endowing the history of Chinese literature with fresh, original personalities. We finish the collection on them, without going abroad first half of XVII century, that is, within the limits marked by the period of the Qing state, although the Middle Ages, as we approximately understand them, are still stretching on and in the 18th century have not yet allowed themselves to be replaced by that time, which is already called new. But one must stop somewhere in this flow of centuries-old poetry, which has not been forgotten to this day.
Isn’t it really strange that almost two thousand years from Cao Zhi and a journey of one thousand six hundred years from Tao Yuan-ming (not to mention the relatively “close” distance from Li Po, Du Fu, Su Shi, Lu Yu), not Is it strange that this remoteness did not erase the unrest experienced by the poets, did not prevent them from combining them with the anxieties of our present day? The patina of antiquity, lying on the bright surface of all these verses, did not obscure the living life beating in them. Poems have not lost their fascination and have not remained primarily a literary monument, as happened with a number of classical works of world literature.
Poets of old China before the reader. They do not require detailed recommendations and speak about themselves in their poems. We will talk about the time and circumstances of their work, as well as its main features, due to time and circumstances. We think that our guiding movement alone is enough to full strength poetry itself sounded and told about those for whom it was created.
The poems are written in hieroglyphic characters. This is their first feature, which could not be noted, since it is obvious. But hieroglyphic writing also makes translation different, giving it more freedom in choosing the concepts and words behind the hieroglyph. We will be mistaken if we assume, as is sometimes done, that a Chinese poem is a pictorial spectacle and is itself a kind of picture. Such an assumption, if not a final lie, is, in any case, a huge exaggeration, especially for the modern Chinese reader, who sees in the hieroglyph an expression of the concept, and only, and forgets about the beginning of the origin of the sign. But the concept embraced by the hieroglyph is "many-sided" and verbose, and thus a Chinese poem is, of course, more subject to the imagination of the reader than a poem written in phonetic alphabet. The translator is also a reader, and he chooses one of the reader's interpretations available to him and offers it to his reader.
Our collection, covering the 3rd-17th centuries, includes two main genres of Chinese classical poetry - shi and tsi. Shi - verses with a four-word (most often in Dotan poetry), a five-word and seven-word line, with a two-line stanza, with a caesura in four-word and five-word verses after the second character, and in seven-word verses after the fourth character. Shi is the original and predominant form that existed, like tsy, until very recently. Tsy appeared later, in the Tang time, approximately in the 8th century, and their subject matter was initially limited to the narrow-minded experiences of the poet. They reached their full maturity in the Sung state, and Su Shi in the 11th century proved with his work that all spheres of poetry are accessible to verse tsi. Tsy, unlike shi, consist of unequal lines and were composed to certain melodies - first music, and then poetry. The names of the melodies also remained later, when the versifiers lost their musical accompaniment, which is now unknown to us and determined only by the manner in which the unequal lines are placed.
Fifteen centuries of Chinese poetry must pass before the mind's eye (as it was customary to say in the old days) of the reader of our collection. Poet after poet bear witness to the development of the thought and literature of Chinese society. First, in the small expanses of the "Three Kingdoms", "South and North", and then in powerful feudal states, ruled by one dynasty for several hundred years.
And each of the times gave birth to its own poetry, which it needed and with strong ties connected with the previous one. Poetry carried with it and preserved the tradition. Reading Chinese poets in their sequence, it is not very difficult to notice its instructive, educational side. Poetry and worldview were in that inseparability, which was dictated by the inseparability of science and art. The functions and tasks of poetry were so serious, so necessary for the very internal structure of the state, that the least space could be given to the poetry of leisure, the poetry of lazy contemplation, or, conversely, ardent passion. We will explain this further.
In the Confucian conception of the universe, man is equal to heaven and earth, living between them and making up with them the triad heaven - earth - man. Throughout the history of Chinese poetry, attention to the person, sympathy, and subsequently service to him passes. The idea of a moral life was dominant in Chinese literature. (Isn't this also one of the reasons for the preservation of Chinese antiquity?).
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We are publishing a transcript and a video recording of a lecture by Professor, Director of the Institute of Oriental Cultures and Antiquities of the Russian State Humanitarian University, a specialist in Chinese poetry and poetology Ilya Sergeevich Smirnov, which took place on November 26, 2015 in the I.S. Turgenev. Photos by Natalia Chetverikova.
Boris Dolgin: Good evening, dear colleagues. We are starting another lecture from the Polit.ru Public Lectures cycle, which we are now holding in the Turgenev Library-Reading Room. It is very pleasant that we can again see Ilya Sergeevich Smirnov, a sinologist, a specialist in Chinese culture, poetry, poetology, director of the Institute of Oriental Cultures and Antiquities of the Russian State Humanitarian University.
We are always very glad to lecturers from there, because it is an inflorescence of acting talents. We will talk about the tradition of Russian translation of Chinese poetry, about schools, about approaches to this. Please, Ilya Sergeevich.
Video recording of the lecture
Ilya Smirnov: Good evening, thank you to everyone who came today. The title of my speech is designated as "History of the translation of classical poetry in Russia", but rather, it should be clarified that this is not so much a history of translation as of the existence of Chinese classical poetry in Russia.
My story will be somewhat inconsistent, because there is no distinctly arranged chronological history of translation from Chinese in Russia. These are such “concentric circles”, schools, students. The relationship with the country from which this great poetic tradition came to us in different epochs changed, the attitude towards those who translated this poetry and the result of their labors also changed. Therefore, I will try to mix a few things: actually talking about translation, talking about Chinese poetry in culture - what is called the transcription or motifs of Chinese poetry in culture.
And, in conclusion, if I have time, I would like to talk about the unexpected - about the future. In the yard - 2015, 150 years, wonderful poets, outstanding scientists, people who happily combined this and that hypostasis in themselves, tried to translate the Chinese classics into Russian. And here we are, reviewing what has already been done, and, voluntarily or involuntarily, we think about further ways of poetic translation from Chinese.
Assessing what has been done over the past century and a half, I will express my opinion (in general, everything that I will say here today, except for dates and chronology, is solely my opinion) we find ourselves in the face of a radical failure: there is no Chinese poetic classic in Russian! There is no need to ask me if there are Arabic, Persian, Japanese classics in Russian - I do not want to touch on this, since I am not deeply immersed in these areas of translation. I know, maybe a little, but God knows how much. I know a little more about the Chinese classics.
Get ready for what will be the final, where I will try to explain why we encountered such a failure, could we have not encountered it, or was it predetermined by the whole course of the interaction of science called "Sinology" or "Sinology" or "Sinology" - and its "splash" in the form of translations of Chinese poems into Russian.
And one more note: I will try to do without any assessments in relation to the work of individual schools and translators. If these assessments somehow arise from what I will say, then it turned out that it was completely beyond my power to avoid them.
So. In 1856, in the 126th volume in the sixth issue of the journal Otechestvennye Zapiski, a translation of the remarkable Russian poet Afanasy Fet (this assessment is natural, it is not included in the "non-estimated" condition) of a Chinese poem appeared. It took probably 30 years for the school of Russian Sinology, which had been formed by that time, to determine that this was a poem by the Chinese poet Su Shi, a poet of the Song era, that is, the XI-XII centuries, no less remarkable than Afanasy Fet, - "Shadow".
Now we will see what has happened and will continue to happen with the translation from Chinese. Yeah, I haven't apologized yet for not having a presentation. I can't. And reading through the eyes of poorly understood lines would add little to your perception of Chinese poetry. Therefore, try to listen to poetry and, I think, you will understand the main thing
First, the interlinear of this poem, so that it becomes more or less clear what this poem is about:
Ledge after ledge
step by step...
The "ledge" is most likely a "floor".
But even for an interlinear, the word is not too poetic, so we will say "ledge".
Step by step, step by step
Climbing the Jade Tower.
No matter how much I order the servant boy,
He won't take her down at all.
Only a great luminary will take her away,
How the clear moon will bring it with it.
I’ll make a reservation right away that the interlinear is an extremely imperfect thing in general, and even more so in relation to Chinese poetry. I tried to convey as accurately as possible everything that is written in the Chinese text, but involuntarily, so that it does not look like a series of slurred words, I am grammarizing the text, while in the Chinese text all these grammatical connections must be established based on the context, experience reading text, prosody and many other things. Nevertheless.
Here is what Fet wrote:
The tower lies
You will count all the ledges;
Only that tower
You won't miss anything.
her sun
Can't steal
look at the moon
I put it down again.
Everything is in place, only the detail with the servant boy is missing. It seemed to be all that was left. The feta translator was scolded for everything, but here it seems that everything is in place. But what is this poem about? What did you understand from it? What is the poem about?
A certain person, a "lyrical hero", in European terms, climbs the tower. This tower has a shadow - the poem is called "Shadow" - and for some reason asks the boy to sweep away this shadow. And then everything is clear: the sun leaves, the shadow from the tower disappears, but then the moon rises and again the shadow from the tower lies on the ground.
What is really going on in this poem? The Chinese are not going anywhere. He walks along the shadow that lies on the ground - "ledge by ledge, step by step." Because the tower was built at the foot of the hill, so the shadow falls, practically reproducing this tower in all details.
It was customary to go for a walk, taking a kettle of wine, warm it on a fire, drink a glass, play such narrow harp, composing poetry. Naturally, a poet, a learned person, did not drag all this household behind him. He had a servant, usually a boy, who carried all this after him. Therefore, the poet jokingly suggests that he remove this shadow, but the boy cannot do this.
And this hidden playfulness is the whole point of the poem. An example, to tell the truth, from the simplest. And here is the question: how should the poet, if not Fet, have acted in order to manifest, convey to the reader not only the obvious, but also the latent?
By the way, many years later it turned out that the interlinear was made by Feta not by anyone, but by the wonderful, great Russian sinologist, founder of the first Russian Sinological school, Vasily Pavlovich Vasiliev. He could well translate the poem in its entirety! But if he wrote all that I have told you, what would the poet do with it? After all, the Chinese did not say all this in his poem, it lives there, "behind the line." That is why Chinese verses practically do not exist without commentary.
First, classical books ceased to live without commentary - those that typologically correspond in Chinese culture to the Bible or the Koran, determine some of the fundamental properties of the tradition, what is called the "picture of the world".
In general, Chinese culture is a philological realm, a realm of commentary. The Chinese practically do not have a tradition of direct utterance, a thought must be expressed gradually, implicitly, the external form - words, a line - only hints, leads to the deep content.
Let's return to Russian translations.
After Fet, the Chinese were translated by Mikhailov, Minaev - his translation, very far from the original, even entered one of the school anthologies in what was then Russia. Later, of course, it was not without Balmont, who translated everything and thought about everything, he translated the Chinese in his own way, he also translated Western poetry, talentedly, but “in Balmont’s way”, you see him, Balmont, rather than see the original .
The first collection that presented the Russian reading public with any extensive selection of Chinese poetry was China's Pipe in 1914. Little is known about the translators Egoriev and Markov. The latter was from the Latvians (Markov, apparently, a pseudonym), married the artist Varvara Bubnova. By the will of fate, she ended up in Japan, taught the Japanese of European painting and herself studied traditional Japanese painting from them, became famous, and in her declining years wrote something like a diary. This diary has preserved for us the meager information about the translator Markov.
Only the lazy did not kick the translations from the "Pipe of China": both knowledgeable people who had serious grounds for criticism, and perfect amateurs.
I will give an interlinear translation of a very famous poem, which is found in all Chinese anthologies, by the famous poet Li Po. From the point of view of the Chinese - the greatest, perhaps. Reveler, drunkards, according to legend, drowned in the lake, reaching for the reflection of the moon in the water.
Even the famous scholar Zhu Xi, who was such a Confucian of the Confucians from whom good word You won’t wait for such “non-canonical” cases, he bluntly said that these 20 words, or rather, signs, in Li Bai’s five-word quatrain, are worth hundreds of thousands of words of other poets. Chinese criticism is very metaphorical, so this is a very high mark. The poem is called "Lamentation on Jasper Steps". Here is the substring:
Jasper steps / give birth to white dew;
The night lasts... // The silk stocking is full.
