FRANK BIDART'S TRANSLATION OF TU FU'S "DAZZLING WOMEN" WITH SOME NOTES

As always my notes are not intended as an academic exercise. My notes are solely the emotional and intellectual responses of one poet to another poet's work. As I write I pose no thesis up front. The writing is purely exploratory. I react and interpret as I write and research—trusting my intuition to guide me to interesting thoughts and feelings. I subscribe to no specific critical approach, and my only goal is to enjoy and understand the aesthetic experience associated with my observation of the work of art.

Below is Frank Bidart’s translation of Tu Fu’s “Dazzling Women.” Unpublished, it was forwarded to me by Bidart after I heard him read it aloud at a reading at UC Irvine. This current discussion is the, I think, final discussion of the poem after 6 previous sets of notes:

SOME MORE NOTES ON FRANK BIDART'S TRANSLATION OF TU FU #6: FLORENCE AYSCOUGH'S DAZZLING WOMEN

SOME NOTES ON FRANK BIDART'S TRANSLATION OF TU FU #5

SOME NOTES ON FRANK BIDART'S TRANSLATION OF TU FU #4

SOME NOTES ON FRANK BIDART'S TRANSLATION OF TU FU #3: MORE ON THE TITLE OF TU FU'S POEM, 麗人行

SOME NOTES ON FRANK BIDART'STRANSLATION OF TU FU #2: THE TITLE OF TU FU'S POEM, 麗人行

NOTES ON FRANK BIDART'S TRANSLATION OF TU FU #1

At long last, finally, dawdlingly, here is Bidart's poem:

Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake

In 753 Tu Fu, along with a crowd of others, watched the imperial court—the emperor’s mistress, her sisters, the first minister—publicly celebrate the advent of spring.

Intricate to celebrate still-delicate
raw spring, peacocks in passement of gold

thread, unicorns embroidered palely in silver.
These are not women but a dream of women:—

bandeaux of kingfisher-feather

jewelry, pearl

netting that clings to the breathing body

veil what is, because touched earth
is soiled earth, invisible.

As if submission to dream were submission
not only to breeding but to one’s own nature,

what is gorgeous is remote now, pure, true.

*

The Mistress of the Cloud-Pepper Apartments
has brought life back to the emperor, who is

old. Therefore charges of gross extravagance, of
pandering incest between her sister Kuo and her cousin

are, in the emperor’s grateful eyes, unjust. Her wish
made her cousin first minister. Three springs from this

spring, the arrogance of the new first minister
will arouse such hatred and fury even the frightened

emperor must accede to his execution. As bitterly to
hers. She will be carried on a palanquin of

plain wood to a Buddhist chapel
deep in a wood and strangled.

*

Now the Mistress of the Cloud-Pepper Apartments,—
whose rooms at her insistence are coated with

a pepper-flower paste into which dried pepper-
flowers are pounded because the rooms of the Empress

always are coated with paste into which dried pepper-
flowers are pounded and she is Empress

now in all but name,—is encircled by her
sisters, Duchesses dignified by imperial

favor with the names of states that once had
power, Kuo, Ch’in, Han. Now rhinoceros-horn

chopsticks, bored, long have not descended.
The belled carving knife wastes its labors. Arching

camel humps, still perfect, rise like purple hills
from green-glazed cauldrons. Wave after

wave of imperial eunuchs, balancing fresh
delicacies from the imperial kitchens, gallop up

without stirring dust.

*

With mournful sound that would move demon
gods, flutes and drums now declare to the air

he is arrived. Dawdlingly

he arrives, as if the cloud of

suppliants clinging to him cannot obscure the sun.

Power greater than that of all men except one
knows nothing worth rushing toward

or rushing from. Finally the new first minister
ascends the pavilion. He greets the Duchess of

Kuo with that slight
brutality intimacy induces.

Here at last is power that your
soul can warm its hands against!

Beware: success has made him
incurious, not less dangerous.

