Compilation and introductory article: L. Eidlin.

Interlinear translations: G. Monzeler, B. Pankratov, E. Serebryakova, V. Sukhorukov, A. Karapetyants, Tan Ao-shuang, I. Smirnova.

Notes: I. Smirnov, V. Riftin.

Chinese classical poetry

Chinese poetry is known in the world. The period of its heyday, the centuries of its greatest artistic achievements, the centuries of closeness and attention to human life fell to the share of this collection.

What is important and most attractive to us in Chinese classical poetry? Unusualness, national acerbity, all that it reflected from customs, from worldview, from nature, and what distinguishes it from all other poetry of East and West? If it were only so, then nothing but curiosity, and it would not cause a non-native reader. But we see how translations of her beautiful samples attract hearts to themselves. And this means that the main thing in Chinese poetry is still its universal human principle, which is contained in it and before translation is hidden from an unprepared look behind a mysteriously bewitching ornamental wall of hieroglyphs.

Is it really so much to know in order to feel the beauty and naturalness of the lines of a building or a vase, to delve into the meaning of a painted picture, if they were created even by the genius of a people far from us? Here there are no clear barriers between the viewer and the object of his admiration, here even a stranger can sometimes be no less a connoisseur than an artist's compatriot. The poetry of another people, in order to communicate with oneself, requires the translation of words and the transmission of thoughts, which is always difficult and not always accessible. Thanks to translation, the literatures of countries and peoples, in their totality, rightfully become the literature of the whole world, that is, the literature of all mankind.

Thanks to the translation, we also learned Chinese poetry. And they realized that her national identity is only a frame for our common thoughts and feelings with her. And, having understood this, without the slightest prejudice, but rather in anticipation of new joys, we bow to what the translator of Chinese poets was able to convey to us.

And now we are reading the poems of Cao Zhi, placing him at the entrance to that rather unsteady space that is called the Middle Ages and begins in the 3rd century: in the first decades it was created by an outstanding poet. Next to Cao Zhi, the pinnacle of Chinese poetry, perhaps the highest, is Tao Yuan-ming. He shocks us with the unexpected simplicity of a word that expressed a strong thought, the certainty and pure uncompromisingness of this thought, always aimed at finding the truth.

So we are approaching the threshold of the Tang state, with an abundance of poets, whose mind and art, it seems, can no longer be surpassed, but they are followed by the Sung poets, with their new view of the world, and then the Yuan and Ming, although repeating a lot, but endowing the history of Chinese literature with fresh, original personalities. We end the collection on them, without going beyond the first half of the 17th century, that is, within the limits marked by the period of the Qing state, although the Middle Ages, as we approximately understand them, are still dragging on and in the 18th century have not yet allowed themselves to be replaced by the time , which is already called new. But one must stop somewhere in this flow of centuries-old poetry, which has not been forgotten to this day.

Isn’t it really strange that almost two thousand years from Cao Zhi and a journey of one thousand six hundred years from Tao Yuan-ming (not to mention the relatively “close” distance from Li Po, Du Fu, Su Shi, Lu Yu), not Is it strange that this remoteness did not erase the unrest experienced by the poets, did not prevent them from combining them with the anxieties of our present day? The patina of antiquity, lying on the bright surface of all these verses, did not obscure the living life beating in them. Poems have not lost their fascination and have not remained primarily a literary monument, as happened with a number of classical works of world literature.

Poets of old China before the reader. They do not require detailed recommendations and speak about themselves in their poems. We will talk about the time and circumstances of their work, as well as its main features, due to time and circumstances. We think that only one of our guiding movements is enough for poetry itself to sound with full force and tell about those for whom it was created.

The poems are written in hieroglyphic characters. This is their first feature, which could not be noted, since it is obvious. But hieroglyphic writing also makes translation different, giving it more freedom in choosing the concepts and words behind the hieroglyph. We will be mistaken if we assume, as is sometimes done, that a Chinese poem is a pictorial spectacle and is itself a kind of picture. Such an assumption, if not a final lie, is, in any case, a huge exaggeration, especially for the modern Chinese reader, who sees in the hieroglyph an expression of the concept, and only, and forgets about the beginning of the origin of the sign. But the concept embraced by the hieroglyph is "many-sided" and verbose, and thus a Chinese poem is, of course, more subject to the imagination of the reader than a poem written in phonetic alphabet. The translator is also a reader, and he chooses one of the reader's interpretations available to him and offers it to his reader.