Return, lower / water-crystal curtain -
Ringingly transparent… // Contemplate the autumn moon.
Now listen to what the most worthy Egoriev and Markov made of these twenty words. So, "Moonlight Staircase":
From white, transparent jade
The ladder goes up
Sprinkled with dew...
And the full moon shines in it ...
All steps shimmer with moonlight.
Queen in long robes
Climbing up the stairs
And dew, overflowing,
It wets the edges of noble covers.
She goes to the pavilion
Where are the moonbeams
Spin your own fabric.
Blinded, she stops at the threshold.
Her hand gently lowers the pearly curtain,
And wonderful stones fall
Rumbling like a waterfall
pierced by the rays of the sun.
And the queen listens to the murmur,
And sadly looks at the moonlight,
To the autumn moonlight
Flowing through pearls.
... And for a long time sadly looks at the moonlight.
Needless to say, they did a great job. For a long time it seemed that this was not a translation at all. But, if we reach the end of everything I want to talk about, then we will return to this opus and try to look at it from a somewhat unexpected angle.
In the meantime, using the example of Li Po's quatrain, I will once again show you the imperfection of even an ideally accurate interlinear translation of a Chinese poem.
“Lamentation on Jasper Steps” - what does this immediately say not to you and me, but to the Chinese reader? Firstly, that the poem was written on behalf of a woman, because the sign “yuan”, which means “complaints, complaints”, is a word from the female language. Men do not complain or complain, at least not through that word.
"Jasper steps" are the steps of the royal palace. Jasper is a sign of all the best. In fact, this is not jasper, but jade, but in Russian the word jade is steadily associated with kidney disease, so for a long time Russian translators preferred mineralogically erroneous jasper to medical jade. Be that as it may, it is important to say that natural jade comes in a wide variety of colors, from white to dark green; white is considered incredibly precious, jewelry is made from it, but in the royal palace, steps were made from it, regardless of costs. Therefore, no rich person can have "jasper steps", ever; in life, maybe yes, but not in poetry. In poetry, this is a sign of the imperial home.
Who can complain in the imperial palace? Only the imperial concubine. Much less often - the empress. The emperor had up to a thousand concubines. This, of course, is not about fabulous debauchery, but about the mystical function of fertility. A great many concubines symbolized the power of the Son of Heaven, his all-begetting possibilities. Girls, of course, beauties, were selected throughout China by special sovereign people.
It is clear that a thousand young ladies is excessive even for the emperor. Many were honored with a visit from the emperor once or twice in their lives, and many faded away, grew old, not seeing the face of the sovereign. And it was almost impossible to return home. Tragedy? Undoubtedly. But over time, this plot, this sadness of the harem maiden turned into an absolutely symbolic theme, in no way connected with the real circumstances of the life of the imperial palaces.
Most likely, it was such a poetic mask for poems about love. It is difficult to say exactly when the substitution took place, but certainly long before Li Bo. The skill of the poet and tradition continued, however, to require strict observance of all the signs of the original theme of the palace concubine. Thus, it is essential to make it clear that the action takes place in the imperial palace. Li Bo, an outstanding master, even dares to point out this circumstance twice - in the title of the poem and in the first line, repeating the “royal” epithet “jasper”; this is very generous, because the poet has only 20 hieroglyphic signs at his disposal.
"Jasper steps give birth to white dew." Why do they "give birth to white dew"? Because jasper / jade, according to Chinese beliefs, and, it seems, by virtue of their chemical properties, here I’m not an expert, it keeps warm in the cold - that’s why there are such jasper benches in Chinese palaces, you can sit on them and not catch a cold in cold weather, and in hot weather they keep a pleasant coolness.
And this combination of properties leads to the fact that when the cold comes, moisture appears on the jasper - in our case, frost. "White dew" is the name of the calendar period of the year. There are 24 seasons in a year, the Chinese, as farmers, reacted very subtly to changes in the weather, and one of the seasons is called the “white dew season”. In addition, this line also contains a hidden reference to the main poetic canon - the “Book of Songs”, where “white dew” was first mentioned as a synonym for hoarfrost.
“The night lasts” is an indication of the length of what is happening in time. “The silk stocking is full”: “full” is my word, in fact there is a hieroglyph that is now included in the word “aggression”, that is, it turns out that this is such an active process, this stocking is literally captured by moisture, dew. What is this stocking? In fact, most of all it resembles such lace boots, a few years ago, our ladies wore them. Here we are talking about something similar.
What is all this for? In order to show that the heroine is in terrible excitement, worries, complains and complains. Therefore, it is an impossible thing in everyday life! - jumped out into the street without shoes, without shoes. Accordingly, these stockings got wet, but she does not feel it and continues to stand on the jasper porch. These are the first two lines. I told you superficially how they are loaded with meaning.
"Return, lower / water-crystal curtain" - no grammar. We don’t know for sure at all whether it’s a man or a woman, if it weren’t for the title with the word “yuan” from the female language. Also stockings. The men didn't wear them. So she is. She - returned and lowers the water-crystal curtain. This is a curtain, such threads on which crystal beads are strung. And there is an erotic subtext here: if a lover comes to a lady, this canopy falls. And she has it raised. And she lowers him with a kind of hopelessness; and behind this gesture is another expression of her complaint. The poem ends with the phrase "contemplate the autumn moon", and for the word "contemplate" a sign is taken that does not mean only "look".
China, on the other hand, is very even in the center, which is why various hills, towers, and stairs are still very popular. If you ever find yourself in China with a Chinese excursion somewhere in an area with hills or towers, you will see how all the Chinese headlong - from young children to old people - climb these hills and towers together, because it is closer to heaven, and a fertile stream flows from there with all the content important to the Chinese. But the main thing is to rise above even nature, above even relief, and look into the distance in order to “see the four seas”, as they say poetically, that is, to see the borders of this middle country, beyond which there is barbarism and, in essence, nothing. And here Li Bo uses the word for this kind of looking - van, although it would seem that the ladies only look at the moon.
Well, with the "autumn moon" everything is more or less simple: autumn is the end of the year, although the height of autumn is still ahead, because the "white dew season" is September, and the peak of autumn is October and November. Autumn evokes thoughts about the frailty of life, the frailty of being; here it is also an experience of hopeless longing. Whose? Concubines? - Maybe. Poet? - More likely.
There is much more to this great poem, I even wrote a long article about it, trying to get to the bottom of its deeper meanings. But now I want to emphasize that the most virtuoso translation - and this poem was translated by knowledgeable and capable people - physically cannot cover all the overtones that an educated Chinese reader (there were no other readers in traditional China) grasped immediately and completely. In other words, in Russian there are more or less talented dummies, devoid of the full-blooded richness of the original.
Now let's stop talking about translation for a while and turn to, so to speak, the echoes of Chinese poetry, in Russian poetry. We are talking about the famous collection of Nikolai Gumilyov "Porcelain Pavilion". This collection was created when Gumilyov lived in France and England, and, apparently, some French versions of Chinese poems served as the basis for Gumilyov's arrangements. one of the French.
It looks like a real Chinese poem, perhaps, only the one that gave the name to the entire collection - "The Porcelain Pavilion". These are lovely poems, I'll read them to you:
Among the artificial lake
The porcelain pavilion has risen.
arched back with a tiger's back,
The jasper bridge leads to it.
And in this pavilion several
Friends dressed in bright dresses,
From bowls painted with dragons
They drink warm wine.
They talk merrily
And then they write down their poems,
Wringing yellow hats
Rolling up sleeves.
And it is clearly visible in the clear lake -
The bridge is concave like a jasper moon,
And a few friends over bowls
Turned upside down.
What we are waiting for is present in this poem in full. For everyone who has seen Chinese painting, this picture lives up to all expectations. Here is a humpbacked bridge, very accurately reflected in the smooth surface of the waters, and gentlemen, poets. There are also inaccuracies, the most noticeable being yellow hats. The yellow color belongs exclusively to the emperor, no dignitaries in yellow hats could be, but on the whole, intonationally all this is very interesting, even formally Gumilyov's transcription to some extent reproduces the form of the Chinese eight-line (in Russian, the number of lines of the original is traditionally doubled).
The charm of this poem is given not only by a visible poetic gift, deep intuition, but also - I'm sure - knowledge of China and Chinese poetry. The fact is that Gumilyov communicated quite closely with the second great Russian Sinologist Vasily Mikhailovich Alekseev (1881-1951) after Vasily Pavlovich Vasilyev, who really introduced the then Russian society with Chinese poetry, releasing in 1916 a huge volume “Chinese Poem about a Poet. Stanzas of Sykun Tu”, which contained a study and translation of 24 octets. Sykun Tu is a poet of the Tang era (UP - X centuries), who created a poetic poetology, very vague and dark, depicting, as Alekseev proved, he considered 24 phases of the inspiration of a Chinese poet.
This is a very complex thing; in Alekseev's book - a multi-page study, an interlinear translation of each poem with a detailed commentary, and in addition - amazing paraphrases that reproduce the Chinese favorite way of explaining the meaning: to say the same thing that has already been said in verses, but in other words and just as poetic. It is known that after the appearance of its Russian version, many poets of that time were fond of the “Poem about a Poet”, among whom was Gumilyov. So his knowledge of Chinese poetry had a very solid foundation.
V.M. Alekseev founded the so-called “second” Russian Sinological school. And to this day, many Russian sinologists trace their scientific pedigree from the Alekseev school. The same can be said about his role in translation from Chinese. He himself translated a lot of poetry and prose, his translations are wonderful. And he was also happy with his students, many of them were distinguished by truly outstanding talents.
You probably know the name of Nikolai Alexandrovich Nevsky (1892-1938), first a Sinologist, then a Japaneseist, Tangutologist, folklorist; by the way, his first independent work was the translation of Li Po's poems with detailed comments.
Another Alekseevsky student, Yulian Konstantinovich Shchutsky (1897-1938), a brilliant translator of the Chinese classical Book of Changes, perhaps showed his talent as a poetic translator more clearly than others; I will say more about this. His friend and classmate at the university, Boris Aleksandrovich Vasiliev (1899-1938), is also a person not without poetic talents, but, alas, quite early felt, how to put it mildly, a taste for political betrayal, having participated in the persecution of his teacher Alekseev, that, however, did not save him from the fate of the firing squad. As well as Nevsky and Shchutsky who did not give up anything.
Aleksey Alexandrovich Shtukin (1904-1963) translated into Russian in verse one of the main canonical monuments of China, the Book of Songs. He escaped execution, but not arrest, ended up in a camp, in spite of everything he continued to translate from memory; thanks to the troubles of Alekseev, the camp was replaced with exile in some wilderness; then camp again, liberation, a short time at large and death from a fourth stroke. But he fulfilled his mission - to this day his translation is the only complete translation of the “Book of Songs” into Russian.
As you can see, all Alekseev's students translated poetry. But for the general Russian reader, Chinese poetry was opened by a small collection “Anthology of Chinese Lyrics of the 7th-19th Centuries” of 1922, then they were still writing “After the Nativity of Christ”, which was made by Shchutsky, and Alekseev himself wrote the introductory article and introductory remarks to the chapters.
This book was extraordinarily popular; The translations were immediately liked and remembered for a long time. There was something in them that was consonant with the traditions that had not yet died. Silver Age, and at the same time - some unusualness, spice, or something. I will cite, by the way, one of the amusing testimonies of the unprecedented popularity of Shchusev's arrangements.
A well-known St. Petersburg scientist mentions such a case in his memoirs. During the war on the Northern Front, in a moment of calm, a company of translators at headquarters and newspapermen started a game: someone utters two poetic lines, and the other must continue the poem and name the author. Failed - lost. The Moscow poet Alexander Kovalenkov, who served in the local newspaper, was simply “stuffed” with poems and invariably emerged victorious. And then one day he asked the author of the memoirs the next two lines:
All our hard, troubled days,-
and he suddenly continued with unexpected ease:
This has nothing to do with
To educate my soul.