(Frank Bidart, After Tu Fu, “Ballad of Lovely Women”)

The political context of the poem “Ballad of Lovely Women” situates the poet’s perceptions as a contrast to the pomp and circumstance of the procession detailed in the poem. The poet’s perceptions in the orginal hinge on his insider understanding from an outsider’s perspective. Tu Fu understood the politics of his "Dazzling Women." The sisters had risen to power because the eldest Yang sister was the mistress of the Emperor. She was according to Hawkes in “A Little Primer of Tu Fu, “Empress in all but name.”

The world around this empire perceived Yang Kuei-fei and her sisters as ambitious snakes: a nest of women who would do anything for their own uppance. Their cousin gains social prominence because of this nepotism and his evil behavior becomes legendary.

In Bidart’s translation the perspective of Tu Fu and the historical context of the Spring festivities are maintained by the title alone. The title alone, and the epigram to some degree, should lead a serious reader down the few sparse paths of investigation I have taken in my previous notes. From this history, and this perspective of Tu Fu, we enter the first few lines of Bidart’s translation.

The first few lines of Bidart’s translation proceed in a sort of dream march. The cadence underneath “Intricate to celebrate still-delicate /raw spring, peacocks in passement of gold” is not only a parade of language and syntax but the consonance of the “t” from “intricate” to “to” to “celebrate” to “still” to “delicate” is the poetic refinement of an ear few possess.

In companion to the march of the “t,” the inversion of the syntax sets the tongue-a-tripping. In a more common phrasing the first phrase might read “an intricate celebration of still-delicate spring” or something similar, but the elevated speech and inverted syntax take us out of the everyday and transport us to the “air” of the period, and sets the tone of the poem. A tone that flags later---but I will discuss that failure later.

The second line uses a pairing of consonance to echo the elevation of the first line. The “g” is quite quiet between “spring” and “gold.” However the procession of “p” from “spring” to “peacocks” to “passement” remarks on the intent of Bidart to hold our attention on the images, essentially, through our sensitivity to his use of sound. This gift for using sound permeates, for the most part, the entire translation by Bidart.

Remember Bidart has set aside the third moon, third day, calendaring of the event as intended by Tu Fu in favor of accelerating the reader’s entry into the images of lines 6-8 from the original. This accelerated introduction to their “garments of embroidered silk gauze” as Ayscough calls them in her “Autobiography of a Chinese Poet” leads me to believe the contemplation here asks the reader to elevate the subject in conjunction with the images and syntax.

Bidart’s italicized “passement,” another elevation, comes from Hawkes’ exegesis of the poem, where Hawkes calls out the first character in line 6, Cu-jin, as “work done in gold thread on top of a silk ground. I think passement is about the nearest equivalent.” Bidart intends a skilled reader to know Hawkes—while the poem is written so having read Hawkes is not required--the allusion to Hawkes, including the italicization, seems overt.

In the third line we pass from season, to image of bird of paradise, to “thread.” The thread leading us through Bidart’s take on the poem hinges on the rest of this line and the next. The “unicorns embroidered palely in silver” are an Americanized image of a mythical Chinese beast called a ch’i-lin composed of elements of deer, fox, unicorn, and so on. The important word here is the “palely.” As if the dream beast were emerging from nowhere to be born dimly forth by the procession. A beast of burden if you will...

In the fourth line, all of the elevation of syntax and imagery, all of the sultry language resolves into the praxis of Bidart’s translation, “These are not women but a dream of women.” A dream of women of a type, of a cast, of a forgone history, from afar one might think them women of a pleasurable fantasy.

At some level one wonders if Bidart’s translation isn’t a veil over his perception of runway models in a New York sping fashion show. The idea is that these are women of fantasy and perfection who as we inspect their history (and the history of their benefactor) we find the underbelly of nepotism and the slime of of subterfuge. Both of these faults masked by the beauty so available to any upon first glance. If the poem is NOT a veil for the catwalks of New York—and I don’t think it is--the poem certainly asks for the reader to politically charge its intent. The poem sets apart its perceptions of beauty so they may be informed by the politics of Tu Fu’s original.

