Stephen Owen wins 2020 Stanislas Julien Prize

Stephen Owen’s monograph Just a Song: Chinese Lyrics from the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries (Harvard University Asia Center, 2019) has been awarded the 2020 Stanislas Julien Prize.

Named after the renowned French Sinologist, Stanislas Julien (1797–1873), The Stanislas Julien Prize has been awarded annually since 1875 by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres to recognize outstanding Western-language scholarship in the field of Asian humanities.

The press website for the book explains:

“Song Lyric,” ci [], remains one of the most loved forms of Chinese poetry. From the early eleventh century through the first quarter of the twelfth century, song lyric evolved from an impromptu contribution in a performance practice to a full literary genre, in which the text might be read more often than performed. Young women singers, either indentured or private entrepreneurs, were at the heart of song practice throughout the period; the authors of the lyrics were notionally mostly male. A strange gender dynamic arose, in which men often wrote in the voice of a woman and her imagined feelings, then appropriated that sensibility for themselves.

As an essential part of becoming literature, a history was constructed for the new genre. At the same time the genre claimed a new set of aesthetic values to radically distinguish it from older “Classical Poetry,” shi []. In a world that was either pragmatic or moralizing (or both), song lyric was a discourse of sensibility, which literally gave a beautiful voice to everything that seemed increasingly to be disappearing in the new Song dynasty world of righteousness and public advancement.

Click here for the full announcement from the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

New Klein Translation / Translation Studies Publications

Mail to Hong Kong from North America can be slow, so even though the current issue of Metamorphoses, a double issue on literature in Chinese, guest-edited by Sujane Wu, has been on the stands for some weeks, I only received my copy today.

The issue includes two new translations I’ve done of poessays 诗文 by Xi Chuan, “On Fan Kuan’s Monumental Landscape Scroll Travelers among Mountains and Streams” 题范宽巨障山水《溪山行旅图》 and “Once More on Fan Kuan’s Travelers among Mountains and Streams” 再题范宽《溪山行旅图》.

It also includes a short essay titled “Our Daily Bread“:

Chinese steamed buns, or mantou 饅頭 “are, indeed, just bread.” The statement is by Harvard professor of medieval Chinese literature Stephen Owen, elaborating on his earlier comments on world literature, where he had said that in the“international poetry” he was looking at, “most of these poems translate themselves.” Is mantou just bread? And what does this assertion have to do with translation?


From there, I go on to discuss Walter Benjamin on pain and Brot, and Eliot Weinberger on pumpernickel and Wonder Bread (and steamed buns). Of all the articles of mine that have been published, this is probably my favorite.

Take a look!


Stephen Owen and Yoshinobu Shiba Tang Prize Video

A video honoring Stephen Owen and Yoshinobu Shiba 斯波義信 for their 2018 Tang Prizes for Sinology; in Chinese with interviews in English and Japanese.

The first half of the video focuses on Owen, and includes interviews with Mai Huijun 麦慧君, Tina Lu, Luke Bender, Kang-i Sun Chang 孫康宜, Peter Bol, Xiaofei Tian 田曉菲, and Owen himself.

The background music is sentimental and too loud, but ignore it if possible.

2018 Tang Prizes Announced

The biannual 2018 Tang Prize for Sinology has been announced, with this year’s recipients being Yoshinobu Shiba 斯波義信 and Stephen Owen, the latter “for his penetrating scholarship and theoretical ingenuity in Classical Chinese prose and poetry, especially Tang poetry and its translation.”
Owen’s inscription reads:
Stephen Owen has been the single most important scholar of Chinese Classical poetry in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A leading scholar on Tang poetry, he has also written widely in other literary fields, and has translated important writings in both prose and poetry. To this work, he brings not only penetrating Sinology, but also a breadth of comparative applications and theoretical sophistication that have made his scholarship unique worldwide.

 

What follows is a run-down of all his authored books.

Established in December 2012, the prize is meant “to encourage individuals across the globe to chart the middle path to achieving sustainable development by recognizing and supporting contributors for their revolutionary efforts in the four major fields of Sustainable Development, Biopharmaceutical Science, Sinology, and Rule of Law.” It claims its roots “in the long-standing cultural traditions of Chinese philosophical thought and in an outlook of convergence and mutual enrichment with other traditions,” with “aims to provide fresh impetus to first-class research and development in the 21st century, to bring about positive change to the global community, and to create a brighter future for all humanity.”

Click the image above for the full encomium.

Chinese Poetry of the Cup?

As part of its Mingbai series (“a daily newsletter that drops knowledge on things ‘everyone in China knows, but almost nobody outside the country knows'”), SupChina has posted a feature on “Chinese poetry of the cup.”