Kovalenkov was so sure that his “strike” would be unanswered that he was confused and did not even ask who the author of the poem was, which, of course, involuntarily saved his opponent: he, of course, did not remember the name of the Chinese poet Wang Ji. But the translation of Shchutsky turned out to be so charming that among the few translations from Chinese it became, as they say, a fact of Russian poetry (whether this is good is another matter).
I PASS IN FRONT OF THE TAVERN
(7th century, from Wang Ji)
I'm drunkenly in the flow
All our hard, troubled days.
This has nothing to do with
To educate my soul.
And where the eyes do not rush -
Everyone is drunk everywhere, and therefore
How dare I resist
To be sober for me alone?
And one more evidence of the unprecedented popularity of this translation: a parody was even written on it:
“I see pleasure around me -
Burdocks, thorns, wheatgrass.
However, this has nothing to do
To the upbringing of my soul."
You understand that they only parody what is “on the ear”, otherwise the parody is meaningless.
In connection with Shchutsky, I will return to the subject of the lecture parallel to the translation - to Chinese motifs in Russian poetry. You already know how tragically this remarkable scientist and translator ended his days. But even on the “nights of execution”, his life was not cloudless. A man of many talents, who took a great interest in the mid-twenties, he openly joined the already persecuted anthroposophists; moreover, he fell in love with the active anthroposophist Elizaveta Dmitrieva-Vasilyeva (the famous Cherubina de Gabriak, who caused the duel between Guliyev and Voloshin). The times were still relatively vegetarian, and soon she was not arrested, not killed, no, she was condescendingly sent to Tashkent.
Shchutsky goes to visit his beloved. She lives in a tiny adobe house, through the porch of which a pear tree has sprouted. They are endless, including about poetry; day after day, the poetess composes the poetic cycle "The House Under the Pear Tree". It is difficult to say to what extent Shchiyutsky, as we know, also an outstanding poet, participated in the creation of these poems, but there is no doubt that we have one of the most striking examples of the "germination" of Chinese imagery, intonation, stanza, symbolism in Russian poetry. I hope you hear it all for yourself.
On the table a blue-green bouquet
Peacock feather...
Maybe I'll stay for many, many years
Here in the desert...
If you stepped on frost,
So, close and strong ice ...
“If you stepped on frost,
This means that strong ice is also close ... ”- this is an expression from the ancient Chinese“ Book of Changes ”, as you remember, translated by Shchutsky. At that time, he was just beginning his studies of this monument and, probably, shared his observations with his girlfriend. In general, this old proverb was very consonant with the then moods of the intelligentsia: signs of cold weather in public life differed quite clearly, without much difficulty the coming glaciation was also visible; I had no illusions: what should come will come!
Another poem:
"Behind the houses, in a back alley,
So the branches of willows are bent,
Like a wave frozen on the crest,
Like carvings on my jewelry box...
My walks are lonely
Silently took a departing friend
Willow branch from remembering hands.
According to the tradition of the Chinese, when leaving a person - and they often left, especially Chinese officials (the fight against corruption did not begin yesterday) - at the city gates, saying goodbye, they broke hanging willow branches and handed them to the traveler as a keepsake of native land. As you can see, Chinese motifs are quite alive in these verses and do not seem alien at all.
Now let's go back from student to teacher and talk about translation again.
Chinese poetry, as already mentioned, was translated by Vasily Mikhailovich Alekseev himself. It must be said that his poems have some incredible, mysterious property. You look at them like an x-ray of a Chinese poem. This is a mysterious thing, because the "backbone" of the Chinese poem comes through. At the same time, these are Russian poems, where the words are arranged in the right order and they are wonderfully chosen.
Alekseev is so high that he is neither cold nor hot from my words, so I risk saying some evaluative words.
Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov said that only Gnedich translated the Iliad not into “general cultural” Russian, but into a language specially designed precisely and only for the transposition of this single work.
If you don't remember, read it again - you can't speak or write in this language. It was invented so that you and I would feel the truly divine, unearthly origin of the great poem.
Alekseev acted in approximately the same way, shifting his Sykun Tu. This is exactly how his translations were assessed by the most insightful contemporaries. It was said that he discovered the "Chinese Khlebnikov" - which in contemporary Russian poetry could be compared in quirkiness with the language of Khlebnikov's original poems.
I will read you a few lines of Alekseev and I will start not with Sykun Tu, but with the poem that we have already talked about, “Lamentations on the Jasper Steps” by Li Bo.
Jasper platform gives birth to white dew...
The night is long: they have mastered a fleur stocking.
I'll leave, I'll lower the water-crystal curtain:
In a transparent pattern, I will look at the autumn month.
Many modern readers believe that this is a slightly "rhythmic" interlinear. Don't know. Even in the syntax, in the choice of words, I see a bizarre Russian-Chinese amalgam; This translation will never become a “fact of Russian poetry”, but to the reader who wants to know not “what” the poems are about, but “how” they are arranged, this arrangement will tell a lot.
I will return to Vasily Mikhailovich's translations, in particular, to his Sykun Tu, but now I would like to talk again about the work of his students - researchers and transcribers of Chinese poetry.
Boris Alexandrovich Vasiliev, who was already mentioned, translated quite a lot, published much less, almost everything in the 1935 collection Vostok; the collection later, when the vast majority of its authors were, as they put it then, “withdrawn”, was withdrawn from libraries, part of the circulation was put under the knife, so that Vasiliev as a translator was practically unknown for many years. I suggest you listen and appreciate one of his translations.
First the subscript:
One path of the setting sun spreads over the water,
Half of the river is azure-azure,
Half of the river is red.
Who does not love the ninth moon (i.e. the ninth lunar month) the initial third night?
Dew, like a true pearl,
The moon is like an onion.
Now translation:
Spreads the road from the glare of fire
The setting sun over the river.
The floor of the river is like the azure of a bygone day,
Half - red, like a ray of fire.
How I love the third day of the ninth moon
At the evening hour, when in the middle of silence
Like pearls, dew suddenly lights up
And in the sky - the moon, like a curved bow.
If you were able to compare the translation with the interlinear by ear, you noticed that there are quite a few words missing in the original, almost half. And, of course, intonation - sublime, even pretentious - hardly corresponds to the spirit of Chinese poetry, “insipid”, as the Chinese themselves defined it. For comparison, I will read you another translation of this poem, made decades after Vasiliev by the last student of Alekseev, Lev Zalmanovich Eidlin (1910-1985):
Walkway one setting sun
Stretched into the depths of the water ..
Half of the azure-azure river,
The river is half red.
I feel tender passion for the third night
The beginning of the ninth moon.
Dew, like a pure pearl of grain,
The moon is like a curved bow.
Eidlin is the greatest connoisseur of Chinese poetry, a major translator of it. Even the Chinese admired his ability to read and understand ancient poems (and you rarely get a kind word from them about foreign Sinologists). I hope you heard the crispness, the clarity of the Eidlin transcription, an almost verbatim match with the original.
To tell the truth, he, like Vasiliev, allowed an hardly justified grammaticalization of the fifth line of the translation, introducing the pronoun “I” - in Chinese poetry, personal pronouns, as a rule, are absent and ours is no exception. In general, this line is clearly not set: "I feel a tender passion for the third night" - everything is here - from intonation to the choice of words "contrary" - and the original, and Eidlin's translation principles, and even his restrained closed character. God knows what happened, translation is almost a mystical thing.
Now I would like to tell you about one interesting episode connected with the existence of Chinese poetry in Russian poetry. There was such a poet - Bobrov. It cannot be said that it is completely forgotten, but not one of those whose name is well known. He lived a long life, in his youth he was a member of the Centrifuge political community, before that he had joined the Futurists; then he took up translations, did mathematical work (he was a mathematician by education), wrote a lot on the theory of verse.
In 1916, Alekseev's book fell into his hands, Bobrov was completely shocked by the translations from Sykun Tu. He tried to translate from these translations as if from interlinear, and tried to write, as he called, "fantasies" on Chinese topics. Sent a very timid letter to Alekseev, Sykun Tu admired him, asked him to evaluate his own experiments. Alekseev, not spoiled by the attention of his colleagues, treated Bobrov's attempts extremely kindly, encouraging him to continue mastering Chinese imagery.
Their correspondence lasted more than one year - Bobrov managed to spend 8 years in exile, everyone forgot him, except for Pasternak, who regularly sent money to Bobrov, thanks to which he survived. He returned, not surprisingly, a completely different person, to an essentially different country and a completely changed translation environment: during this time, views on translation have changed dramatically.
All the guidelines of the Gorky World Literature were rejected, the so-called "Soviet realistic translation" prevailed. If translators from world literature, scientists, high connoisseurs of different cultural traditions, sought to make the reader feel the difference between Arabic, English, French, Spanish, Chinese and other poetry, now the main thing was the comprehensibility of the translation to the general reader. Bobrov - it is not for us to judge him - quickly became imbued with new trends (and he hardly had a choice).
One way or another, he strove to create from Chinese poetry, to which he was committed, such texts that would be understandable to the proletariat. He wrote an extremely arrogant article as a preface to his translations, where he dragged everyone in - both Europeans and someone else, trying, completely without knowing the matter, to explain the essence of Chinese poetry. And then he did not hesitate to write a long letter to Alekseev, saying in plain text that he was outdated, did not understand translation well, and was poorly versed in Chinese poetry, lagged behind. But with all this, he condescendingly invited the scientist to participate in the book of Chinese translations he conceived on new, “progressive” grounds.
The shocked Alekseev tried to explain to his colleague, refusing the flattering offer, that he was “a Russian scientist, not an insolent one”; he did not heed and even pretended not to understand what it was about. However, he stopped insisting.
Bobrov, of course, had talent and had an ear. Here is one of his transcriptions, so that you feel that this is not an empty bag:
The wind of living inspiration floats,
I will not touch the signs.
You don't touch me, words,
My unquenchable sadness.
Truth rules in empty clouds
A moment - and I will arise with you,
Full to the brim. Like a lotus I
Curled up in the wind - I hide.
Air dust dances through the void,
Droplets of darkness - sea mist:
Myriads crowd, soar, glide -
And a single world will form a wave.
This is his version of Sykun Tu's poem, in which one of the main postulates of the Chinese poetic tradition is carried out - all the meanings behind the words. “Without putting a single sign, I can exhaust the breath-fluidity,” the poet claims. And Bobrov’s deep thought (he is a little more clearly expressed in Alekseyev’s paraphrase: “A poet, without denoting it with a single word, can fully express the whole living current of his inspiration”) is expressed tritely and indistinctly: “The wind of living inspiration floats, I will not touch the signs I". It seems that he simply did not understand what the Chinese said. Or did not believe Alekseev. After all, he had other authorities.
On this instructive case it would be possible to end our story. But still, there is something else that needs to be said.
After the war, when the “great friendship” with China began, transfers began to flow in full flow. In 1957, the four-volume Classical Chinese Poetry was published. Today, before the lecture, I looked at the table of contents: more than 90% of translators are literary day laborers, laborers of translation. Well, the quality of work is the same. And where did the masters come from in the right amount - thousands of the most difficult lines needed to be translated almost instantly, four volumes were published in one year, the executive editor N.T. Fedorenko served in China on the diplomatic side, no one looked after the translators, and they translated - and God knows what.
However, this edition is rather a sign of the times than a stage in translation evolution.
It should not be forgotten that during the war he defended his dissertation, in which a translation of about 260 poems by Bo Ju-yi, already mentioned by L.Z. Eidlin, and he was the only Russian Sinologist known to me, translated so accurately that he risked including his literary translations in scientific works, considering them, quite rightly, to be so “quotable” that the usual philological translations were no longer needed. Eidlin continued to work until the mid-80s. True, he translated very little.
