A Conversation with Robert Ashmore about the poetry of Li He.
Robert Ashmore, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley, recently delivered a talk as part of the China Humanities Seminar series co-presented by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. In his talk, Professor Ashmore explored the question of “musicality” in the song-poems of Tang poet Li He (李賀, 790–816). Drawing from his recent book, The Poetry of Li He (De Gruyter, 2023), a new translation of Li He’s works included in the Library of Chinese Humanities series, Professor Ashmore examined the ways in which song traditions and the medieval soundscape shaped the poet’s distinctive artistic vision. He discusses Li He’s unconventional place in Chinese literary history, the challenges and rewards of translating him, and the role of new translations in bringing his work to modern readers.
Li He, often referred to as a “demonic talent” of the Tang dynasty, is a major figure in Chinese literary history. Yet not a single poem by Li He is featured in the wildly popular anthology, Three Hundred Tang Poems, that any self-respecting Chinese parents would try to teach their children. How do you evaluate this phenomenon?
Historically we can see how in some eras Li He becomes “hot,” and then in others seems to lose favor, though there are always individual writers with a special affinity for his work. But as it takes shape in the popular imagination of later times—and in cultural education, as you suggest—“Tang poetry” is something grand and majestic; it’s an object for public veneration, and part of a very public brand of cultural identity, whereas in Li He there’s always a pull toward the quirky, the unsettling, and for exploring realms of experience that may be more private, even hermetic. And a lot of his influence is felt in genres other than classical poetry—the short banquet songs of the Northern Song master Zhou Bangyan (1056–1121) for example have Li He echoes all over the place. And it’s sort of a literary “fun fact” that Lin Daiyu, the tragic heroine of the monumental eighteenth-century novel Story of the Stone (or Dream of the Red Chamber), is in certain regards modeled on Li He—in her style as a writer, and particularly in the rendering of her illness and death. On that note, as much as we shouldn’t reduce literary history to simple biographical facts, it’s worth remembering that Li He didn’t really have a “career” in the way any of the other Tang poets of comparable stature had. He was a precocious kid with a reputation for composing imagined new versions of ancient songs. You see the mutual compatibility, and the traces of influence, from the literary circle of Han Yu (768–824) who sort of adopted him—but within seven or eight years or so after he emerged as a figure in this context, he was dead. If he’d lived into or through middle age, it stands to reason we’d be looking at a very different poet. An older Li He might even have cut some of what we’re now reading as juvenilia, so perhaps it’s somehow all for the best—if one can venture to say such a thing.
That’s very nicely put. The popular imagination of Tang poetry is a sanitized version that doesn’t have much room for a quirky poet like Li He or Meng Jiao (751–814), even though in modern China Mao Zedong was, interestingly, a big fan of Li He and even used one of Li He’s lines in his own poetry! But what drew you to Li He? Your translation of Li He is the second complete English translation of Li He’s poems after J.D. Frodsham’s translation in 1970. Why do you think we need another translation of Li He’s poetry?
I think that for readers from his lifetime on down, Li He has had a knack for producing a line or an image that somehow gets under your skin because of how striking, yet how difficult to reduce to “meaning,” it is. I’m sure I’m neither the first nor the last to feel compelled somehow to understand something about things in Li He like the glassy clang of the sun, or the burbling of flowing water heard on the banks of the “Silver River” (what we call the Milky Way). I’d now say Li He is no less traditional than any of his peers, but he selects his traditions, and activates them in his work, in ways that he makes his own. On Frodsham’s translation, I want first of all to “give flowers,” and observe that the fact we’re asking whether a new version might be needed after fifty-plus years is itself a kind of homage. I say that partly because I do also recommend anyone approaching Li He or any other Chinese poet in translation, to read A.C. Graham’s 1971 review of Frodsham’s Li He. I’ve heard people speak of that review as a harsh takedown, but I take Graham at his word, that he respected what Frodsham had achieved, and intended to be constructive with his criticism. At any rate Graham’s discussion is richly illuminating, exploring through specific examples how we strike a balance between our sense of what sounds “poetic” or just good in English on the one hand, and the concrete material of the original text on the other. So when you are simply trying to get a meaning across in a way that flows well, and notice that unconsciously your line-forms are starting to trend toward English blank verse—that’s a moment to stop and think about this sort of thing. What then are you presenting to the reader? It’s not an easy or necessarily answerable question—systematically avoiding English-sounding rhythms makes no more sense than systematically imposing them—but somehow you have to keep asking it.
I cannot agree with you more on this. This in many ways is also the question posed by Walter Benjamin in “The Task of the Translator.” I believe that we always need new translations of the classics: new translations that are done in the modern idiom as well as present a different interpretation to the readers. I think your Li He translation is a wonderful example of a new translation that has brought new life to these ancient poems. Some have said that Li He’s poetry is, compared with some classical Chinese poems requiring extensive footnotes, easier to translate into another cultural context. Do you agree?
