Thanks to John Vinson for introducing me to today’s poem

(Translated by Arthur Waley)

Today’s poginant and beautiful poem lends itself to a number of interpretations. There is, first of all, the surface meaning, a lament for a bird cruelly caged for no crime other than that of being pleasing - and, while simplistic, this is a very valid reading of the poem. To call the bird a metaphor and plunge instantly through it and into the deeper layers of the poem is to miss a great part of its beauty, for there is a definite pathos inherent in a caged bird, and Po Chü-i has delineated that pathos simply and elegantly.

However, the bird is, of course, a metaphor, and not a particularly subtle one at that - indeed, the poem makes the comparison explicit with “what is always done/ to the learned and eloquent”. I am unsure whether the bars the poet refer to are political, societal or personal (or, indeed, to the effective cage of Po Chü-i’s own paralysis), but the point is that it doesn’t matter - the situation is universal enough that most readers will find something to identify with¹.

Apart from the imagery, I like this poem for its elegant minimalism, and for the contrastive balance of ornamentation and starkness. The delicate portrayal of the bird ‘coloured like the peach tree blossom’ provides an effective contrast to the blunt, almost unpoetic “They took a cage with stout bars/ And shut it up inside.” There is also the indefinable but palpable feel of a translated poem², marking Waley’s success in capturing both the poem’s universal message and its Chinese origin.

Arthur Waley sent Russell the translation of a Chinese poem, which he had not published. Russell quotes it in his autobiography to convey his feelings at the time. […] The poem speaks of the thoughtless cruelty of imprisoning pacifists.

– http://www.geocities.com/vu3ash/index.htm3.htm

    translation of Pushkin:
      The obvious advantage those translating from their native tongue have
      is that they can retain the feel of the original - there's something
      peculiarly Russian about this

– Poem #760

It is interesting to see how people translating from an acquired language manage to capture the oft-elusive feel of that language and its

associated

culture. Perhaps some Chinese speaker could comment further on today’s

— Poem

— Martin

A biography and selection of Po Chü-i’s poems:

http://www.humanistictexts.org/po_chu_i.htm

  An excellent piece on Waley:
    Arthur Waley selected the jewels of Chinese and Japanese literature and
    pinned them quietly to his chest. No one has ever done anything like it
    before, and no one will ever do so again.

There are now many Westerners whose knowledge of Chinese or Japanese is greater than his, and there are perhaps a few who can handle both languages as well. But they are not poets, and those who are better poets than Waley do not know Chinese or Japanese. Also the shock will never be repeated, for most of the works that Waley chose to translate were largely unknown in the West, and their impact was thus all the more extraordinary.

Full piece at http://www.renditions.org/renditions/sps/s_5.html

The history of Annam:

http://www.bartleby.com/65/an/Annam.html