Usually in scientific papers, interlineators are still used. He is the only one in the dissertation and later ... The only thing that he translated was extremely little. And, in general, of all Bo Jui's quatrains, he translated one quarter. Then he published a book of translations, which was his doctoral dissertation, about the poet Tao Yan Ming, of whom only 170 poems remain. I talked quite a lot with Eidlin, but I did not dare to ask, he did not translate all 170 poems either. Someone can stop misunderstanding of the text. Eidlin understood everything masterfully. Here is some poetic oddity.
I will name a few more names, these are my colleagues with whom I communicated and lived nearby in translation. It was a close and benevolent community, I am extremely grateful to them. Most of them, unfortunately, have passed away.
I will mention the Moscow translator Leonid Cherkassky, who left for Israel in the early 1990s and died there more than ten years later. He translated the great Chinese poet Cao Zhi, studied a lot new poetry China, almost the only one we have translated poets of the twentieth century.
Lev Menshikov, an outstanding world-class Sinologist from St. Petersburg, who translated all his life, but modestly never published. We ended up together in 1989 in China, and both for the first time, although he was much older. On the train, he told me: “If I die in this China (he was afraid of the climate there), then please print my translated poems.” Thank God, he lived for years and years, saw a collection of his translations, to the publication of which I was fortunate enough to have a hand. He translated wonderfully, very accurately, and with all the accuracy - into rhyme, it was his idea-fix that needs to be translated into rhyme.
Another figure very significant in translation is Boris Vakhtin. A talented playwright, prose writer, professional sinologist, he published two collections of Chinese folk songs in his translation. Due to a combination of many, not always plausible circumstances, his translations became the object of condescending criticism in an article by L.Z. Eidlin "Ideas and Facts". This article was directed against the well-known Japanist N.I. Konrad, whose younger friend was B. Vakhtin, and aimed at Konrad's favorite idea of the Eastern Renaissance. Bakhtin shared the idea, but actually it had nothing to do with his translations, except that the preface to the second book was composed by Konrad and promoted "Renaissance" thoughts in it. It seemed to Eidlin not enough to sniff (in my opinion, to a large extent to the point) the author of Konrad's idea; he undertook the irreverent task of proving that Vakhtin could not read Chinese poetry.
It was somehow not accepted in the sinologists corporation to write devastating reviews even on very weak translations, at worst, they wrote a private letter, noting oversights and failures.
And mistakes in our craft happen to everyone. By the way, Eidlin's teacher Alekseev noted many cases of incorrect translation in Eidlin himself, who was not yet a master at that time. But what can I say: I happened to prepare for publication a book of unpublished translations of Alekseev, and there were many mistakes! The Chinese said that "the mast was upright" - Alekseev writes that "the mast was lying." Why? Don't know! Have you looked and thought? True, I dealt, in essence, with draft translations.
And B. Vakhtin was a good translator. He died suddenly at the age of 50. Only two books of translations remained after him.
And - who has moved away from translating classical poetry in recent years, unfortunately - my classmate and classmate at the institute, a contemporary whom we knew as Lenya Bodylkina, and he, turning to writing, took the pseudonym Bezhin and under this pseudonym became a famous prose writer . In translation from Chinese, he left a noticeable mark.
Of the non-Sinologists, it is necessary to mention, of course, Alexander Gitovich, who made an era in our craft, who in the 50s mysteriously as a correspondent, he ended up in warring Korea, where he was impressed not so much by the war (although he wrote a few things that did not need to be written), but by the nature of Korea - indeed, impressively beautiful, in those years completely untouched by civilization. Then, somehow, “by adjacency,” he switched to China - perhaps this was due to the fact that Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, who was his neighbor in Komarov, began to translate Chinese from interlinear to earn money, and he followed. And translated a lot.
For their time, these translations were comparable to Marshak's translations in terms of fame and influence on people who were interested in China. They are also comparable in their approach to the material - now it has become almost good tone prove that Marshak did not understand Shakespeare. He understood, but at this time, when translation became not an intensive, but an extensive matter, when it was necessary to involve as many people as possible in reading world classics, Marshak's translations (were) explanatory. Gitovich's translations were about the same explanatory. A wonderful sinologist Boris Mikhailovich Pankratov, a former Russian intelligence officer in China, worked with him. He knew the language grandiosely - he turned into a monk and into whom he just did not turn.
And, probably, one of the few main people in my life is Arkady Akimovich Steinberg, an artist, an outstanding poet, a translator who translated Milton's Paradise Lost into Russian verse. From his youth, having read Wang Wei's treatise "On Painting" translated by Alekseev, he dreamed of translating Wang Wei's poems.
In the early 70s, after completing Milton, he asked me to do interlinear. I didn't know a damn thing, I didn't even know what it was. And Chinese poetry, barely graduating from the University, read rather weakly. In general, I gave him this ... He was a very courteous, polite person, he did not condemn me in any way. On the other hand, I found him an excellent scientific expert, V. Sukhorukov, who worked with Steinberg on Wang Wei. Their joint (Steinberg insisted on this) book turned out to be a wonderful miracle.
In order, so to speak, to loop the plot with the jasper porch and acquaint you with the handwriting of the master, I will give the Steinberg translation of Li Po's poem already known to you:
On the porch of jade
white frost lay in bulk.
Wet in the long night
lace patterned stockings.
At home, the canopy is transparent
lowered, sat down by the window;
Through the crystal drops
looks at the autumn moon.
As you can see, Steinberg translated masterfully. In his translations, Chinese poets are truly remarkable, if you have not read it, read it, enjoy it. But, as almost always happens in translation, “you pull out your nose - the tail gets stuck”: because of this high skill Chinese verses in Steinberg's translations acquire some kind of decisive certainty, which, perhaps, is not in the original, built on inconsistencies, omissions.
I hope I didn’t miss any of the major translators, if I missed it, I’m sorry.
Now about why, from my point of view, all their works turned out to be, by and large, a failure. I have already mentioned one of the reasons by mentioning Gasparov's remark about Gnedich's translation of the Iliad. A special language is no less necessary for translating ancient Chinese verses than for translating the Iliad.
Why is it needed? Not even because the poems are written in Chinese, and the Chinese language is radically different from Russian. All the poetry that we call "Chinese classics" is poetry of a medieval type. This is the Middle Ages with which Europe parted in the Renaissance, not immediately, but parted. And China continued to exist in this medieval culture until 1911; the idea of transferring this poetry, which is alien in word and spirit, to everyday modern Russian language seems to me stillborn, and individual successes - they, of course, happened - do not change things.
I will also note one particular, perhaps not the most important. Any, the most modest poet of modern times, the most inconspicuous, comes into literature in order to say something new that no one has said before him. The medieval Chinese poet lives with a fundamentally different attitude. He looks, as it were, back into tradition, knowing that everything has already been in it. And his task is to make this “already former” intelligible for his contemporaries by the maximum effort of his spiritual forces. Hence the apparent monotony of Chinese verses, hence their imaginary simplicity. After all, almost everything important is hidden in the depths, it is behind the line. And we, translating and reading translations, are content with obvious and not at all the main meanings; the main thing inevitably eludes us.
The whole centuries-old movement of Chinese poetry is a relentless choice of a model in the past, in order to, by imitating, somehow change this past and update it for today. And, of course, this is a language that very early ceased to be understandable by ear. This is a "dead language", which had its own grammar, vocabulary, and specifics. The entire poetic tradition in China has been created in this long silent language. So without creating a special - I don’t know which one, I don’t dare to fantasize - a language in the translation of old Chinese poems is indispensable. In a word, Gnedich is required.
In conclusion, I will read you a poem translated by Lev Zalmovich Eidlin. Perhaps this is just one of the happy exceptions in the series of our professional failures.
I remember, in my youth, when I did not know what bitterness was,
I used to like to climb the tower.
I used to like to climb the tower
And compose poems in which he sang to himself about imaginary sorrows ...
Now, when I know to the end what bitterness is,
I would like to talk about them, but I am silent about them.
I would like to talk about them, but I am silent about them,
And about that I say how pleasant the day is, how beautiful autumn is!
Unfortunately, I didn't have time to say a lot of important things. But thanks for your attention.
Lecture discussion
Boris Dolgin: Thank you very much, Ilya Sergeevich. And I have a lot of questions and, I'm sure, the audience. Before questions, I would like to say a few words about the fact that our today's lecturer is actually related to the topic in very different ways. This was partly clear from the story, but perhaps not completely.
I introduced him in his current position, but did not say that Ilya Sergeevich worked in the eastern editorial office of the Nauka publishing house and was an editor for many years. Secondly, I did not say that Ilya Sergeevich created and published collections of translations of Chinese poetry; many books were published in his own translations.
Thus, there are several points of view and, of course, it is very interesting when they are all combined in one person: from the author through the person who works with this as an editor, collector, to a researcher and translator. But I will start with my question, then I will alternate. When you spoke about the anthology of 1914, did you say that from the present moment, perhaps, one can look at this translation not so pessimistically?
Ilya Smirnov Yes, sorry, I had this ring composition in my head, but I got tired and missed the necessary conclusion. I had to discuss the situation with Chinese translations with Gasparov. Many of his thoughts seemed to me very curious, and his practice of experimental translations seemed even more interesting. He published them as a separate book. In short, the essence of the Gaspard experiment is as follows. he translates the poem, and then says: “Look, there are a lot of superfluous words here, they give nothing to either the mind or the heart, they are empty.” And - oops! - squeezed out all these unnecessary words.
Sometimes the reverse move was used: Gasparov took a short poem, which, for one reason or another, remained incomprehensible in translation and included the necessary explanations directly into the text. In other words, I did approximately what Yegoriev and Markov, who were scolded so many times, did, with a story about which I began today's lecture. They did it poorly, clumsily, they did not understand Chinese well, and, finally, they were simply not talented. But, if a person comes who has determination, talent, knowledge, perhaps some sense will grow from this.
I tried to do something similar, but I had a different move. I asked myself the question: what are we missing in Chinese translations? Answer: We are out of context. A Chinese connoisseur remembers millions of lines by heart, while reading Chinese verses, a million associations immediately unwind in him, and a small quatrain grows into a mental poetic “lump”.
And I began to write commentaries on the Chinese verse. Not so formal: such and such lived then, this city is located there, but trying to include these comments in the artistic fabric, as far as possible. Most importantly, if there were translations in Russian of at least part of the poems to which this poem referred the Chinese reader, I cited these translations. If there were none, I tried to translate at least some of the poems myself, to expand the context.
I confess that this is not an easy job and I did not have enough gunpowder for a long time. I hope someone will continue to do something similar or turn to Gasparov's idea.
Boris Dolgin: Thank you. Please questions.
Question: Ilya Sergeevich, you mentioned that a tradition has recently arisen of translating twenty Chinese characters into twenty words. When did it happen?
Ilya Smirnov: Not recently at all. Or I misspoke, or you misheard. This was introduced by Alekseev. Before that, there were no rules, as in "The Pipe of China", where, as you remember, twenty hieroglyphs turned into two hundred Russian words. Such was the all-European manner - so translated, for example, the Frenchwoman Judith Gauthier. Alekseev was disgusted by this method, and he came up with the idea and began to translate in such a way that every meaningful Chinese word “responds” to a meaningful Russian word.
Question: Are they trying to keep the rhyme or not?
Boris Dolgin: Yes, about the discussion of rhyming and non-rhyming.
Ilya Smirnov: There is a complicated story here. All Chinese poetry begins with the "Book of Songs", which includes texts from the 11th century BC to the 6th century BC, a colossal length, they are all rhymed. But the evolution of the Chinese language led to the fact that quite early rhymes were no longer perceived as rhymes, phonetics changed. And for the current Chinese reader, classical poetry is practically devoid of rhyme.
In addition, rhyming in Chinese is relatively easy.
And Russian rhyme, as you know, requires a lot of effort. Therefore, one has to choose: rhyme - and then monstrous semantic losses, or the rejection of rhyme for the sake of fullness of meaning, overtones and nuances.
IN different periods I translated either into rhyme or not, with exact rhyme and with assonance, but I never found a single recipe for myself. Eidlin never rhymed, but Menshikov always did.