Earlier translators of classical Chinese poetry such as Arthur Waley took it as given that one needed to start by seeking out that (possibly narrow) bandwidth of original material that was likely to “work” in translation. They were writing for an audience of poetry readers, and expected their volumes were going to be read alongside Swinburne or Housman—or Eliot or Mallarmé for that matter—and in some way take up a position and a meaning within that context. So a long epistolary regulated verse, where Tang readers and writers might all derive great pleasure from the recounting of a bald set of historical or administrative facts via a complex network of antithetical and tonally-balanced phrases and an encyclopedic scope of obscure and fragmentary canonical references, would have struck them from the outset as clearly “ineligible” for translation in this sense. To an extent I don’t think they were really wrong—readers with the patience to read or even enjoy that material should just save time and learn classical Chinese (though when they do, they’ll find facing-page editions with footnotes very useful).
So that concept of translation was quite different from what we now find ourselves doing, in a more historicist framework (and in an era largely devoid of poetry readers in that earlier sense), taking translation as a medium for making whole swaths of Chinese traditional texts, and whole books, available in some way to students or readers who don’t (yet) read classical Chinese. Li He’s collection includes a range of things, some of which would fall into that “ineligible” bag by the earlier standard. But yes, proportionally there’s more of the sort of work where you can put a reader in English on at least similar footing with a reader of the original without swamping the page with footnotes. Making it “work” as poetry in English, though, is another matter. I’m happy to have the facing-page format as an excuse in that regard; I try to produce something that can be useful for learners as a crib on the original text, and hope the result for the all-English reader remains as accessible and engaging as possible within that context.
The Library of Chinese Humanities series, in which The Poetry of Li He is included, is a facing-page Chinese-English translation series founded at Harvard University in 2016, widely regarded as a groundbreaking model in the field. This series aims to bring Chinese literary classics to readers worldwide, in ways appealing to the general audience and also serving the scholarly community. As such, the Editorial Board looks for translations that are both literal and literary. Your translations of Li He have found such a balance admirably. How did you manage to achieve it?
I’ve been glad to hear from some readers who have enjoyed the versions in this volume as translations, though as I said I take a sort of refuge in the idea that my first obligation, in the facing-page format, is to come up with something useful to readers who are working to one degree or another on both sides of those facing pages. To think back to that model of the Loeb Classics that I suppose we all have in mind to some degree, learners of Latin and Greek reach a point where they’ve got pretty much the grammar and vocabulary they need to start reading more widely and independently, but might still need help with “construing” dense or syntactically complicated styles, or branching out into unfamiliar genres or periods, and so on. So I hope my versions let everyone know how I’m construing all the syntax and underlying grammatical relations in the original texts, and although it’s good not to multiply footnotes needlessly, an exact translation of a line’s surface meaning, plus a footnote explaining the classical allusion whereby that line comes to mean what it means, is definitely preferable within this approach to just directly paraphrasing the meaning, or straining for a roughly equivalent idiomatic expression in English, as one might feel forced to do in a free-standing translation, to avoid footnotes. And I suppose if you try to be precise and clean about doing this, some sort of “literary” quality may emerge as well. This relates in a way back to the question about things that do or don’t lend themselves to translation—there are perhaps enough striking images and textures in Li He that what amounts to a quite “barbarizing” translation style like the one I adopt here still has a chance of coming across as fresh and provocative, rather than just bewildering. I do think that the facing-page format, with the Introduction, endnotes, and text-critical apparatus, does promise to be able to offer something to everyone from specialist scholars to readers with little or no Chinese who just want to follow up on some initial impression they picked up somewhere about someone called Li He. And of course having it available online for free allows this to be all the more the case—so I feel really lucky in that regard, and grateful to the series for such an opportunity.
What are you working on now? Can you talk a little bit about your current project?
My current project, titled Bodies of Interpretation: Exegesis and Performance in Chinese Classicist Traditions, is a set of case studies of problems and paradoxes in the relations between text and body in a range of Chinese canonical traditions. “Interpretation” may refer either to explaining the meaning of a text in words, or to the embodied act of someone who brings a tradition to life performatively for an audience, as we might say a pianist interprets a Beethoven sonata, or an actor interprets King Lear. Ritual is naturally a space where these kinds of interpretation, textual and bodily, are always intertwined. The Record of Rites for example includes not just ritual rules but anecdotes about watching ritual performances—Confucius sees someone performing mourning for a parent in an exemplary way, and says to his disciples, “Look at that! Remember that! That’s better than I can do!” In such moments the classic text puts us as readers in an odd position, where we’re not just being told how to do a ritual, but being told that at some moment there was a ritual performance such that Confucius couldn’t adequately convey in words what was good about it, but had to just point. Or the famous Analects passage where he says, “My way is threaded through with one thing,” and his disciple Zeng Shen just says, “Yeah.” Of course later the other disciples have to ask Zeng Shen to explain—for their sake, and for ours as readers of the text. But if the point of the text is to transmit that “way,” why not just record the content of what Zeng Shen instantly “got” from Confucius’s enigmatic statement? Again, the text doesn’t just ask us readers simply to understand a textual meaning, but instead points to a something beyond itself that can only be reached in an embodied way, beyond language. Versions of this basic scenario play out in a range of important traditions, extending far beyond just the so-called “Confucian” ones. So the cases taken on here also include things like calligraphy, formal court speech, poetry manuals, examination essays, and martial arts narratives. My argument is not that it’s somehow the same thing going on in all these cases, but rather that, by bringing out the family resemblances among them, we can better understand each case in its own right.
Yi Zhang, Ph.D. Candidate in East Asian Arts/Film/Cultural Studies, contributed to this piece.