{"id":17044,"date":"2016-07-18T11:01:57","date_gmt":"2016-07-18T15:01:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17044"},"modified":"2016-07-18T11:01:57","modified_gmt":"2016-07-18T15:01:57","slug":"on-inhabiting-earth-with-inaccessibly-beautiful-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17044","title":{"rendered":"on inhabiting earth with inaccessibly beautiful things"},"content":{"rendered":"

I unfortunately know no Chinese. The sounds, resonances, allusions, and calligraphy of traditional Chinese poetry can\u00a0reach\u00a0me only through paraphrase or as abstract patterns, each\u00a0character looking not much different from the next. However,\u00a0Perry Link writes<\/a>,<\/p>\n

Should we compare poetry across civilizations? If we do, classical Chinese poetry wins easily. The contest is almost unfair, because, as my students of Chinese language eventually come to see, the fundaments of language are different.<\/p>\n

Indo-European languages, with their requirements that tense, number, gender, and part of speech be specified, and with the mandatory word inflections that the specifications entail, and with the extra syllables that the inflections add, just can\u2019t achieve the same purity\u2014a sense of terseness and expanse at the same time\u2014that tenseless, numberless, voiceless, uninflected, and uninflectible Chinese characters can achieve. In a contest, one person has a butterfly net and the other a window screen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I thought of this passage during\u00a0a recent, brief visit to the Sackler Gallery in Washington, which is showing “Painting with Words: Gentleman Artists of the Ming Dynasty<\/a>.” The highlights are vast, wall-sized hanging scrolls that display\u00a0poems in the original authors’ calligraphy. The setting is abstract, modern, respectfully dark. In the background, a recording\u00a0of a classical Chinese zither plays. The English translations by a Sackler curator,\u00a0Stephen D. Allee, produce what I would call good poetry. The\u00a0language is moving and sometimes surprising. For instance<\/a>:<\/p>\n

My friends are scattered few and far apart and the rain just drizzles on.
\nFragrance fades from the incense burner and the teacups have toppled over;
\nI composed a poem on plum blossoms, but I\u2019m sorry it is not well done.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I trust that these English lines convey the sense of the\u00a0end of a poem by\u00a0Wen Zhengming (composed ca. 1500), but they\u00a0bear only a distant relationship to the scroll he painted and the sounds that his intended audience would hear as they read it. It’s strange to think that I will never be able to experience a deeply valuable art form–in Link’s estimation, the best<\/em>\u00a0tradition\u00a0of poetry in the world–even though I can stand\u00a0in the same room with it.<\/p>\n

(See also:\u00a0nostalgia for now<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Ito Jakuchu at the National Gallery<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I unfortunately know no Chinese. The sounds, resonances, allusions, and calligraphy of traditional Chinese poetry can\u00a0reach\u00a0me only through paraphrase or as abstract patterns, each\u00a0character looking not much different from the next. However,\u00a0Perry Link writes, Should we compare poetry across civilizations? If we do, classical Chinese poetry wins easily. The contest is almost unfair, because, as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fine-arts","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17044"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17155,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17044\/revisions\/17155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}