Question: I also wanted to clarify about the rhyme. But I have a general question. Languages - Chinese, Japanese, Korean - do they have a common basis?
Ilya Smirnov: Japanese and Korean have nothing in common with Chinese, except for writing, and in Korea they have not used hieroglyphs for a long time. Japanese and Korean belong to the Altaic languages, Chinese to the Sino-Tibetan languages.
Boris Dolgin: We had a lecture by Georgy Starostin on how language kinship is studied. You can watch the recording or transcript.
Question: I wanted to ask about tones in Chinese poetry. More?
Ilya Smirnov: Every Chinese word is pronounced with a certain tone.
Question (continued): Yes, I know it. But what did this give poetry, poetry?
Ilya Smirnov: The alternation of tones, which was set by special rules, gave the line a special melody; in the next line, the melodic pattern changed. Thus, the whole poem acquired a musical originality. It is impossible to reproduce a melodic pattern in Russian, as you understand. Two features of the Chinese poem are irretrievably lost for us - melody and hieroglyphic picturesqueness.
Boris Dolgin: Thank you. Why was Chinese poetry so unlucky in the 1950s? I mean that in the 1950s people began to actively translate not only poetry. Novels and short stories seem to be more fortunate. What's happened?
Ilya Smirnov: Hard to tell. Maybe poetry is a more reverent kind of literature? There is some kind of plot in prose that makes it easier to understand. In addition, in China, fiction appeared much later than poetry and for a long time was considered disrespectful. Although, for example, the novel "The Dream in the Red Chamber" is very, very complex, full of complex symbolism, difficult to decipher and comment on.
Question: Until the 20th century, as far as I know, there was Chinese spoken and Chinese, in which poetry was written. In the 20th century, poetry began to be written in spoken language. Have you looked at translations of poetry from "colloquial Chinese" into Russian, is there something better or worse?
Ilya Smirnov: In any language, written and spoken languages coexist throughout its development. In Chinese, whose history dates back more than one thousand years, the picture is much more complicated. In different eras, the ratio of "spoken language - written language" looked very different. Without delving into this difficult topic, I will say that, for example, great poet During the Tang period, Bo Juyi wrote a lot of poems in the colloquial language of bai hua and, allegedly, read them to village old women, checking the accessibility of his poetry not only to connoisseurs of high classics. The latter, of course, is a legend. The language of Bo Juyi's poetry is a highly refined version of the colloquial bai hua, hardly understandable by ear even to scholarly contemporaries.
Another thing is that when the traditional exams for official positions were abolished at the beginning of the 20th century, there was no longer any need to learn classical written wenyan and the entire gigantic body of texts written in it, at least for those who were going to make a public career. The state language was assigned to be spoken, which quickly disintegrated into the proper spoken and into the language of written texts. But aren't we? Do we speak the way we write?
Today's poetry is somewhat more complex than the classics. If that one was saturated with allusions, quotations and other signs of traditional verse, then the current one is imbued with the spirit and signs of a fast-paced time, which are not at all easy to catch.
I had to somehow translate the modern Chinese poet Yang Lian, who, by the way, was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize. He left China in the 1980s and lives in England. He is a wonderful poet. His poems are complex with some completely new complexity: they both have a clear echo of poetic classics (Yang Lin's favorite poet is the first ancient poet Qu Yuan known to us by name), and are truly modern - these are free verses, multilayered, saturated with new, unusual imagery. Translation of such verses is incredibly difficult.
Boris Dolgin: And no one is trying on wenyan now?
Ilya Smirnov: I can’t say for sure, but it seems that Mao Tse-tung was the last known character.
Question: You mentioned the problem with Chinese poetry - that Chinese poetry is very voluminous, based on a lot of references to other poems. And without context, it is very difficult to understand them, in order to translate them, you need to “deploy” them several times, or write huge comments on them, explaining for a long time. And I heard that now all Chinese anthologies can be found quickly. There is Albert Krisskoy, who runs a popular Chinese language blog. He had such an example: a poem in which a certain turnover occurs. Based on it, he found in an anthology three poems from different centuries. He laid them out in a row.
Boris Dolgin: Your question is, is it now easier to prepare poems for translation, given the ease of searching for contexts?
Question: Is it possible to group poems not by poet, not by age, but by context? Would it make it easier to understand if we said that the poem is related to this and in this poem?
Ilya Smirnov: The computer certainly makes things easier. You have described exactly what you can do with it. As far back as the 18th century, the Chinese created a multi-volume dictionary called "Pei wen yun fu". it was made by a whole collegium of scholars in order to make it easier for those going to the exams to select elegant expressions to rhyme from thousands and thousands of poets, starting from ancient times. When translating a Chinese poem and encountering some kind of two-syllable / two-word combination, for example, “clear moon”, you can use this dictionary to determine when and by whom this expression was used. Probably, someone will prefer a computer, but to think that a computer will solve all the difficulties of understanding and translating ancient texts, in my opinion, is a serious misconception.
Boris Dolgin: In some ideal future, if you imagine the digitized Chinese classics, perhaps this is not a fantastic task?
Ilya Smirnov: No, not fantastic.
Boris Dolgin: Perhaps one can imagine the rather automated work of a philologist who is preparing some kind of work for publication?
Ilya Smirnov: Yes, but I won’t have to live in this beautiful time. I don't know, anything is possible, but I'm sad to part with the book. Even the process itself is familiar and pleasant: I met a complex turn in the text, got up from the desk, went to the shelf, found the necessary dictionary, found the hieroglyphs ... well, and so many times a day. Probably, someone will prefer manipulations with the computer to all this tediousness.
Boris Dolgin: There was another aspect to the question: the listener asked whether it makes sense sometimes to publish poems not by authors, but by some complexes of poems that are “built” around one poem, for example, and in order to explain it, a set of those with which it is connected. True, then there is the question of what each of those is connected with ...
Ilya Smirnov: Here is the first Russian anthology that Shchutsky translated under the direction of Alekseev, I mentioned it in my lecture - it was organized not chronologically, but thematically. Some themes of Chinese poetry were singled out, six or seven, to which Alekseev wrote amazing introductory explanations, and the verses were grouped according to these themes. There are many thematic Chinese anthologies - old and new: “Poems about wine”, “Poems about tea”, “Poems about parting”. Of course, from such collections it is easier to trace the repetition of motives, the roll call of poets. It would be nice if someone could take on this job.
Boris Dolgin: But in general, the idea of a hypertext, in which links between texts are built multiple times and it is impossible to say whether the text is in this section or in that one, it is in each of the sections for which it is marked up - it is probably somehow close to a multiple understanding of meanings and connections. ?
Ilya Smirnov: From the outside, we are all, of course, outside observers, it is not easy to judge. There are Chinese verses called "shan shui" - "mountains and waters." And to a profane look it seems that these are poems about the beauty of nature. Translators are especially fond of translating them not only here, because these verses are close to the heart of a foreign-language, not Chinese, reader, because this is exactly what they expect from China: so that there is a lake under the moon, a boat floats, and in it a Chinese poet with a thin long beard and something there played on some kind of lute. It's so universal, isn't it?
But these verses are not about that. And about what? Don't say right away. There are a great many landscape poems, it is hard to imagine that all of them implicitly spoke about one thing; every time the poem needs to be analyzed, to get to the deepest meaning.
But as for the corpus of poems about the abandoned concubine, in comparison with the landscape forces of a small one, I have a timid guess: apart from the earliest, around the turn of the new and old era of poems on this plot, written later, outwardly remaining within the framework of the traditional theme, become just poems about love, about love sadness and the like.
I will not now substantiate my guess, which must be checked and verified, but it seems to me that there is something meaningful here. In fact, it is not such a rarity in the world poetic tradition when a living feeling is expressed in frozen, canonized forms. For example, in the old Indian poetry there are also verses in which something completely different is hidden behind the “manifested” meaning.
Apparently, a long tradition develops such specific techniques, when the outer layer, which the layman reads, is very clear and accessible, and the meaning is hidden in the depths, and only experts can understand it.
Boris Dolgin: Thank you. But were there any attempts to publish in the form in which you are talking about the editions of Chinese classical poetry in China, classical, that is, together with the entire set of Chinese commentaries superimposed on it, comments, it does not matter, Russian or European, comments to text or comments to comments? That is, here is such a multi-layered?
Ilya Smirnov: One of the works that Alekseev left behind the impossibility of printing was an attempt to translate not poetry, but the famous monument "Lun Yu" - "Judgments and Conversations" by Confucius. What did Alekseev do? He translated a phrase from a treatise, then translated a classical commentary on it, then translated another commentary of a later time, and then he wrote his own commentary on everything. The impression is amazing.
In this manner he translated several initial chapters. very, very convincingly, but no one was going to print this, and the scientist left such a promising idea. And the modern translator, who undertook the full translation of Lun Yu, wrote in simplicity, they say, translating with the Alekseevsky method is unbearable work, and I will not try. Because the comments are almost more difficult to read than the text itself. Because the text still implies a larger number of readers. And the Chinese commentary is written not so that the text will explain to you and me, but so that the same knowledgeable smart scientist as the author of the commentary understands how smart and learned the author of the commentary is.
Boris Dolgin: Apparently the last question. Why, in your opinion, did Chinese and Japanese poetry in the domestic cultural consciousness take the place it did? Yes, there was Persian poetry somewhere, but by and large, nothing compares to Chinese and Japanese poetry in their status for the Soviet intelligentsia. And this, in part, in general continues. Why? With all that kind of failure.
Ilya Smirnov: I would like to start my speech today with the assertion that Chinese poetry has had a much lesser impact on Russian culture than the Middle Eastern poetic tradition. The entire Russian XIX century is literally full of quotations, allusions, translations, imitations, transcriptions of the best poets of the Persian-Arabic poetic tradition. China, although it is also not overseas, existed until the second half of the 19th century. as if outside of Russian verbal culture. What happened later, when Chinese literature began to be translated, I tried to briefly demonstrate to you.
It seems to me that in the 20th century after 1917, the taste for Arabic-Persian poetry, which became the poetry of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, was spoiled by mass translations of the national poetry of the Soviet republics, which did not smell of any classics, they spoiled the reputation of classical poetry. But the Middle Eastern classics were translated by wonderful poets, the same Arseniy Tarkovsky. But that influence and that admiration that was in the 19th century was not in sight.
The theme of the Caucasus as the abode of an ideally simple life, not spoiled by civilization, has completely disappeared. There, on occasion, it was possible to hide "from pash e y”, that is, from cruel power. In Soviet times, this would have never occurred to anyone.
Boris Dolgin: Is this why the Arab-Persian influence has declined?
Ilya Smirnov: But the thirst to hide from the vigilant gaze of the authorities did not go away, and it became much more difficult to physically move somewhere, so people tried to go into some kind of spiritual retreat, to avoid propaganda chatter. Someone chose ancient literature, someone was closer to Indian wisdom, and someone was attracted by the Far East, including the poetry of Japan and China, elegant, distant, devoid of obsessive didacticism.
Boris Dolgin: Thank you very much for the lecture!
Poetry has always been a favorite literary genre for humans for thousands of years. This art is not taken very seriously in the West, especially in the last two hundred years, but with all this, the poetry of ancient China is read to this day, and Chinese writers enjoy great honor and praise among readers. Some of the greatest and most brilliant poets are believed to have lived over a thousand years ago during the Tang (618-907), Song (960-1279) and Han (206 BC - 220 AD) dynasties .). Among these, such well-known names as Du Fu, Li Bai and Su Shi immediately come to mind; also distinguish five main styles of the poetic literary current of that time, they are called: Shi, Qi, Ge, Tsu and Fu.