First it introduces baijiu 白酒, “the Chinese king of liquors … made primarily with sorghum, although other bases like wheat and rice are often added to the mix.”

Then it asserts:

Some of China’s finest poets — perhaps even the finest — were admirers of the merry drink. Let’s take a look at Li Bai 李白, whose immortal poetry is learned by heart in every classroom across China … Li Bai lived during the Tang Dynasty (618-907), often known as China’s Golden Age. His poems were often about the beauty of friendship, the wonders of nature, and wine … One of Li Bai’s poems, “Drinking Alone Under the Moon” (月下独酌 yuè xià dúzhuó), is a particularly beautiful ode to the beloved drink.

The entry then quotes an “artful translation” by John Derbyshire, with the poem in simplified Chinese characters and pinyin transcription.

Among the flowers with wine beneath the sky
Alone I drink — no friend or kin, just me
I raise my cup to toast the moon on high
That’s two of us; my shadow makes it three

But… is there any evidence (other than a tipsy inference from Li Bai’s name) that Li Bai was drinking baijiu when he wrote his poems about drinking?

There’s a long tradition of referring to jiu 酒 as “wine” when translating classical Chinese poetry, and because of decorum, zui 醉, which means drunk, has often been translated euphemistically with phrases like “rapt with wine.” It’s good that SupChina isn’t passing on that misconception, but my understanding is that the archaeological record of medieval Chinese drinking vessels is that they were goblets, and that they were drinking something pretty much like what we refer to today as beer.

See what Stephen Owen has had to say about it:

“Do you really think [those warriors] are running around drinking out of little sake cups?” Owen asked his colleague. “These guys drank from huge flagons made of metal”–he has actually seen one–“and sloshed their ale down by the gallon.” Owen objects to the old “translation language,” partly because it creates a false image of a very effeminate, aged, and weak China, but also because it makes no distinction in language between the “high-sensibility” people and “the guys that ride horses, assassinate people, and drink flagons of ale.”

Take a look at the back pages of The True History of Tea, by Erling Hoh and Victor Mair, for more on medieval Chinese jiu.

Click the image for the SupChina article.

Owen & Swartz’s Ruan Ji and Xi Kang from de Gruyters

As part of the ongoing Library of Chinese Humanities series, de Gruyter has now published the complete Poetry of Ruan Ji and Xi Kang, with translations by Stephen Owen and Wendy Swartz (edited by Ding Xiang Warner and Xiaofei Tian). It is not only available for sale, it is also available for open-access free download in .pdf format.

As the promotion materials state, the present translation of Ruan Ji 阮籍 (210–263)

not only provides a facing page critical Chinese text, it addresses two problems that have been ignored or not adequately treated in earlier works. First, it traces the history of the current text … Second, [earlier] translations have been shaped by the anachronistic assumption that Ruan Ji was loyal to the declining Wei dynasty, when actual power had been taken by the S[i]ma family, who founded the Jin dynasty after Ruan Ji’s death. The introduction shows how and when that assumption took full shape five centuries after Ruan Ji lived and why it is not tenable. This leads to a different kind of translation, closer to what a contemporary reader might have understood and far less certain than referring it to some political event.

Meanwhile, Xi Kang 嵇康 (ca. 223 – ca. 262) is presented with

a complete scholarly translation of his poetic works (including “Rhapsody on the Zither”) alongside the original texts. Many of Xi Kang’s poems are difficult and most are laden with allusions and quotations, adding another level of challenge to interpretation. Basic explanatory notes are provided.

Click the image for ordering / download information.

Mazanec on Learning Classical Chinese

Tom Mazanec has posted a blog entry about “How and Why to Learn Classical Chinese.” He writes:
Classical Chinese is an intrinsically interesting language. It refers to the written language of the premodern Chinese tradition and covers a period of some 2500 years (500 BCE~1920 CE) … It served  as the shared language of the elites in premodern China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Knowledge of classical Chinese opens you up to new worlds. It represents the human experience of something like 1/5 of the people who ever walked the earth.
More practically speaking, knowledge of classical Chinese will also greatly improve your modern Chinese. The two are distinct languages (at least, by any meaningful definition of “language”), but the modern Chinese languages grew out of their classical ancestor and still bear its imprint. Most of the set phrases (chengyu 成語) that mark one’s speech as refined in modern Chinese are summaries of or quotations from classical sources and therefore obey classical structures. Many of the puzzling usages in formal, written Mandarin (the kind used in newspapers) make perfect sense with a basic knowledge of classical Chinese.
In addition, he provides links for recommended learning materials–some of them free–by the likes of David Hawkes, David Knechtges, Edwin Pulleyblank, Mark Edward Lewis, Michael Fuller, Paul Kroll, Paul Rouzer, Richard Mather, Stephen Owen, Zong-qi Cai 蔡宗齊, and Hugh Stimson, to help with reading classical Chinese poetry and prose (I guess it’s time for some women to publish materials on learning classical Chinese).
Click the image above to link to the entry.