Our collection, covering the 3rd-17th centuries, includes two main genres of Chinese classical poetry - shi and tsi. Shi - verses with a four-word (most often in Dotan poetry), a five-word and seven-word line, with a two-line stanza, with a caesura in four-word and five-word verses after the second character, and in seven-word verses after the fourth character. Shi is the original and predominant form that existed, like tsy, until very recently. Tsy appeared later, in the Tang time, approximately in the 8th century, and their subject matter was initially limited to the narrow-minded experiences of the poet. They reached their full maturity in the Sung state, and Su Shi in the 11th century proved with his work that all spheres of poetry are accessible to verse tsi. Tsy, unlike shi, consist of unequal lines and were composed to certain melodies - first music, and then poetry. The names of the melodies also remained later, when the versifiers lost their musical accompaniment, which is now unknown to us and determined only by the manner in which the unequal lines are placed.

Fifteen centuries of Chinese poetry must pass before the mind's eye (as it was customary to say in the old days) of the reader of our collection. Poet after poet bear witness to the development of the thought and literature of Chinese society. First, in the small expanses of the "Three Kingdoms", "South and North", and then in powerful feudal states, ruled by one dynasty for several hundred years.

And each of the times gave birth to its own poetry, which it needed and with strong ties connected with the previous one. Poetry carried with it and preserved the tradition. Reading the Chinese poets in their sequence, it is not very difficult to notice its instructive, educational side. Poetry and worldview were in that inseparability, which was dictated by the inseparability of science and art. The functions and tasks of poetry were so serious, so necessary for the internal structure itself, that the least space could be given to the poetry of leisure, the poetry of lazy contemplation, or, conversely, ardent passion. We will explain this further.

In the Confucian conception of the universe, man is equal to heaven and earth, living between them and making up with them the triad heaven - earth - man. Throughout the history of Chinese poetry, attention to the person, sympathy, and subsequently service to him passes. The idea of ​​a moral life was dominant in Chinese literature. (Isn't this also one of the reasons for the preservation of Chinese antiquity?).

We are publishing a transcript and a video recording of a lecture by Professor, Director of the Institute of Oriental Cultures and Antiquity of the Russian State Humanitarian University, a specialist in Chinese poetry and poetology Ilya Sergeevich Smirnov, which took place on November 26, 2015 in the I.S. Turgenev. Photos by Natalia Chetverikova.

Boris Dolgin: Good evening, dear colleagues. We are starting another lecture from the Polit.ru Public Lectures cycle, which we are currently holding at the Turgenev Library-Reading Room. It is very pleasant that we can again see Ilya Sergeevich Smirnov, a sinologist, a specialist in Chinese culture, poetry, poetology, director of the Institute of Oriental Cultures and Antiquity of the Russian State Humanitarian University.

We are always very glad to lecturers from there, because it is an inflorescence of acting talents. We will talk about the tradition of Russian translation of Chinese poetry, about schools, about approaches to this. Please, Ilya Sergeevich.

Video recording of the lecture

Ilya Smirnov: Good evening, thank you to everyone who came today. The title of my speech is designated as "History of the translation of classical poetry in Russia", but rather, it should be clarified that this is not so much a history of translation as of the existence of Chinese classical poetry in Russia.

My story will be somewhat inconsistent, because there is no distinctly arranged chronological history of translation from Chinese in Russia. These are such “concentric circles”, schools, students. Relations with the country from which this great poetic tradition came to us in different epochs changed, attitudes towards those who translated this poetry and the result of their labors also changed. Therefore, I will try to mix a few things: actually talking about translation, talking about Chinese poetry in culture - what is called the transcription or motifs of Chinese poetry in culture.

And, in conclusion, if I have time, I would like to talk about the unexpected - about the future. In the yard - 2015, 150 years, wonderful poets, outstanding scientists, people who happily combined this and that hypostasis in themselves, tried to translate the Chinese classics into Russian. And here we are, reviewing what has already been done, and, voluntarily or involuntarily, we think about further ways of poetic translation from Chinese.