The poetry of that time told about the simplest, but unchanging things, such as love, romance and nature - something that has always been the highest value for people. Despite the fact that most of the works of poetry of that time were written in the era following the Song Dynasty (960-1279), with each generation, poets became more and more erudite, highly educated and possessing sacred and esoteric knowledge, which modern Chinese are not always able to end to interpret the meaning and meaning of what is stated. Although the Chinese script has its own specific system of characters, as opposed to the alphabetical system of writing, and despite the fact that its language system has undergone a number of certain changes, modern Chinese can still read the poetic texts of that time. Since the pronunciation of words has changed significantly, quite often a rhyme or tonal rhythm is lost in a poem that has its own originally given rhyme or tonal shade. But nevertheless, the symbolic meaning has not changed much, although the modern reader can interpret the meaning of what is stated a little differently than what the writer wanted to display. Hue and connotations may be lost. Since the poems of that time have survived to this day and the modern Chinese understand the meaning behind these works, they are still highly valued.
Five varieties
shi 詩
Shi poetic creations are couplets. These are verses consisting of two or more paired lines. The two lines of the couplet usually rhyme and rhythmically match and complement each other in their intonation. Modern Mandarin has only five tones, but in ancient language usually there were more, so some tonal rhythms tend to be lost.
qi 詞
Qi poetry can be described as poetry that has its own syllabic and tonal patterns of expressing meaning. In the process of writing a poetic work, the poet chooses a speech that corresponds to a certain template. This structure may have once been part of the song. But the music was lost. There are various speech structures in poetry, using which they achieve a certain effect when presenting thoughts or present various characters and tones to the world.
Ge 歌
The word "GE" means song. Poems of this style are a set of words constructed in a certain way that can be sung. There have always been folk songs, as well as songs written by a competent and educated composer.
Qu
When the Mongols conquered China and founded the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368), they brought with them their own musical style and form of entertainment. They especially liked to enjoy the spectacle of the theater of puppet shadows, which was a performance of small puppet puppets tied to ropes, pulling which they moved, they directed light so that the shadow fell on the screen. It is believed that the manner in which the Yuan Dynasty operatic drama was presented imitated this shadow play. The style of music and songs in the opera was called Yuan Qu or Mongolian music. Opera and contemporary songs embodied Ku's poetic style, which was also popular in later eras. Poetic style is free from various forms.
Fu
The fifth main style in poetry is called "Fu". These are descriptive-meaningful poems that contain both prose and couplets. They were popular around 1500-2000 years ago. Often, poets included with their masterpieces rare or unusual written characters borrowed from previous eras.
Examples of poets
It is believed that the most talented poets of that time lived in the Tang, Song, and Han eras. If we recall the greatest Chinese poets, such names as Du Fu and Li Bai of the Tang Dynasty, who were contemporaries and traveled all over China, involuntarily come to mind. Both lived in Chang An, which was the capital of the Tang Dynasty. They also went through the An Lu Shan rebellion that began in 755. The writers of the Tang Dynasty are generally considered the best. Poetry in the Tang Dynasty era was simple and talked about general things such as love, romance and nature, which has always been the highest value for people. Along with such famous personalities as Du Fu and Li Bai, another famous poet of that time, Su Shi, belongs to the Song Dynasty period.
Du Fu (712-770)
Du Fu liked to write his poems in a structured form, which was called Lu Shi or structured poetry. As a child, he loved to read. He always said, "I read ten thousand scrolls until they are completely worn out." Perhaps one of the reasons people love his poetry so much is that he wrote about the people and places he visited. After An Lu Shan's rebellion, he is believed to have lived in a thatched cottage near Chengdu in Sichuan.
He is considered one of China's greatest realist poets. His poems reflect the horror of the events of hostilities, the way people died being close to rich rulers, as well as everyday rural life. He was an official in the Tang Dynasty capital of Chang'an, and was taken prisoner when the capital was attacked. It is believed that he lived in a simple hut last days his life, where he wrote many of his best realistic poems. Approximately over 1,400 of his poems have survived and his masterpieces are still read and loved in China.
Here is one of the famous couplets:
Behind the scarlet door, the smell of wine and food;
On the road, in the dead, frozen people are almost dead.
Li Bai (701-762)
Li Bai liked to write his poems in free form, as was the case in earlier times. This type of poetry is called Gu Shi. Like Du Fu, he traveled extensively and lived in both Chang An far to the north and Sichuan in the southwest. He also wrote about places he visited and things he saw. He is spoken of as a romantic poet.
Su Tongpo (1037-1101)
Su Tongpo is also called Su Shi. He is considered a great poet of the Northern Song era (960-1127). More than 2,000 of his poems have survived to this day. He was a court official in the Song Dynasty, and passed the official qualification exam with honors. Due to political problems, he was expelled and lived on a farm. Many of his finest poems are believed to have been written during his exile. Here are the stanzas belonging to his brush:
The light of the moon at a quiet hour walks around the red house
Leaning slowly towards the soft door at once
Sheds her light on the sleepless rest at the door
Leaving all grievances without saying a word
Ah, moon friend, why do you strive to become full,
When people are apart
It is well enough known that the most natural way of self-expression for traditional Chinese philosophy was the literary form, and in this parameter it is comparable to, say, Russian philosophy. Therefore, for an adequate understanding of Chinese philosophical thought, an analysis of its poetic and metaphorical means of expression is necessary (for more details, see), but, on the contrary, for an adequate understanding of classical Chinese poetry, it is necessary to fully understand and identify its deep philosophical nature. Chinese poetry cannot be rid of the appearance of frivolous primitiveness until its wisdom is animated by the "holy" spirit of Chinese philosophy. The often-common tenderness of the supposedly childish spontaneity and simplicity of this poetry is nothing more than a misunderstanding. Chinese poetry is the "finest juice" of Chinese culture, and it is already a priori clear that the quintessence of such a complex and refined culture cannot be simple and direct.
As for Chinese philosophy, within the spiritual culture that gave birth to it, it has (to use a mathematical term) a larger area of definition than any Western philosophy. The reverse side of this circumstance is that philosophical ideas in China have a more extensive arsenal of means of expression. This statement does not contradict the narrowness of the problems and the categorical apparatus of traditional Chinese philosophy, often noted by researchers, since the recruitment of expressive means by it is carried out “vertically”, i.e. due to the specific universal classification of concepts and the reduction of the elements of the obtained classes into a one-to-one correspondence. An early, but already quite developed example of such conceptual schematism is the 24th chapter of the Shujing, Hong Fan (The Majestic Pattern). Such a construction makes it possible to express the ideas embedded in the "foundation" through the structural elements of both the first "floor" and the "roof". Moreover, inside each "floor" there is a kind of binding material that guarantees the strict unambiguity of transitions from one level to another. In order to avoid unfoundedness, let us try to illustrate the stated thesis with concrete material, i.e., to catch the metaphysical meaning where it seems that one cannot count on its presence.
Let us turn to two, at first glance, far from philosophy, poems by Du Fu. Their choice is dictated precisely by earthly concreteness, and not by the empirical abstractness of the content. The key to success in the ongoing search can be considered, firstly, that we will talk about the classical examples of the work of the coryphaeus of Chinese poetry, from which we should expect the maximum realization of the potentials described above, and secondly, that at least the non-uniqueness of their meaning is reliably established. Behind the immediate semantic plan of the poetic description, another semantic plan is clearly recreated - a specific socio-political situation, given by the sum of realities. Moreover, the art of borrowing and allusion, developed to virtuosity in Chinese literature, drawing certain particles of the classical literary heritage of the past into the orbit of poems, creates in them a kind of individual literary microworld, which stands out in a special semantic plane. As the Tao Te Ching teaches, "One begets Two, Two begets Three, and Three begets Ten Thousand Things" (§ 42). Therefore, there is reason to assume the existence of some other (some) semantic plan.
So, it is necessary to show at least four semantic levels of the hieroglyphic poetic text: the first is given directly in translation, the second is historical realities, the third is the “literary microworld”, the fourth is metaphysical speculations. Since in this case we are mainly interested in the latter, more or less special comments on the poetic translation are followed by their general analysis, in which, with the help of canonical philosophical treatises, one of the leading themes of Du Fu's poetic masterpieces is interpreted. It appears at the very beginning of both poems and can conditionally be called the theme of water. General analysis ends with an attempt to explain the metaphysical commonality of two poems that are paired from the point of view of the Chinese cultural tradition. As for the comments given by paragraphs, they are interspersed with information relating to the second, third and fourth plans.
The translations are from Three Hundred Poems [of the] Tang with Detailed Explanations. A special literary analysis of the first of the proposed poems was carried out by L. A. Nikolskaya in the article "On Du Fu's poem "Beauties"". Our translation of this poem was also published there in an incomplete form. Both poems, as far as we know, have not been translated into Russian before .
Song of the beauties 1
On the spring holiday of purification 2
Breathing renews the firmament 3 .
In Chang'an capital 4, near the waters
Beauties are a wonderful combination.
Thoughts are far away, majestic to become,
Cleanliness combined with beauty.
The whole appearance is full of lovely tenderness,
Marked by the highest bodily harmony.
Spring, which is waning,
Shines festively in the silks of dresses,
On them a unicorn burning with silver 6
With the firebird 7 golden-woven crowded.
What do they have on their heads?
woven with green petals,
Hanging gracefully over the temples,
They are clothed with kingfisher light fluff.
What does the eye find behind the back?
Pearls with an oppressive veil
Frozen dress train dressed,
As if cast on the body 8 .
Inside, behind a canopy embroidered with clouds—
Relatives of the queen from the Pepper Palace 9,
Gifted from a higher person -
Qin, Guo 10 - great principalities names.
Camels brown humps
From emerald vats grow,
And fish scales shine with silver
In crystal bowls that are clearer than water.
Rhino bone sticks 11
Almost frozen, having done their work,
But with bells, knives multiply in vain
A blind abundance of fine dishes.
Lifting the bridle, the charioteer-eunuch 12 rushes,
Dust does not sway - so fast is the flight.
Palace cook in a continuous line
He sends eight priceless dishes with him.
Pipes and tamburas mournful reckoning
Disturbs pure spirits and devils.
A motley assembly of courtiers and guests
There is a gathering of dignitaries of high distinction.
But here is the confused trampling of the horse
Accompanying someone's delay!
At the pavilion the guest leaves the horse,
He hurries to take the patterned carpet.
Down covers the poplar
A simple duckweed with an avalanche 13 .
Agile magpies on the tail
Spreading joyful news 14 .
The power of the minister 15 is not to match -
A touch threatens to burn -
Beware of approaching him
Fear before his menacing gaze to appear.
1 “The Song of Beauties” (“Li Ren Xing”) was written in the spring of 752. It is ideologically connected with the extraordinary growth of power at the court of the Yang family, based on the attachment of Emperor Li Longji (Xuanzong, 712-756) to his concubine - the famous beauty Yang Guifei. The vicissitudes of the events described are a favorite plot of the Far Eastern literatures. Of the works on this topic available in Russian translation, it is enough to indicate.
All poems are based on rhyme. zhen- "true, genuine" (perhaps a hint at the veracity of this "poetic information"). The hieroglyph "zhen" itself completes the 3rd verse, it is also included in the official name of Yang Gui-fei - Taizhen (Great Truth), given to her by order of the emperor ( Guifei- her personal title, meaning "Precious Sovereign Concubine"). This poetic device more than compensates for the absence of Yang Guifei's own name in the poem. The song is clearly divided into three semantic parts, successively transferring the description from the general appearance of the celebrating beauties of the capital to the feast of the imperial favorites, and then to the manifestations of the omnipotence of the temporary Yang Guozhong (more on him below).
2 Literally: “on the third day of the third moon,” that is, on the feast celebrated on that date. In 752 it fell on the third decade of March. Further, in the third stanza it is called the end of spring (mu chun). According to the Chinese calendar, the year began in spring, so the third month of the year was also the last month of spring.
3 Literally: “heavenly qi is renewed” (tian qi xin). The hieroglyph "tian" means not only the sky itself, but also nature in general, taken in the unity of its spatial and temporal characteristics. It can also denote the nature of an individual person (see, for example,), apparently, due to the idea of the homomorphism of the macro- and microcosm, and also due to the etymological relationship: the hieroglyphs "tian" and "ren" (man) go back to a single etymon . "Air, breath" (qi) - in the philosophical sense, this is a kind of material-spiritual pneuma that makes up the dynamic substance of the universe. Hence, tian qi not just air and not just weather, but the essential state of nature (the universe), including human nature. Thus, by indicating the renewal, or change, of this state, a metaphysical exposition is set at the very beginning, warning of possible deviations from the usual course of things and the normal behavior of people.
