Tag Archives: Chuang Tzu

Sam Hamill on Burton Watson (1925 – 2017)

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In honor of Burton Watson’s passing, I am collecting statements and memories from friends and fans, to be posted as they come in. The following poem is by Sam Hamill, his entry in Salutations; a Festschrift for Burton Watson (Ahadada / Ekleksographia, 2015):

Salutation to Burton Watson

So very much learned
from the feet of a master—
the fall of the Ch’in,
the rise of the T’ang and Sung,
tales from Masters Chuang and K’ung.

The long dusty roads
of the various poets
and monks, and sutras
chanted, the sake cups filled
with kinship and harmonies,

Hardships remembered.
It is December, the moon
full, snow turned to ice
on the frozen ground. I raise
a cup of good Nihonshu

To a master, a
lifetime’s companionship in
wandering borders.
Through hard times and good, decade
by decade, when my heart yearned

For good company,
I always knew where to turn.
Tonight, just a cup
below Li Po’s cold clear moon—
because it is impossible
to drink alone.

Contact me if you would like to add your own remembrance.

John Bradley on Burton Watson (1925 – 2017)

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In honor of Burton Watson’s passing, I am collecting statements and memories from friends and fans, to be posted as they come in. The following remembrance is by John Bradley, from his review of Salutations; a Festschrift for Burton Watson (Ahadada / Ekleksographia, 2015), originally published in Rain Taxi #81 (21.1, Spring 2016):

Empty hills, no one in sight,
only the sound of someone talking;
late sunlight enters the deep wood,
shining over the green moss again.

This famous poem by Chinese poet Wang Wei displays the craft not only of the author but also—we all too often forget—of the translator. Burton Watson translated this poem with such craft that some may say “That’s it?” as indeed a student of Lucas Klein’s did, as he relates in his essay “Translation and Translucence in the Work of Burton Watson,” one of the offerings in this festschrift.

Watson certainly deserves acclaim for the quality and the breadth of his Asian translators. His works are much too long to list here, but a few titles will give an idea of his productivity: Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T’ang Poet Han-shan, The Selected Poems of Du Fu, and the Complete Works of Chuang Tzu. These are just a fraction of his translations from classical Chinese works. Some of his translation from classical and modern Japanese literature include: From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry (collaborating with Hiroaki Sato), Ryokan: Zen Monk-Poet of Japan, and Saigyo: Poems of a Mountain Home.

Salutations offers seventeen contributions, each by a different writer, with some of the texts consisting of scholarly papers on Asian literature, and others offering personal reminiscences of Burton Watson or poems dedicated to him. The scholarly papers cover such topics as “a cultural history of Wenren,” which, as Victor H. Mair and Timothy Clifford explain, refers to a “literary man” (22). While these papers would have interest to Asian scholars, for the non-specialist the personal memories of encounters with Burton Watson are more engaging.

… Perhaps the best remedy will be to turn to one of Burton Watson’s many Asian translations and savor his skill.

Contact me if you would like to add your own remembrance.

Jeffrey Yang on Burton Watson (1925 – 2017)

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In honor of Burton Watson’s passing, I am collecting statements and memories from friends and fans, to be posted as they come in. The following comment is from Jeffrey Yang, poet, translator, and editor at New York Review Books and New Directions:

For me, Burton Watson exists as an emanation of one of the five Dainichi Nyorai, specifically Ashuku Nyorai, residing east of the Diamond Realm, manifesting enlightenment through his translations, which reflect the fluidity of water and mirror-like wisdom, exciting the blood with their earth-touching music. I wasn’t fortunate enough to meet him in the flesh. His presence assumed more ethereal proportions in my mind, expanding and evolving with each new book of his I read. His selection of Su Tung-p‘o poems served as a direct model for my first translation, East Slope, that I worked on in graduate school. His Chuang Tzu I found in a discarded box of books in the English Department and have kept near me ever since, along with his translations of Kumarajiva’s version of the Vimalakirti Sutra and Sima Qian’s Records. I’ve long taken to heart that in his book of fu rhyme-prose he turned to the art of the sports announcer for primary inspiration. Most recently I’ve been reading his marvelous Record of Miraculous Events, translations of the setsuwa genre of anecdotal “spoken stories,” again setting a standard for what a classical text can be (i.e. karmically relevant, entertaining, filled with miracles). With awe and reverence one looks at all the books he’s published over the decades, knowing that the breadth and depth of his classical devotions is matched by that rare quality of consistent worth—nothing rushed, every line turned over and over in the mind. Master Watson’s work can be summed up in the three incidental words Milton used to describe Poetry and upon which Coleridge based all his dicta on the subject: “simple, sensuous, passionate.” No wonder his secret to translating classical Chinese poetry was never a secret: Read as much contemporary American poetry as possible, for that is the idiom he chose to translate into.

In his presence, I recite this verse of praise from his Vimalakirti:

Free of worldly attachments, like the lotus blossom,
constantly you move within the realm of emptiness and quiet;
you have mastered the marks of all phenomena, no blocks or hindrances;
like the sky, you lean on nothing—we bow our heads!

Contact me if you would like to add your own remembrance.

Jesse Glass on Burton Watson (1925 – 2017)

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In honor of Burton Watson’s passing, I am collecting statements and memories from friends and fans, to be posted as they come in. The following remembrance is by Jesse Glass, adapted from his entry in Salutations; a Festschrift for Burton Watson (Ahadada / Ekleksographia, 2015), which he edited with Philip Williams:

When I made my exit from America I threw a party: poets, painters, cabaret singers, gallery owners, teachers, philosophers of the street, strangers and passersby looking for a bargain, everyone was welcome. Somehow I had managed to shake free from everything and everyone I thought I loved, reduced my worldly goods to a suitcase and a few boxes in friends’ attics, and it was time to make my way to Japan the very next morning. But first we’d have a party: I’d play a record on my little black plastic machine, then give it away, and by the end of the night I gave the record player away too; I made sure my suits, my hats, my ties, some paintings, a Haitian deity in repousse steel, went walking out the door. My 1928 Underwood typewriter grew unsteady legs too after we’d typed dozens of drunken, communal, but surprisingly dry-eyed verses. I remember we’d all staggered down to the Milwaukee river an hour or two before sunrise, laughing at the lights reflected lights, at the trees and at the few cold stars left in the sky. I was poorer and happier than I had been in a long time and I was not afraid. I kept referring in my mind to the one book I did not give away but would take with me on the plane, and keep with me through the coming years in countryside Japan, in south China, in Korea and in Japan again: the book told me of trees that were useless, and best that way, and of a butcher who never needed to sharpen his knife, and of a giant bird and a vast fish that divided the waters of the deep beyond the skill of anyone to catch, and a skull existing in a perpetual dream of autumn, and of an unbearably ugly man who for some reason proved so attractive that everyone wanted to be near him and even princesses would fight to be his mistress, and of butterflies dreaming they were philosophers and philosophers dreaming they were butterflies. These stories nourished and consoled me then as they do even now. After many years, when I finally met the gentleman who gave me those precious stories, wrestling them expertly from the ancient Chinese into memorable English, I showed him the dog-eared, coffee-stained, annotated, and deeply decrepit pages and he wrote on the fly-leaf of Chuang Tzu; Basic Writings: “ October 22, 2005/ For Jesse Glass, / In appreciation of a well-read copy, Burton”.

Due to the incredible generosity of Burton Watson with his gifts we all have been given a key to the intellectual riches of a part of the world that is just as crucial to the collective future of humanity as it is to its past. The stories, the poems, the teachings of great sages and the epic histories that Burton Watson has given us, both directly in his superb translations from the Chinese and the Japanese, and indirectly through his role as teacher and exemplar to dozens of other scholars, translators, poets, writers, and artists, continue to unpack their treasures. No, Burton, the appreciation, the pleasure, has been ours as well. Please accept this small gift from us, sensei.

Contact me if you would like to add your own remembrance.