The dream language from Tu Fu’s original, extracted selectively by Bidart, struts across the page. The “bandeaux” of the “bandeaux of kingfisher-feather” in line 5 comes from Hawkes again. But the “kingfisher” seems to come from Ayscough’s “Ornamental leaves made of kingfisher feathers.” The ornamental language juts out across the page with the displaced “jewelry, pearl,” a sort of thread between the passement to the bandeaux to the “netting that clings to the breathing body.” This first passage has been a kind of blazon of the finery. Hawkes points out that it is impossible to know exactly what this finery might look like, but one can be assured they were wearing the very height of fashion. The peak of the contemporary style of the period.

(I do want to call out that odd puncture at the end of line 4, the colon followed by the double dash. The floating double dash makes several more appearances in this poem following other punctuation marks. I take these as the unneeded affectations of a poet adding his signatures to the structure of the poem. I see no difference between the poem with them in versus the poem with them removed. In some sense I think these floating oddities will be forgiven by most readers because of 1) the prior reputation of the poet and 2) the otherwise gifted quality of the transliterated poem.)

The blazon of the finery resolves through its threads of imagery into a “veil.” It is a veil that veils the “invisible.” A bit like a zen koan, this netting that clings to their bodies “veils what is…invisible.” The netting is synecdoche for the entire procession, the whole sequence that precedes this moment. The koan is interrupted by the clause, “because touched earth is soiled earth,” meant to answer the paradox of the veiled invisible. We have, as you might imagine, drifted far afield of the literal Chinese. We are in the amplification of what Ayscough translates as “Their backs behind, what can be seen?” And what Hawkes exegesis strings together as “Behind-back what-that-which seen.”

This veil image that has been transmuted by Bidart around the “What can be seen from behind?” question is actually the second of two questions asked in the original. The previous question asks “What is upon their heads?” In the Ayscough text there is a print of Yang on a horse veiled from view by a large round fan, “a cloud screen.” The point here is that Bidart’s departure down this thematic path has residual basis in the original.

The analogy here is that what cannot be seen is “untouched” and pure for if it had been seen it would be like “touched earth” which is “soiled earth.” Yet we know the beauty here masks a nebulous underbelly. The unseen is pure according to the myth, but the reality of these women is that they are soiled.

Bidart closes the first strophe with an inculcation of the reader and the subjects in a way that tips its cap to Tu Fu but takes the poem in a different direction than the original. Bidart closes with “As if submission to dream were submission/not only to breeding but to one’s own nature,//what is gorgeous is remote now, pure, true.”

The dream procession incanted in the first few lines, the march of the finery is the reader’s “submission to dream,” a submission that many onlookers might fall prey to--the same fantastic quality to which the emperor has fallen prey. The crowd, the emperor, are now submissive to their perceptions of these women as the stuff of dreams.

In the original the notion of the finery is contained within a context set in line 3. Hawkes’ exegesis of line 3 suggests “Appearance gorgeous thoughts remote pure and true.” And Hawkes even adds that the “pure and true” Chinese characters of Tu Fu do not refer to morality but “it is their breeding and refinement that he finds so impressive—like those of the princess in the fairy tale who was a real princess because she could feel a dried pea through several thicknesses of mattress.” I find this marginalia by Hawkes amusing—Tu Fu’s Yang clan as Grimm Fairy Tale.

So to submit to dream, or fantasy, in Bidart’s version of Tu Fu, we are submitting not only to the “breeding” of beautiful women but also to our own desire to be dominated by our own desires. We are less than beautiful, so we are less than what is beautiful. We can’t help but submit to the sublime. One falls prey to the magical spell of beauty despite its unrevealed ugliness.