4 Chang'an, now Xi'an, one of the two capitals of Tang China, the main city of the Shaanxi province.
5 Combination si ni(charming tenderness) can also be understood as “subtlety and fullness”, “graceful fullness”, apparently hinting at the fullness of Yang Guifei herself.
6 In the original: qilin- a mythical annunciatory animal with the body of a deer and one horn.
7 In the original: kunzue(peacock).
8 Drawings of the aristocratic women's costume of the Tang era, see:.
9 "Pepper Palace" - the palace of the Empress, in the plastering of the walls of which pepper was used, which, according to the organizers, contributed to the preservation of heat and created aroma. For the present context, it is significant that the exciting spice (pepper) symbolized fertility.
10 In 748, the emperor, as a sign of special favor, granted the three sisters of Yang Guifei the titles of the principalities of Han, Guo and Qin (see, however, here, in contradiction with what was said on p. 15, it is said that Lady Qinguo is “one of the aunts” , not older sister Yang Guifei).
11 The horn of the rhinoceros, like the antlers of the maral and deer, has an exciting effect, thereby once again emphasizing the immoderation of the festival.
12 In the original: huang men(yellow gate). This well-established designation of court eunuchs is due to the fact that yellow symbolized everything imperial. It is also known that Yang Guifei was especially fond of the color yellow.
13 Poplar in Chinese - yang. These lines contain an allusion to the protege of the Yang family, Yang Guozhong, officially the elder cousin of Yang Guifei. Some sources report that he was her brother. This is a clear mistake. According to other sources, Gozhong illegally appropriated the surname Yang, being in fact the son of a certain Zhang Yizhi. A similar point of view was held by Lu Xun, considering him to be Yang Guifei's half-brother (see). His own name was Zhao, and Gozhong (Loyal to the State) was his personal title. The allegory with "poplar fluff" alludes, according to commentators, to Yang Guozhong's assignment of the surname Yang (Poplar) and his love affair with Mrs. Gogo mentioned in the poem. Therefore, it is difficult for us to agree with the opinion of L. A. Nikolskaya, who believes that Du Fu hints at the intimacy of Yang Guozhong with Yang Guifei herself. Duckweed flowers were previously used in the wedding ceremony and, apparently, are also intended to symbolize intimacy - Gozhong and Gogo. A similar symbol was the burial of Mrs. Gogo under a poplar. To demonstrate the non-randomness of this kind of symbolism, one can point out the similar role of the plum in the life of Yang Guifei's rival, the favorite of Mei (Plum). She had a fondness for the flowers of this tree and was buried near a plum tree.
14 Literally: “blue-green birds fly away, holding red handkerchiefs in their beaks” (qing niao fei qu xian hong jin). This line is very saturated with mythological imagery. In the Book of the [Dynasty] Later Han, in the Biography of Yang Zhen (tsz. 84), a commentary on the name of Yang Zhen's father Yang Bao (here the same surname Yang as Yang Guifei) reports the following about him. As a nine-year-old boy, he saved from death and came out a yellow bird (huang qiao - Passer rutilams?), which then returned to him in the guise of a boy in yellow clothes, who introduced himself as a messenger from Xi-wang-mu (the mythical Western mistress) , who “brought in his beak” (xian) four white rings (bai huan) and predicted prosperity for the descendants of Yang Bao. The connection of this story with Du Fu's verse is indicated primarily by the use in both cases of the hieroglyph "xian" "to hold in the mouth (in the beak)". Thanks to the story with Yang Bao, the hieroglyph "xian" paired with the hieroglyph "huan" formed the phraseological unit "xian-huan" (thank for mercy). Therefore, although the character "huan" does not accompany the character "xian" in the text of Du Fu's poem, its semantic influence can be found there. This virtual presence, in all likelihood without much difficulty, should have been actualized in the minds of readers due to the fact that the hieroglyph "huan" was part of Yang Guifei's childhood name - Yuhuan (Jade Ring).
The story of Yang Bao ends with the following words of the “yellow-mouthed” schist: “Your descendants (sons and grandsons) will achieve [degrees] san shi what these rings correspond to. The Yang Bao clan, according to Hou Han shu, originated from Huayin County (Shaanxi Province), but the Yang Guifei clan also originated from there, so their relationship is quite likely. And from this it follows that the above prediction can also be considered as extending to Yang Guifei. Some other circumstances could lead the poet to the idea of playing this situation. The term "san shi" (three things) in the quoted phrase is synonymous with the term "san gong" (three high dignitaries), and the names of all these three positions first included the hieroglyph "tai" (great), later - "yes" (big ), so they were also called "san tai" (three great ones). Thus, the presence of the sign "tai" in the name-title Taizhen, as it were, equated Yang Guifei with three guns, or san shi. The reason to consider it as the fourth "supernumerary" gun arose-lo also due to the fact that the messenger Si-wang-mu brought four rings, but correlated them with three shea, i.e., as if he left one ring unassigned to any of these three. Poetic imagination thus acquired a legitimate right, by means of literary reminiscence, to address this ring - a symbol of the highest social position - to the probable descendant of Yang Bao, who became at the helm of state power. Moreover, the “white ring” (bai huan) perfectly matches the name Yuhuan (Jade Ring), since jade (yu) in China has always been associated with white.
The name Taizhen connects Yang Guifei with another thread with Xi-wang-mu - the same name was also given to one of the daughters of the mythical Western mistress (cf.).
The source of the well-established metaphorical name of the messengers - "blue-green birds" (qing niao), Chinese philologists find in the following story from "Han Wu Gushi" ("Stories [related to] Han Wu[-di]"): -my day of the seventh moon (pay attention to the holiday date. — A.K.) blue-green birds suddenly appeared - flew in and sat down in front of the palace. Dong Fanshuo said: “This [means] that Si-wang-mu will arrive.” And soon [really] Si-wang-mu arrived. Three blue-green birds accompanied her on the side ”(quoted from). Three blue - green birds - a standard attribute of the Western mistress (see, for example, "Shan hai jing" - here they are translated as "green birds").
Modern Chinese commentators on Du Fu's poem identify blue-green birds with three-legged (we pay attention to the significance of the number "three" here) ravens - messengers of happiness (san zu wu), and the entire line is interpreted in the sense that to Yang Guozhong messengers are sent with joyful news. But the three-legged crows, the messengers of happiness, are the same as the red crows (chi wu), which, in particular, are mentioned in Lu shi chun qiu: “Before the time of Wen-wang came, Heaven revealed fire. Red crows, holding red letters (xian dan shu) in their beaks, sat on the altar [of the house] of Zhou. And here again we see how birds holding red objects in their beaks (xian) [writings (shu) are very close to handkerchiefs (jin)] express the idea of the gospel.
The fact that “blue-green birds” are associated in China primarily with good news is evidenced by the translation into Chinese of the term “qing niao” of Maeterlinck’s “Blue Bird”.
In the light of all that has been said, and also taking into account the fact that in China even magpies are traditionally considered harbingers of happiness and good luck, the use of Russian messengers - forty - in translation seems justified to us.
15 The formidable and all-powerful minister is Yang Guozhong. Shortly before the Song was written, in 752, he became a "right" minister, and in 753 he also acquired the position of head of the Office of Public Works. Subsequently, during the rebellion of An Lushan, who declared his overthrow as his goal, this temporary worker was executed along with Yang Guifei herself.
The Song of Du Fu very colorfully depicts all sorts of excesses that lucky favorites indulged in, but, according to the primordial belief of the Chinese, nothing that violates the measure can exist for a long time. Therefore, "the culprits of the rebellion of An Lushan, the rumor unanimously named three - Gozhong, Lady Guogo and Yang Guifei", which is why Du Fu's lines are fraught with condemnation. However, the cruelty of the violent death of the favorites was also a violation of the measure, but in the other direction, to which the poet accordingly reacted by condemning what had happened, in an inverted form of regret for the past.
Crying at the head of the river 1
Old peasant from Small Hill 2,
We crush with groans, we torment with sobs,
On a spring day, lurking, wanders there -
There are 3 meanders to the Winding River.
Palace at the head of the river
He put locks on thousands of gates.
So for whom are the emerald tides
Young reed and tender willow? 4 .
In the memories of the gleam of bygone times,
When over South Park grew
Glittering Rainbow Banners
And the darkness of things gave birth to diversity.
Empress and first person
Palace of the Radiant Sun 5
Sat with the sovereign in the carriage,
Serve him like a loyal guard.
Ladies of state, at the head of the cortege,
They carry a bow and arrows with them.
Their horses are snow-white 6
Golden bits gnaw.
Here, turning suddenly to the sky,
A bow aimed at a cloud of arrows -
Headlong flying, one arrow
Knocks down two wings.
But where are the eyes clear today? 7
And bright pearl teeth?
stained with blood - defamed -
The spirit wanders, having lost shelter! 8
Seeks to the east transparent Wei 9 current,
But Jiange has to enter into the depths.
Remaining here and the one whose purpose -
Leave, they won’t be able to give each other a message 10.
And the person in whom the feeling is alive,
Chest 12 will irrigate with sad tears.
Her abode - river flowers, water
There is no definitive limit.
The golden luminary withers,
Twilight descends and hu 13 ,
Chasing horses, rushing on horseback,
Filling the capital with a dusty whirlwind.
Falls south of the city
Keep your sad way.
And the northern limit from there
Contemplate with hope 14 .
1 “Lament at the head of the river” (“Ai jiang tou”) was written in 757, apparently during Du Fu’s time as a prisoner of the rebels, which can be judged by the “secrecy” (qian) of his journey to the Winding River.
2 The Old Villager from the Small Hill is Du Fu's pseudonym, taken by him due to the fact that his family lived near the Small Hill (Shaoling), located in Chang'an County.
3 Winding River - the name is not a river, but a lake located near Chang'an. "River bed" (jiang tou) thus actually means the end of the lake. The Winding River was often visited by Yang Guifei. By this lake the events described in the Song unfolded; even the Han emperor Liu Che (Wudi, 141 - 87) arranged a park dedicated to spring (I chun yuan) on its shore, and in the Tang era and, consequently, in the time of Yang Guifei, it was near its waters that festivities and feasts took place on the third day third moon. Therefore, the very title of this poem throws a bridge to the previous one. The mention of Liu Che as the organizer of the lake is necessary in order to show one more thread from a tangle of symbolic connections - usually in works dedicated to Yang Guifei, a parallel is drawn between Emperor Li Longji and her, on the one hand, and Emperor Liu Che and his wife Li - with another.
4 The willow branch is a traditional symbol of longing in separation.
5 From the emperor's visit to the Palace of the Radiant Sun (Zhao yang dian, also translated as the Palace of Splendor and Splendor), Yang Guifei began to ascend, and then she occupied this palace, so by the "first person" it means herself.
6 The snow-whiteness of the suit is not accidental, but a constant epithet, which speaks of the high value of the horse. At the same time, it apparently carries a hint of a mourning outcome, since white is the color of mourning (compare with the similar mourning symbolism of Du Fu's poem "White Horse").
7 Clear eyes "-" bright pupils "(min mou) - an indicator of spiritual purity (more details below).
8 This refers to the murder of Yang Guifei, whose exalted spirit (hun) is doomed to wander.
9 The Wei River (a tributary of the Huang He), which is distinguished by the clear purity of its waters, is opposed in the popular mind to the muddy Jing River, with which it connects, which is captured in the idiom "Jing-Wei". The poetic opposition of these two rivers appeared already in the Shijing (I, III, 10). Having such a figurative meaning, the name of the river. Wei once again reports the spiritual purity of Yang Guifei, buried by her waters.
