Pilgrim of the Clouds: Poems and Essays from Ming Dynasty China (Companions for the Journey)

How often is it that you read a poem that stops you dead in its tracks? The following poem, written by the great sixteenth-century Chinese Ming dynasty poet Yüan Hung-tao is a heart-piercing elegy to the poet's dead wife, and it appears in "Pilgrim of the Clouds," a collection of Yüan's poems translated by Jonathan Chaves. The entire collection is replete with continually surprising poems that evince a variegated range of emotions -- the beginning of one of them sounds like Vladimir Mayakovsky and Frank O'Hara ("Hey there, Yüan Hung-tao! / Why not get up with the crack of dawn? / A hundred thousand universes / have been blown by the wind / into an ocean of cloud.") But it is Chaves's translation of the poem entitled "Twenty-First Day Of The Seventh Month" that is one of the most indelible and haunting translations of a Chinese poem I have ever read. But why say anything more? Here's the poem:Foggy moon, birdcalls in the flowers at dawn,in cold willow branches, orioles trembled on the edge of dream.The words "Love Each Other" were written on the pillow,and heavy incense curled from behind the curtains.Her emotion had the lucidity of calm waters--red color came to her cheeks as she smiled!Back turned to the lamp, she changed her damp nightgownand asked her lover to gather up her earrings.Their tears of parting moistened the fragrant quilt,tenderness of love, fragile as the wings of the cicada!With silver tongs she stirred the ashes in the brazierand traced these words: "As Long as the Sky..."Lanterns hung from each story of the building;the red railing of the balcony gave on the avenue below.This was the scene of our love that year--now I see only a tomb, overgrown with grass.From the roots of the maples, I hear the whispering of a ghostbearing the traces of her southern voice.The stagnant clouds of this woman's spirithave been swept into rain over a mountain I do not know.

The poems and essays are interesting, but the translation is... just so. They contain none of the flair of diction, form or music as, for example, translations by Vikram Seth or David Hinton. For all the trumpeted individualism of the author in the foreword, most of the poems seem to repeat essentially the same nature, separation, wine themes of Tang dynasty poets. But the texts do provide contain glimmers of hope, for example, in quirky descriptions of insect fights in the essays section.