The last line, “what is gorgeous is remote now, pure, true” has a duality to it that I need to call out. The word “remote” situates the reader afar from the historical event perhaps leaving the reader to see the superficial beauty more easily. The word remote also clarifies the perspective of the speaker in the poem as far away from the procession as it passes. The “remote” in Bidart has shifted from being of the Yang clan to being a characteristic of the viewers.

Bidart then breaks the poem using an asterisk. In the original there are no section breaks, but Bidart has broken his transliteration into four parts. This form comes indirectly from Hawkes. Hawkes proposes that “although Chinese editors do not as a rule divide this poem, I am almost sure that it is meant to be read as three stanzas of equal length.” Hawkes goes so far as to even parlay some interpration when “read in this light the whole poem very cleverly unfolds the scene as it must have appeared to the crowded onlookers. The first stanza describes the expensive dresses, beautiful complexions, and haughty manners of the court ladies; the second watches them eating—or waisting—a great deal of very rich and expensive food, and identifies various mounted couriers who come galloping up as palace eunuchs bearing additions to the feast from the imperial kitchens; and finally in the last stanza, a sound of music is heard and the crowd watches the arrival of a mounted procession: Yang Kuo-chung himself appears…” Bidart has broken the poem into four sections as a turn on this structure.

I’m comfortable with the break. The break not only remarks on the organic separation of parts from the original as described in Hawkes, but also notes a change in approach by Bidart. The processional speech, the language of madrigals, falls away. The poem descends from the dream empery, to exposition, to argument, to conclusion.

In the second stanza, the poem reflects, on “The Mistress of the Cloud-Pepper Apartments” Yang Kuei-fei herself. She is noted as such because, from Hawkes, “in the palaces of the Han era the Empress’s apartments had their walls plastered with a paste in which dried pepper flowers had been pounded. It was said to impart a subtle fragrance to the air.”

As pepper flowers enliven the air of the room, Yang “has brought life back to the emperor.” She is symbol of the decadence of the emperor. Much can be attributed to her own wiles but it is the emperor who allows her rise, allows his desire for her to seep him in decadence. As is the emperor, as is the empire.

The charged language of the first stanza has all but dried up. As the stanza continues, “Therefore charges of gross extravagance, of /pandering incest between her sister Kuo and her cousin /are, in the emperor’s grateful eyes, unjust. Her wish /made her cousin first minister.” At some level the poem has stopped trusting that the reader will bring the missing context to the poem. While I’d prefer if Bidart had stuck to his approach and not backed away to introduce the exposition, I understand why he did it. Few to no readers will do the work required to provide sufficient substrate for a purely lyrical transmutation of Tu Fu’s original. At some level Bidart is conceding he needs to tell this specific part of the story because this part of the story is important to his thesis.

The leap forward in time is a concession to the inevitable. That the empowered emperor will maintain his dalliance only so long and then these women and those who have acquired their positions through nepotism will all be erased—as if they were but a dream. Because the emperor has enjoyed the Yang clan’s lasciviousness the “charges of gross extravagance, of /pandering incest between her sister Kuo and her cousin //are, in the emperor’s grateful eyes, unjust.”

The incest referred to by Bidart is alluded to in the original Chinese in lines 23. From Hawkes, “Yang, as well as meaning ‘willow’, is the surname of Yang Kuo-chung, the subject of this stanza. According to an ancient bit of Chinese folklore, frogbit (the bai-pin of line 23) was generated by the mutation of willow-down when it fell in to the water. Now there was a popular rumour, apparently believed by Tu Fu, that Yang Kuo-chung was carrying on an incestuous relationship with his cousin, the Duchess of Kuo.” Did Tu Fu’s belief in the rumor, and subtle allusion to it in the original, hasten his own departure from his appointment in the court?

