Caption: A poem by Li Bai (701–762). Photo: WikiCommons . In the Same Light: 200 Tang Poems for Our Century Wong May (translator) Carcanet Press: 2022 . S adness, exile, homesickness, grief, rhinos—whatever you might presume you know of these subjects, this collection offers new ways of seeing them. It also opens perspectives on the power of poetry, ‘not what is said, but what it does to you’, as Wong May, the translator of this volume, writes.
In the Same Light is a love letter to thirty-eight poets of the Tang empire (618-906). Having relearned through them ‘the language of human friendship’, Wong feels as if she worked for them for seven years. ‘As for my employment history since 2015, see the list of Tang Poets on the contents page’.
In addition to rendering 245 pages of poetry, Wong offers a ninety-eight-page afterword with forays into Tang history, Tang and earlier poetics, Confucian, Daoist and Chan philosophy and comparative world literature. Her touchstones include Virgil; Dante; Shakespeare, Pope, and Eliot; Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Proust and Beckett; Rilke, Kafka, Brecht and Celan; Frost, Dickinson, Pound and Snyder; Mishima and Borges.
She also presents historical context, particularly the horror of the An Lushan Rebellion (736-742). This uprising killed or displaced two-thirds of Tang’s roughly 36 million inhabitants. Three million lived in the capital Chang’an, then the world’s most populous city; today the megalopolis of Xi’an. The cosmopolitan city was home to a hundred thousand foreign traders, officials, monks and students. After the war’s destruction of Chang’an, many literati turned to nature and poetry.
The essay is arresting for the ways it defies convention. Wong seeks to cultivate ‘the literacy of the heart in a barbarous world’, and her light touch threads through what is ultimately a book of hope. She voices her confidence when she asks, ‘Is it not time … to place Chan in the tradition of the world’s mystical poetry?’
In expressions of julian (‘intense pity’), Wong discerns the centrality of the theme of transience in Tang poetry. She takes julian to mean ‘our relatedness to the things of this world—those instants of being, however, rare or intermittent’. As in the modern term julie, ju means intense; lian means to pity or feel compassion. Wong glosses the term both as a verb ‘to cherish acutely’ and a noun ‘pity of love, tendresse, rather than regret, au fond no reproach’.
Earlier she has explained why. ‘Above all, it is a poetry singularly devoid of grievances; grief, yes—grievances, no.’ Many of these poems eschew psychology, and thereby depersonalise loss. ‘A landscape can show there is sadness and grief, but not your grief or mine.’
For such insights the afterword would be worthy of publication as an independent essay. Even Wong’s more errant musings merit contemplation. ‘When I search my mind for Jiu-lian [sic]—the ‘acute christening’ or ‘piteous love’; the adjacent word is Greek agape.’ Agapē—our reciprocal love with God? Perhaps insofar as fierce compassion contrasts with erotic love (eros), brotherly love (philia) or self-love (philautia). Yet agapē transcends given circumstances, whereas julian lingers over an impermanent but cherished moment.
Given that Wong recounts finding twenty-seven terms and as many ‘forms of sadness’, one could ask why she privileges julian. The term was not common in the Tang. Later poets such as Wang Shimao (1536-1588) and Huang Jingren (1749-1783) used it more, as did early twentieth-century May Fourth writers such as Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967) and Yu Dafu (1896-1945).
Acute wistfulness does nonetheless pervade Tang poetry. As with the ‘sadness of things’ or mono no aware in Japanese aesthetics, impermanence is a cause not for despair, but for close attention. Like bonsai or rock gardens, Tang poems are ‘forms of sculpted time’. Bound by strict rules of economy, a quatrain’s lines can be four time frames. Similarly ‘time becomes the narrator’ in long regulated verse of linked couplets (pailu).
Reluctant to take herself too seriously, Wong titles the afterword, ‘The Numbered Passages of a Rhinoceros in the China Shop’. The figure of the ‘sky-intuiting-rhino’ also regularly interrupts the journal. Every few pages a black silhouette of a rhino’s head appears with words in a thought balloon. ‘Wet umbrellas here’, the rhino cautions next to a passage about tears. ‘Whom should I say is calling?’ the rhino asks as its author discusses the near homophones for human, benevolence and forbearance.
The conceit stems from an untitled poem by Li Shangyin (813-858) about a heart on the point of a rhino’s horn. At age seven, Wong learned from her classical poet mother about a rhino ‘who talked to the moon nightly and his horn grew with it; the intimacy of a voice, quasi-human, pinpoint of light in the vast night’. Her translation gives a sense of the liberty she takes as she turns the poems into free verse.
Grounded, the body, I fear,
……………………… No hope for wings, singular or paired-off.
What will it not transmit or disclose?
This eight-line regulated verse is widely known and loved, particularly the lines above. A less fluent but more faithful translation would be, ‘The body hasn’t the coloured phoenix’s pair of flying wings, [but] the heart understands [as keenly] as the point of the rhino’s sensitive horns’. Many interpret the poem as a love poem, for the rhino’s horn was thought to have telepathic powers, a sensitivity that enabled it instantaneously to pass stimuli from its tip straight to the brain. Without phoenix wings, lovers’ bodies cannot fly together, yet their hearts connect like a rhino’s sensitive horns.
Such an innovative and expansive work deserves latitude, yet I’d be remiss not to warn readers of irregular spellings for key terms and names. Readers may not easily identify Lee Shangyin with Li Shangyin; Xuo Tao with Xue Tao, Wong Wei with Wang Wei or Han Yue with Han Yu. In addition to the misspelling of julian above, chu shen (to go outside of oneself) appears as ‘zhu shen’, and nature (ziran) as ‘jiran’.
A lthough born in Chongqing, Wong grew up in Singapore from 1950 through her studies in English literature at the University of Singapore. After two years at the Iowa Writers Workshop, she published her first collection of poetry, A Bad Girl’s Book of Animals (1969), followed by Reports (1972), Superstitions (1978) and Picasso’s Tears (2014). For this oeuvre she won Yale’s 2022 international Windham-Campbell Prize. She has lived in several European and North American cities and, since 1978, in Dublin. There she also paints under the pseudonym Ittrium Coey (yttrium is a rare-earth element).
Wong May calls the poet-historian Du Fu (712-770) the ‘consoler-in-chief’ during the calamitous Wang Anshan Rebellion. She credits him with teaching ‘how & why words matter, that our senses still count’. In our own parlous era, may In the Same Light console readers with new views of the fleeting sublime.
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