J. P. Seaton on Burton Watson (1925 – 2017)

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 translator J. P. Seaton:

Burton Watson is responsible for whatever good has or will come of my own work as a literary translator of Classical Chinese Literature. In 1962, about the time his career was taking off, I was as a senior in college, and along with my new wife (now of fifty-six years, Kathy Paradiso Seaton,) I left the excellent little men’s school Wabash College (where Ezra Pound taught for a little while a couple of generations earlier) so that Kathy could go back to school, and I could begin the study of Chinese language (not available at Wabash at that time). One semester into that project, living sometimes on fifteen dollars a week, I was ready to give up. Aside from Pound and Waley I had found nothing in translation that provided sufficient motivation to get me through the first stages of what was to become one of my favorite bits of weekly exercise, the memorization of new Chinese characters. (For any beginners reading this, it gets much easier and more rewarding the farther you go.) I was about to drop out of Chinese. Then I picked Prof. Watson’s Records of the Grand Historian (the book form of his Columbia dissertation as the book, and Ssu-ma Ch’ien as the historian) for the single term paper that would provide the whole grade for a required one hour historiography credit that actually was to decide whether or not I’d get the fellowship that would put Kathy and me through school. I loved Ssu-ma Ch’ien, I fell in love with Burton Watson and the legend that he’d done the translation while snowed-in all one winter in a cabin somewhere in Minnesota, (don’t tell me it’s not so!) and the professor in my 200-plus student class loved my paper. Of course, Harvard man or not, he’d never heard of Ssu-ma Ch’ien: that was before all but two of Watson’s forty-plus books had appeared. So, I got one of the first twelve of the National Defense Critical Languages’ Fellowships. So, simply put, I stayed with Chinese because of Burton Watson’s earliest translation.

Some time after I got tenure at UNC, Chapel Hill, around ’73, I got up the nerve to write Prof. Watson about a problem I was having with two lines of a quatrain by Tu Fu, and he was kind enough to send me an answer on a postcard… I have a treasured sample of his handwriting, but we had no more contact until after I reviewed his anthology, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: from Early Times to the Thirteenth Century, for the scholarly journal CLEAR. It was a privilege, an honor, to be invited, and a joy to write. I’ve always hated “critics” and have refused to write reviews that were other than appreciations.

In the late ’80 I got the idea for a “translation issue,” a single issue dedicated entirely to translations of poetry from classical Chinese into poetry in the American language for the The Literary Review (pub. by Fairleigh Dickinson University,) where I had the usually honorary title of Advisory Editor. I was communicating a lot… old fashioned letters, OMG!) with the poet and publisher (Copper Canyon) Sam Hamill at the time, and he eventually wrote a nice little essay on the influence of Chinese poetry on 20th. cent. American poets. The scholar-translator Stephen Owen wrote another essay for the issue. Sam Hamill helped me contact several writers I didn’t know about, including the then barely known “Red Pine,” Bill Porter, but my idea was that everybody had to come on board, and I took on Gary Snyder, Jonathan Chaves, and finally, Burton Watson. I took on Watson first of these (to me) “big three,” because I hoped he might know something about my work, and/or he might have seen or at least have been told about my review of his anthology. We also had a couple of acquaintances in common, including, as I recall it, Carolyn Kizer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who’d been writer-in-residence at Carolina during my earlier career, and Kenneth Hanson, the great poet, who taught English and translated Lin Ho-ch’ing and Han Yu at Reed College after studying there with both Kizer and Snyder (or so it seems to my flagging memory). Anyway, Watson’s response was swift, and so sweet, yes I said sweet, that he seemed to sense how difficult it was for an unknown J.P. Seaton to write asking for help with a fairly ridiculously naive or idealistic project. Even though he said in his first response that he didn’t think he had anything I’d want, I was emboldened to ask what he did have: kanshi, or Sino-Japanese, he said (poems written in classical Chinese by Japanese poets), and right now mostly “Dog poems,” as in poems about dogs. The poems he finally sent, all of which were printed in the Spring, 1989 Literary Review (Vol. 32, #3), are printed below.