As evidence of the emperor’s whims Bidart flashes forward again, a second time, to the “Three springs from this/spring,” when “the arrogance of the new first minister / will arouse such hatred and fury even the frightened // emperor must accede to his execution.” The first minister is the cousin of Kuo and he has gained his position through nepotism. His behavior so infuriates the empire’s subjects that the emperor must cull him from the court. The cousin’s disposal leads to his mistresses inevitable disposal, as “she will be carried on a palanquin of /plain wood to a Buddhist chapel /deep in a wood and strangled.” Being toted away on a plain piece of wood starkly contrasts to her carriage during this spring festival.

The Yang clan’s rise is a flight of the phoenix. By the close of the second stanza we have been awarded their demise. The mistress strangled in the wood like a cultural foil to the head of John the Baptist on the platter for Salome. The third stanza focuses on “now.” Its repetitions seem to assert a fleeting present.

The declarative echoes suggest that the now is not exactly a “now.” As if their afterlife were being lived in the present, long before their deaths. The Mistress of the Cloud Pepper Chamber has had her rise to the heavens on earth. And the god of earth will one day cast her from her perch. Here the emperor departs the poem and does not return. The rest of Bidart’s poem explores the remainder of the procession and the entrance on the scene of the cousin of the Yang clan, the prime minister. But more to this later.

The third stanza returns us to the present of the poem. The observed moment, as “Now the Mistress of the Cloud-Pepper Apartments,— / whose rooms at her insistence are coated with / a pepper-flower paste into which dried pepper- / flowers are pounded because the rooms of the Empress / always are coated with paste into which dried pepper- /flowers are pounded and she is Empress//now in all but name…”

That “Now” hangs out there. Its insistence like Yang’s own insistence that her rooms be “coated with a pepper-flower paste.” The poems insistence on “now” parallels the mistresses will. For “the rooms of the Empress always are coated with paste into which dried pepper-flowers are pounded.” The drawing together of the insistence or the tone with the empresses insistence hints at the judgement the poem places on the decadent will.

The language here while not of the madrigal as in the first stanza, is not of the plebian as in the second stanza. It seems to have found a middle ground—though its assertive tone takes precedence over its image making.

“Encircled” by her sisters, Mistress Yang, is further surrounded by the affectations of what the Chiu T’ang Shu called the “Festival to Uproot Evil.” The empress in all but name luxuriates in the bath of delicacies. Yet there is the pervasive sense of ennui mixed with an overbearing tension. For “Now rhinoceros-horn / chopsticks, bored, long have not descended. /The belled carving knife wastes its labors.” These hovering rhinocerous horn chopsticks are from Hawkes as well, representing sex and poison. Hawkes posits “Rhinoceros horn is well known for its aphrodisiac and magical properties. Its use for chopsticks would be as a poison detector.” So the opulence of the imagery is laced with the guardedness of those aware of their ill-gotten gains.

What gains? Gains such as the meal layed before the procession. The “Arching // camel humps, still perfect, rise like purple hills / from green-glazed cauldrons. Wave after // wave of imperial eunuchs, balancing fresh / delicacies from the imperial kitchens, gallop up // without stirring dust.” According to Hawkes these foods are of the “eight delicacies” from “an ancient text which enumerates eight particularly delicious and costly dishes.” From Aysough these “eight delicacies” are “bear’s paws, deer’s tails, duck’s tongues, turbot’s roe, camel’s hump, monkey’s lips, carp’s tail, and ox’s marrow.”

In the final stanza, the Yang sisters’ cousin, Yang Kuo-chung, the new prime minister, arrives on the scene to much ado. Curiously “With mournful sound that would move demon/gods, flutes and drums now declare to the air /he is arrived” the language even in the original Chinese is not subtle. The “mournful” comes straight from the Chinese and is translated as such in Hawkes and as “pitiful” in Ayscough.