Assessing what has been done over the past century and a half, I will express my opinion (in general, everything that I will say here today, except for dates and chronology, is solely my opinion) we find ourselves in the face of a radical failure: there is no Chinese poetic classic in Russian! There is no need to ask me if there are Arabic, Persian, Japanese classics in Russian - I do not want to touch on this, since I am not deeply immersed in these areas of translation. I know, maybe a little, but God knows how much. I know a little more about the Chinese classics.

Get ready for what will be the final, where I will try to explain why we encountered such a failure, could we have not encountered it, or was it predetermined by the whole course of the interaction of science called "Sinology" or "Sinology" or "Sinology" - and its "splash" in the form of translations of Chinese poems into Russian.

And one more note: I will try to do without any assessments in relation to the work of individual schools and translators. If these assessments somehow arise from what I will say, then it turned out that it was completely beyond my power to avoid them.

So. In 1856, in the 126th volume in the sixth issue of the journal Otechestvennye Zapiski, a translation of the remarkable Russian poet Afanasy Fet (this assessment is natural, it is not included in the "non-estimated" condition) of a Chinese poem appeared. It took probably 30 years for the school of Russian Sinology, which had been formed by that time, to determine that this was a poem by the Chinese poet Su Shi, a poet of the Song era, that is, the XI-XII centuries, no less remarkable than Afanasy Fet, - "Shadow".

Now we will see what has happened and will continue to happen with the translation from Chinese. Yeah, I haven't apologized yet for not having a presentation. I can not. And reading through the eyes of poorly understood lines would add little to your perception of Chinese poetry. Therefore, try to listen to poetry and, I think, you will understand the main thing

First, the interlinear of this poem, so that it becomes more or less clear what this poem is about:

Ledge after ledge

step by step...

The "ledge" is most likely a "floor".

But even for an interlinear, the word is not too poetic, so we will say "ledge".

Step by step, step by step

Climbing the Jade Tower.

No matter how much I order the servant boy,

He won't take her down at all.

Only a great luminary will take her away,

How the clear moon will bring it with it.

I’ll make a reservation right away that the interlinear is an extremely imperfect thing in general, and even more so in relation to Chinese poetry. I tried to convey as accurately as possible everything that is written in Chinese text, but involuntarily, so that it does not look like a series of slurred words, I am grammaticizing the text, while in the Chinese text all these grammatical connections still need to be established, based on the context, the experience of reading the text, prosody and many other things. However.

Here is what Fet wrote:

The tower lies

You will count all the ledges;

Only that tower

You won't miss anything.

her sun

Can't steal

look at the moon

I put it down again.

Everything is in place, only the detail with the servant boy is missing. It seemed to be all that was left. The feta translator was scolded for everything, but here it seems that everything is in place. But what is this poem about? What did you understand from it? What is the poem about?

A certain person, a "lyrical hero", in European terms, climbs the tower. This tower has a shadow - the poem is called "Shadow" - and for some reason asks the boy to sweep away this shadow. And then everything is clear: the sun leaves, the shadow from the tower disappears, but then the moon rises and again the shadow from the tower lies on the ground.

What is really going on in this poem? The Chinese are not going anywhere. He walks along the shadow that lies on the ground - "ledge by ledge, step by step." Because the tower was built at the foot of the hill, so the shadow falls, practically reproducing this tower in all details.

It was customary to go for a walk, taking a kettle of wine, warm it on a fire, drink a glass, play such narrow harp, composing poetry. Naturally, the poet scientist man, not dragging all this economy behind him. He had a servant, usually a boy, who carried all this after him. Therefore, the poet jokingly suggests that he remove this shadow, but the boy cannot do this.

And this hidden playfulness is the whole point of the poem. An example, to tell the truth, from the simplest. And here is the question: how should the poet, if not Fet, have acted in order to manifest, convey to the reader not only the obvious, but also the latent?

By the way, many years later it turned out that the interlinear was made by Feta not by anyone, but by the wonderful, great Russian sinologist, founder of the first Russian Sinological school, Vasily Pavlovich Vasiliev. He could well translate the poem in its entirety! But if he wrote all that I have told you, what would the poet do with it? After all, the Chinese did not say all this in his poem, it lives there, "behind the line." That is why Chinese verses practically do not exist without commentary.

