Transience and Water II

 

 

 

Awhile back I posted a dozen or so translations of Janus Vitalis' poem "Qui Roman in media quaeris novus advena Roma", a reflection on permanence and change which ends

 

"Oh Rome, in your greatness and your beauty,
what was firm has fled, and only the transitory remains and lasts".

 

"The transitory" in this poem is the Tiber, which flows past the ruins of a Rome which is no more. Vitalis' poem expresses a philosophical acceptance of the ravages of time. By contrast, the following poem by Ted Hughes, which makes a similiar point in a geological context, seems to have a meanness to it, as Hughes' poems often do:

 

 

Sugar Loaf

The trickle cutting down from the hill-crown
Whorls to a pure pool here,
with a whisp trout like a spirit.
The water is wild as alcohol
--distilling from the fibers of the blue wind.
Reeds, nude and tufted, shiver as they wade.

I see the whole huge hill in the small pool's stomach.

This will be serious for the hill.
It suspects nothing.
Crammed with darkness, the dull, trusting giant
Leans, as over a crystal, over the water
where his future is forming.

Ted Hughes, "Sugar Loaf"
Wodwo 1967.

 

 

Hughes' theme is, of course, a commonplace of Chinese culture, and is especially characteristic of  the Taoism of Lao Tzu:

 

 

天 下 莫 柔 於 水

 

而 攻 堅 強 者 莫 之 能 勝

 

 

"There is nothing in the world softer than water,
yet there is nothing better for attacking the hard and strong"

 

Lao Tzu Ch. 78

 

 

The following characteristically simple and transparent lines by the T'ang dynasty Chinese poet Po Chu-i (Bai Zhuyi) put a rather surprising twist on this theme:

 

     浪 淘 沙

 

一 波 沙 來 一 波 去

 

一 重 浪 滅 一 重 生

 

相 攩 相 淘 無 歇 日

 

會 教 山 海 一 時 平

 

One wave brings the sand, another sucks it back again.

One wave dies away, another wave is born.

This constant stirring and scouring of wave on sand

Turns at last the hills and seas to level land.

 

Po Chu-i, "Lang Sao Sha" #1 (tr. Ayling and Macintosh)
 A Further Collection of Chinese Lyrics 1970 p. 17

 

 

 

 

The last line literally can be read "is able to teach (教 , jiao) the hills and seas to be level (平 , ping)", where  平   ping has the secondary meanings of "peaceful", "quiet", or "orderly". Unlike Hughes, Vitalis, and even Lao Tzu, Po Chu-i does not stress the destructive force of water at all, but only its tendency to even things out and make them nice and civilized.

 

Note: Fenellosa's "ideographic fallacy", which fooled Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell almost a century ago (thus causing the Imagist movement), has been refuted many times by now.  Be it noted, however, that in the poem above (including its title), 10 of 31 Chinese characters are classified under the  "water" 氵 radical.

 

ADDENDUM:

 

During the last years of the Roman Sulpicius Lupercus Servasius (ca. 400 AD) seemed to have a premonition of what was going to happen:
 

Rivers level granite mountains,
Rains wash the figures from the sundial,
The plowshare wears thin in the furrow;
And on the fingers of the mighty
The gold of authority

is bright with the glitter of attrition.

 

Sulpicius Lupercus Servasius, Jr., tr. Kenneth Rexroth

(Poems from the Greek Anthology, Michigan, 1962)

 

Rexroth Archive

 

 

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All original material copyright John J. Emerson 

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