I think it is an odd choice by Tu Fu and worth fully considering. This music comes from line 19 of the original: the character, 哀, means sorrow and the character,吟, means moan. But why the sorrowful moan? One thinks of a funeral procession not of the gay affair of the Spring Festival to Uproot Evil. Tu Fu while respectful has let slip both a foreboding and a tonal shift in his work. The sound of demons is not accidental as the crowds perceive Yang Kuo-chung as demon-like. Also, the sounds allude to his and his cousin’s forthcoming executions

But for now, “Dawdlingly // he arrives.” The “dawdlingly” seems odd as well, yet the word “dawdlingly comes direct from Hawkes’ exegesis. The character, 逡, actually means “to shrink from.” Hawkes spends some time focusing on the crowd shrinking away from the Prime Minister but not the converse. Yang seems to shrink back from the crowd as well. Bidart gets some of this into his transliteration when Bidart notes how he is exposed to all, “as if the cloud of // suppliants clinging to him cannot obscure the sun.”

Here Bidart cleverly achieves two aims. First the “cloud” alludes to our empress. She cannot shield her cousin from the execution by the emperor. The crowd represents the public that causes an uproar about the Prime Ministers behavior. His nepotistic success and other excesses exposed to all will eventually cause the “sun” that is the Emperor to execute him. Bidart also gets the practical elelment of the Prime Minister's laconic reluctance to move into the sun. His pace is a sign of his power, a “Power greater than that of all men except one / knows nothing worth rushing toward //or rushing from.” Bidart calls out this quality to continue the thread of dream time in his transliteration. This last scene unfolds at an unreal pace, too slow, dreamlike under the sun beating down on all.

Bidart then lets the Prime Minister greet his cousin for “Finally the new first minister / ascends the pavilion. He greets the Duchess of // Kuo with that slight / brutality intimacy induces.” How to interpret this greeting of “slight brutality?” This greeting, this “slight brutality” is parallel to the intent of line 23 in the original Chinese. This is the moment Tu Fu selects an image to allude to the incest between Kuo and the Prime Minister. What Hawkes translates, ‘The Yang flower covering the frogbit.” It also alludes to Hawkes’ interpretation of line 24, of ‘the blue-bird carrying a red handkerchief” as “a secret assignation being arranged by the exchange through an intermediary of billets-doux and love tokens.”

While the intent of Bidart to convey Hawkes’ interpretation is clear, what is not for certain is whether Hawkes’s interpretation is correct. In Ayscough the black bird flying away, “holding in his beak a rose red handkerchief” occurs later at the moment of the Mistress Yang Kuei-fei’s death. I’ll add that this “correct interpretation of Tu Fu” is irrelevant to Bidart’s transliteration as he has made choices that make the Hawkes’ view of the line work for this poem.

In the penultimate stanza we get the follow-on from the thesis in the first stanza. For if beauty is a veil, “Here at last is power that your /soul can warm its hands against!” Beauty and power lay exposed at our feet. The ladies of the Yang clan and their deeply refined elegance and exquisite finery “cloud” their actions as whores to the thrown. Their beauty has granted their cousin power, power “your soul can warm its hands against.” His abuse of that power in some ways brings forth the fall of the ladies of the Yang clan. But for now, “Beware: success has made him /incurious, not less dangerous.”

The prime minister is the foil to Tu Fu. Tu Fu observes the procession and the tenor of the crowd. He sees the event in all its subtlety and innuendo. The “incurious” prime minister can’t see it at all. But if the Prime Minister were to look upon someone they might be scorched by his wrath.

I want, somehow, to broaden the scope of Bidart’s intention—to connect his choice of transliterating this particular poem—to a larger consequence that is parallel in nature to Tu Fu’s politicization. The implied argument here has consequences for the perception of the sublime. Consequently the poem implicates nepotism and the power associated with it. I mean the obvious implications are that desire for beauty is tragic. That power is unreal when ill-gotten. That power that attracts such beauty and nepotism into it will bring about its own downfall—as in the later collapse of the empire. But how and where can I apply the lessons of Bidart’s version of Tu Fu’s "Dazzling Women" to my world? In what ways has Bidart implicated power, and beauty, and art, and politics now?