I suspect that Prof. Watson’s name opened the door for Gary Snyder’s contributions. An original poem by Snyder that I mentioned liking when I wrote to him ended up, greatly appreciated by many readers, as the cover image for the issue, and Chaves, once Watson’s student at Columbia, was the last of more than thirty extremely talented, and well known, translators to join up. As a whole, I’ll claim there’s yet to be an anthology to match it, and I credit Burton Watson for creating the editor, as in me, and for bringing on board well known poet-translators whose presence made it easy for all those folks to come together in one place. I’d asked Walt Cummins, the editor of TLR, to see if he could find money to pay the translators, (fat chance we both thought) but with an NEA grant, Walt and TLR were able to pay twenty dollars per poem, and Prof. Watson got $160 to grace our pages with his work. I’ve never gotten paid anywhere else, other than for books, for a translation, and another of the translators wrote me the same thing. At the time I figured the few dollars wouldn’t be much but a gesture to most of the established folks who offered their work. I remember that Ursula Le Guin’s agent couldn’t even figure out where the little check meant for her actually came from, for six early versions from the Tao Te Ching that she later used in her version, published by Shambhala.

In 1990 it was my great good luck to be invited to write a cover blurb (behind  Gary Snyder, of course, and the Zen man Richard Aitken), for the lovely little book of Watson’s mostly autobiographical essays, The Rainbow World, published by the wonderful and sadly short-lived Broken Moon Press. I didn’t know anything about Burton Watson the man until I read this great little book. It’s offered for sale by several book sellers on-line today. I advise anyone who’s interested in Watson the man, or who’d like to see his prose (it’s easy going and always beautiful) when he’s not limited by the subject matter and language of the translation project, to get your hands on one.

When I read John Balcom’s interview with Prof. Watson, the lead article in the Translation Review (#70, 2005 (seems like yesterday) and heard from Balcom and our mutual friend Steve Bradbury that Watson wasn’t getting money of any kind from Columbia, and was actually translating whatever came to hand, including ads and pamphlets, just to get by, I screamed in a couple of people’s ears about getting him a MacArthur grant or a big money prize of some kind… he certainly deserved a Nobel for his service to the world of literature, and of history, and for providing the basic texts of Chinese and Japanese culture to the English readers of the world. I wished I had another $160 check to send him. But, from the Wikipedia biography that tells me all I know about Prof. Watson after 2005 it appears that something like that did happen… he published a couple of more Columbia University Press works after 2005, and also received a Gold Medal prize from a prestigious Japanese cultural organization that I trust was backed up with enough support for his final years to keep him from having to pawn that medal for the gold… I hope I hear from some folks who knew him more intimately that his last couple of years were lived with some of the ease and dignity that a benefactor of the world at large deserves, but maybe sometimes, often, fails to receive.

If there’s an afterlife I dream of listening to Watson explaining Chinese and Japanese languages and translation to Dryden, and comparing notes with his first literary loves Waley and Pound. If we’re most or all reincarnated, may the Heavenly Bureaucrats in charge of our re-assignments, (recalling Waley’s Monkey) with full consideration of our karmic impacts, give us a lifetime of closer contact: I’d gladly do a turn as his amenuensis, or graduate assistant. Hail and farewell to a great man: brilliant, hard working, generous and kind.

Burton Watson poems from The Literary Review, Spring 1989, special Chinese translation issue:

Chang Yueh: Written When Drunk
Once drunk, my delight knows no limits,
So much better than before I’m drunk.
My movements are all shaped like dances,
And everything I say comes out a poem!

Su Tung-P’o: Lotus viewing
The clear wind–what is it?

Something to be loved, not to be named.
Moving like a prince wherever it goes;
The grass and trees whisper its praise.
This outing of ours never had a purpose;
Let the lone boat swing about as it will.
In the middle of the current, lying face up,
I greet the breeze that happens along
And lift a cup to offer to the vastness;
How pleasant–that we have no thought for each other!
Coming back through two river valleys,
Clouds and water shine in the night.

Po Chu-I: A Question Addressed to Liu Shih-Chiu
Green bubbles—new brewed wine;

Lumps of red—a small stove for heating;
Evening comes and the sky threatens snow –
Could you drink a cup, I wonder?

Love Long-Enduring
In the ninth month when the west wind blows,

When moonlight is cold and dew blossoms congeal,
I think of you all the long autumn night—
In one night my spirit leaps up nine times.
In the second month when east winds appear,
When grasses sprout and the hearts of flowers unfold,
I think of you through the slow spring days—
One day and my heart takes nine turnings.
I live north of the Lo River bridge,
You live south of the Lo River bridge.
I’ve know you since I was fifteen;
This year I am twenty-three.
Like the dodder plant growing
By the side of the pine,
My tendrils are short, the branches much too high—
Twine and coil as I may, I cannot reach them.
They say when a person has a wish,
If the wish is worthy, Heaven is sure to grant it.
I wish we could be beasts in some faraway place,
Touching, twining limb around limb.