10 Jiange (Castle of Swords - translated by B. A. Vasiliev) - a county in the province of Sichuan, where Li Longji went deep, hurrying to the west in order to hide from the rebels in Chengdu. Yang Guifei, on the other hand, was left dead off the coast of the eastward-rushing Wei.
11 This line (in the original - zhen sheng yu qing) can be understood as "people and everyone who has feelings", i.e. all living beings; supports such an interpretation and a similar combination of homogeneous members in a parallel line: jiang shui jiang hua"river waters and river flowers".
12 The chest (s) is not just a part of the body, but a material symbol of the soul, which is reflected in the hieroglyph And, which consists of the signs "meat" and "thought". The chest owes its high status to the proximity to the heart, from the traditional Chinese point of view, the center of all human mental abilities.
13 Hu- the designation of the Uighurs and other peoples who lived north and west of China. The rebel general An Lushan himself was hu, and his army that occupied Chang'an consisted mainly of non-Chinese "barbarians".
14 Winding River Lake, located south of Chang'an, was on a hill that made the area easy to observe. The north attracted the attention of the poet by the fact that from there (from the province of Ningxia) he expected the arrival of the liberation troops of the new emperor, Li Heng (Suzong, 756-762).
General analysis
Let's start with the first verse of the Song. Another designation for the holiday of the third day of the third moon is "double three" (chung san). There are many such double holidays in China, for example: the fifth day of the fifth moon, the seventh day of the seventh moon, the ninth day of the ninth moon. The symbolic connection of the holidays with each other is also superimposed on the numerical symbolism of dates. In particular, dual dates themselves form dyads. The third day of the third moon is associated with the ninth day of the ninth moon both through the numerological unity of the three with the nine, and due to the symmetrical position in the cycle of time - in the annual cycle of months. Rituals performed in the fall are associated with the mountains, and spring rituals are associated with the waters. On the ninth moon, according to the ancient custom, it was necessary to climb the mountains and make prayers, and on the third moon, cleansing ablutions were supposed to protect from evil influences. Therefore, the Song begins the description with the beauties by the waters. The connection between mountains and waters in the Chinese worldview is more than close, brought together two hieroglyphs denoting them express the concept of landscape, thus showing that mountains and waters are presented as a kind of coordinate grid thrown over any natural phenomenon. These coordinate axes operate not only in the field of attitude and perception of nature, but also in the field of worldview. Confucius said: “He who knows rejoices in the waters, the humane rejoices in the mountains. The one who knows is active and mobile (dun), the humane is calm. The one who knows rejoices, the humane lives long” (“Lun Yu”, VI, 23). Here is an example of the binding material mentioned above. If the superposition operation is carried out, it turns out that on the “water” holiday of the “double three” it is supposed to enjoy and rejoice, and the time of the “double nine” corresponds to a minor mood and sublime (literally and figuratively) reflections. The latter is fully confirmed by the invariable minor key that sounds in the poems dedicated by Chinese poets to the ninth day of the ninth moon (see, for example,). This means that the major intonations of the Song of Du Fu are prescribed by the "statute" of the holiday itself, to which it is dedicated. The cheerful character of the "water" holiday on the third moon associated with love was already noted in such classical monuments as "Shujing" (I, VII, 21) and "Lun Yu" (XI, 26).
The image of water, which pops up at the very beginning of the poem, immediately directs him into the channel of his symbolic meanings. It stretches as a thread of allegory to the not directly named, but nevertheless the central character of the Song - Yang Guifei, for the legend says that it was after bathing in the palace reservoir (precisely in the spring!) that the emperor's love descended on her. The extraordinary role of ablutions in her fate is evidenced by the famous painting by Zhou Fang (?) “Yang Guifei after bathing”. It is also significant that a pond was named after her. Yang Guifei's career began by the water, and it ended by the water: she found her grave near the Wei River. It is no coincidence, it seems, that the emperor, doomed to death, saw off the favorite “to the northern exit to the postal road” and “to the north of the main road” she was buried, because in the Chinese universal system, water, as one of the five elements, corresponds to the country of the world - north. In Lament, written after the death of Yang Guifei, when the seriousness of the mission of water in her fate was revealed to the end, the theme of water sounds with even greater force.
Probably, among all peoples, water was associated with a sensual-bodily feminine principle (see, for example, Porfiry). The mermaid element of water in traditional Chinese poetry turned into a metaphor for carnal beauty imbued with voluptuousness (see, for example,. For totemic and early animistic ideas associated with the cult of mountains and rivers, see). For us in this case, it is important that this coordination was not only present in mythological representations, but also ratified by philosophical thought. In the systematics of correspondences of Hong Fan, the natural-physical property of water to flow down is fixed as a metaphysical attribute (chow 1, see). And in Lun Yue, the direction of downward movement is already an attribute of low people (XIV, 23), in the subsequent reasoning, they are reduced to the same category with women (XVII, 25). The numerical symbol of water is six, and it is the six in the I Ching system that serves as the standard designation for the feminine yin. As an element in opposition to fire or soil (that), water forms the opposition "female-male". The expression, literally meaning "water color" (shui se), has the meaning - "female physique, female appearance." In addition, the "double three" is in some way identical to the six. The connection between water and the feminine, obviously, is based on common property passivity, the ability to perceive a different form. Water is an ideal symbol of passivity, since it perceives any images with its surface mirror, and fills any forms with its substance. In this sense, it is significant that in the "Hong Fang" the statement of "the majestic model" hong fan is associated with the ordering of "majestic waters" (hong shui): the sample finds in the water the best recipient of exemplary.
The image of water in Chinese philosophy was also a traditional symbol of human nature. The beginning of this tradition was laid by the controversy between Mencius and Gaozi, in which both sides recognized human nature (hsing) like water, and its essential quality - goodness or unkindness - like the desire of water to flow in one direction or another. The indifference of water to whether it flows east or west, Gao Tzu considered analogous to the indifference of human nature to good and evil. The inevitable desire of water to flow down Mencius considered analogous to the inevitable inclination to good inherent in human nature ("Mengzi", VI A, 2). It is important to keep in mind that the hieroglyph “sin” denotes not only the nature of a person in general, but more specifically, his gender (sexus), therefore, the analogy between syn(nature) and Shui(water) naturally contains a feminine characteristic; on the other hand, the hieroglyph "sin" in its most general meaning "nature" extends to the nature of water. In this sense, the identity of the characteristics of the feminine and water in the Daodejing is quite natural in this sense: “The female usually defeats the male due to [her] calmness, [because] thanks to [her] calmness, she tends down” (§ 61); “In the Celestial Empire there is nothing more pliable and weak than water, but among those who overcome hard and strong there is nothing that could defeat it” (§ 78). The femininity of water in this treatise is also expressed by the fact that it is likened to tao(§ 8), which, in turn, is represented by the “mother of the Celestial Empire” (§ 25, § 52), “the mother of the darkness of things” (§ 1).
Both poems perfectly demonstrate the triumph of the weak female nature: in the Song - physical and real, in "Lament" - metaphysical and ideal, that is, the triumph of an unforgettable image.
Attention should also be paid to the connection of knowledge with joy and enjoyment, which is the opposite of the biblical idea: knowledge is sorrow.
The fact is that in China, socially significant (effective) knowledge was traditionally considered true knowledge, and it was supposed to bring success to its owner. Refined metaphysical knowledge lying outside the framework of the social context, say, Taoist speculation, could be highly valued, however, passing through a different category: self-understanding as wise ignorance, it was accepted by society as an individual lifestyle. The very semantics of the sign "zhi" - "know" contains the idea of social application in the form of the meaning "manage", "know". Using the above aphorism of Confucius as a key, we can conclude that the lines of Du Fu depict such “knowers” who, fundamentally different from the humane, adherents of the mountains, are engaged in active social action, having fun and enjoying themselves. This means that the picture of historical reality created by the poet fits exactly into the "frame" of metaphysical speculations behind the symbols he used.
In the aspect of historical and cultural parallels, the etymological connection of the Russian verb "to know" with the Indo-European root ĝ en“to be born (sya)”, now manifested in the euphemistic turnover “to know a woman” (since the vocabulary generated by the root ĝ en, originally denoted relations only between people, and not between a person and a thing. Cf .: "Lun Yu", XII, 22: "knowledge is the knowledge of people"), is worthy of being used to explain why the knower loves water. By the way, in European philosophical thought, there was also an understanding of the connection between knowledge and love, although this connection was interpreted very differently. This issue is not ignored by modern Western philosophy; for example, in the arguments of A. Camus about Don Juan, love seems to be a kind of knowledge: “To love and possess, conquer and exhaust; here is his (Don Juan. - A.K.) way of knowing. (There is a sense in this word, beloved in Scripture, where "knowledge" is called the act of love) ".
The final Song (as if unexpected) motive of formidable danger actually brings its emotional and metaphysical “melody” to its logical end, again returning us to the idea and image of water, because, according to the Yijing, the property “danger” corresponds to the image of "water", the unity of which is sealed by a single sign - the trigram "Kan" and its doubling, the hexagram of the same name No. 29 (see).
Lament, like the Song, does not name Yang Guifei, although all his pathos is directed at her. In addition to the realities directly related to Yang Guifei, such as the Winding River or the Palace of the Radiant Sun, it is indicated by the same passwords as in the Song. Again, everything begins with spring and waters, ending with a glance towards the "side of the water", that is, to the north. Moreover, as noted above, the motive of water becomes even stronger. This is not difficult to confirm statistically. In the Song, for 181 hieroglyphs of the text (together with the title) there are 8 hieroglyphs that include the sign "water" or are actually it, and in the "Lament", respectively, 143 - 19.
(Our calculation was based on a purely formal criterion, so that the "fish" and "weeping" involved in moisture, as well as the "north" symbolically associated with water, were not taken into account.)
In Lament, instead of the “distant thoughts” of predatory beauties, whose characteristic “shu tse zhen” can be interpreted not only as a “combination of beauty and purity”, but also as clarity and clarity of intentions, combined with a sober realistic aspiration, there are "light eyes". And about the pupils in Mencius it is said: “From what is inherent in a person, there is nothing better than a pupil. The pupil cannot hide his evil. If it is righteous in the soul (chest), then his pupil is clear, if it is unrighteous in the soul, then his pupil is cloudy ”(IV A, 15). It turns out that this seemingly external, outward sign contains a high positive assessment of the intellectual and moral state of the spirit.
The observation of L. A. Nikolskaya, who notes that in the Song, descriptions of beauties are given, relating only to the body, but not to the face, is very important for us, while in Lament, on the contrary, there is an idea of the face. Indeed, in Lament, against the background of the absence of any bodily descriptions, “pupils and teeth” create an image of a face. Therefore, we have before us, as it were, two halves of the Chinese credentials tag, the addition of which allows us to obtain a holistic image of the personality of Yang Guifei, a person understood as a single spiritual and bodily organism (shen), in which the face and body are also united (more about the personality—body—shen cm. ).
In terms of emotional mood, "Lament" is diametrically opposed to the Song: in the first - in minor, in the second - in major. And in terms of semantic orientation, the poems contradict each other: the Song looks like a sophisticated satire on a beauty who has seized power, eager for entertainment, and her retinue, and “Lament” sounds like a sad elegy about a lost beauty surrounded by a halo of tragic love. Paradoxical in appearance, the contrast is a brilliant embodiment of the most important Chinese worldview principle - the principle of universal polarized duality. The world dyad is made up of the polar forces of yin and yang, modeling in the image and likeness of their connection the most diverse structures in ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic terms. Relationship yin And yang not just counterargumentary, it is dynamic, and the seed of its antagonist is embedded in each of the opposite principles. Therefore, in the Song, the spring holiday of the "double three" is joyful, and in the "Lament" spring evokes sadness, which is why the major Song "suddenly" ends with an alarming note, and the minor "Lament" "unexpectedly" concludes with an optimistic exclamation of hope. Such a powerful ideological modulator as the concept of universal interpenetrating polarization not only determines the interdependence of the poems in question, but also acts as one of the factors in the high aesthetic merit of this pair.
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