Spring Outing
I mount my horse, ready to go out the gate;

out the gate, pause in uncertainty,
sure she must be puzzled by all these spring outings.
I know I go on a lot of spring outings,
But what can an old fellow do,
When the ruddy face of youth is fading, fading,
And white hairs continue and continue to appear?
You have ten fingers—use them,
Make a count of my friends for me.
Sage age one hundred is the outside limit—
How many make it into their seventh decade?
Now I am sixty-five
And speeding downhill like a wheel on a slope.
Supposing I should last to seventy,
That leaves me only five springs more.
Faced with spring, not to go out and enjoy it,
One would have to be a fool!

Rokunyo: When My Beloved Japanese Spaniel Died
A traveler offered you for two thousand coins,

And I bought and raised you—just three years.
In cold and heat, hunger and thirst constantly you stood guard;
By instinct you knew your master, made friends with the servant boys,
spoke no words, yet we always knew your feelings.
You learned to tell regular visitors, jumped up in their laps,
but barked indignantly at a strange face—small use you had for them!
Toss a fruit, call your name, and off you’d race;
paws folded, you stood on your hind legs and begged.
You did the hop-skip, the crawl—I had only to command;
but tuckered out, asleep on your mat—then you were in heaven!
One morning, listless and weak, you fell over like a cart wheel;
At heart you knew there was no cure for the sickness.
A hundred coaxings with food or medicine—you refused them all,
You wagged your tail feebly, straining to lift your
head,trying to tell us humans the misery you were in.
Creatures of different species may learn to care for one another;
look on them as brothers and there’s none you can’t accept.
I wrapped the body in a worn-out mat, buried it in the temple plot,
raised a little grave mound, planted a wooden marker.
That night, returning, I thought he came out the door to greet me;
the tinkle of a bell struck my ear—wasn’t that his sound?
I felt so downcast I barely touched my supper,
Next day the whole day sat on my cushion in a daze.
High-minded people no doubt will scoff at such foolery,
but who knows?  These feelings ay be the start of Goodness.*

*A reference to the passage in Mencius, IIA, 6: “The heart of compassion is the start of Goodness”

Spotting Plum Blossoms by the Road
I start to pick them, stop my hand—

whose plum tree is this, poking over the fence?
No one would know, but still I’d be breaking the precepts—
in my breezy sleeve I steal off with a bit of the fragrance.

Winter Day: Scene on the Road to Otsu*
Boats and wagons from north and east converge at this port;

in all the coming and going I don’t see one person idle.
Most pitiful—on Meeting Slope slippery with ice and frost,
rice-bale carriers in thin robes, their bodies drenched in sweat.

*Otsu was an important port town at the southern end of Lake Biwa. Osaka or Meeting Slope is a steep incline on the main road between Otsu and Kyoto.

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

Mazanec on Rouzer’s Hanshan Translations

Tom Mazanec has posted about Paul Rouzer’s new translation of Hanshan 寒山 (Cold Mountain) for de Gruyter’s Library of Chinese Humanities–now available for sale and free download.

As Tom notes, some of the Hanshan corpus was “famously translated by Gary Snyder in 1958 [and] later celebrated by Jack Kerouac in his hit novel The Dharma Bums,” which means this publication lacks the punch de Gruyter landed when publishing Stephen Owen’s complete Du Fu 杜甫:

there are already two complete translations of Hanshan out there, by Robert Henricks and Red Pine (personally, I’m fond of the latter), as well as multiple partial translations by such prominent translators as Arthur Waley, Burton Watson, Peter Hobson and T. H. Barrett, J. P. Seaton, and doubtless others. A close reading will show how these translations each contribute something different to our understanding of this poetic corpus, and this in itself is helpful for teaching and understanding Tang poetry.

Worth noting, though, is that Rouzer’s book also includes poems attributed to Hanshan’s companions, Shide 拾得 and Fenggan 豐干. At any rate,

It’s always good to have more translations of Tang poetry in other languages, and especially translations by someone as knowledgeable as Paul Rouzer … He’s a sensitive reader and a smooth writer, and I’m sure his translations are wonderful (I’ve yet to go through them with a close eye).

Tom also notes the forthcoming titles in the Library of Chinese Humanities, Robert Ashmore’s Li He 李賀 and Stephen Owen and Wendy Swartz’s translation of Ruan Ji  阮籍 and Xi Kang 嵇康.

Click the image above for the full write-up.