First, classical books ceased to live without commentary - those that typologically correspond in Chinese culture to the Bible or the Koran, define some fundamental properties traditions, what is called the “picture of the world”.

In general, Chinese culture is a philological realm, a realm of commentary. The Chinese practically do not have a tradition of direct utterance, a thought must be expressed gradually, implicitly, the external form - words, a line - only hints, leads to the deep content.

Let's return to Russian translations.

After Fet, the Chinese were translated by Mikhailov, Minaev - his translation, very far from the original, even entered one of the school anthologies in what was then Russia. Later, of course, it was not without Balmont, who translated everything and thought about everything, he translated the Chinese in his own way, he also translated Western poetry, talentedly, but “in Balmont’s way”, you see him, Balmont, rather than see the original .

The first collection that presented the Russian reading public with any extensive selection of Chinese poetry was China's Pipe in 1914. Little is known about the translators Egoriev and Markov. The latter was from the Latvians (Markov, apparently, a pseudonym), married the artist Varvara Bubnova. By the will of fate, she ended up in Japan, taught the Japanese of European painting and herself studied traditional Japanese painting from them, became famous, and in her declining years wrote something like a diary. This diary has preserved for us the meager information about the translator Markov.

Only the lazy did not kick the translations from the "Pipe of China": both knowledgeable people who had serious grounds for criticism, and perfect amateurs.

I will give an interlinear translation of a very famous poem, which is found in all Chinese anthologies, by the famous poet Li Po. From the point of view of the Chinese - the greatest, perhaps. Reveler, drunkards, according to legend, drowned in the lake, reaching for the reflection of the moon in the water.

Even the famous scholar Zhu Xi, who was such a Confucian of the Confucians, from whom you can’t expect a kind word about such “non-canonical” cases, directly said that these 20 words, or rather, signs, in the five-word quatrain of Li Bai, are worth hundreds of thousands of words of others poets. Chinese criticism is very metaphorical, so this is a very high mark. The poem is called "Lamentation on Jasper Steps". Here is the substring:

Jasper steps / give birth to white dew;

The night lasts... // The silk stocking is full.

Return, lower / water-crystal curtain -

Ringingly transparent… // Contemplate the autumn moon.

Now listen to what the most worthy Egoriev and Markov made of these twenty words. So, "Moonlight Staircase":

From white, transparent jade

The ladder goes up

Sprinkled with dew...

And the full moon shines in it ...

All steps shimmer with moonlight.

Queen in long robes

Climbing up the stairs

And dew, overflowing,

It wets the edges of noble covers.

She goes to the pavilion

Where are the moonbeams

Spin your own fabric.

Blinded, she stops at the threshold.

Her hand gently lowers the pearly curtain,

And wonderful stones fall

Rumbling like a waterfall

pierced by the rays of the sun.

And the queen listens to the murmur,

And sadly looks at the moonlight,

To the autumn moonlight

Flowing through pearls.

... And for a long time sadly looks at the moonlight.

Needless to say, they did a great job. For a long time it seemed that this was not a translation at all. But, if we reach the end of everything I want to talk about, then we will return to this opus and try to look at it from a somewhat unexpected angle.

In the meantime, using the example of Li Po's quatrain, I will once again show you the imperfection of even an ideally accurate interlinear translation of a Chinese poem.

“Lamentation on Jasper Steps” - what does this immediately say not to you and me, but to the Chinese reader? Firstly, that the poem was written on behalf of a woman, because the sign “yuan”, which means “complaints, complaints”, is a word from the female language. Men do not complain or complain, at least not through that word.

"Jasper steps" are the steps of the royal palace. Jasper is a sign of all the best. In fact, this is not jasper, but jade, but in Russian the word jade is steadily associated with kidney disease, so for a long time Russian translators preferred mineralogically erroneous jasper to medical jade. Be that as it may, it is important to say that natural jade comes in a wide variety of colors, from white to dark green; white is considered incredibly precious, jewelry is made from it, but in the royal palace, steps were made from it, regardless of costs. Therefore, no rich person can have "jasper steps", ever; in life, maybe yes, but not in poetry. In poetry, this is a sign of the imperial home.

Who can complain in the imperial palace? Only the imperial concubine. Much less often - the empress. The emperor had up to a thousand concubines. This, of course, is not about fabulous debauchery, but about the mystical function of fertility. A great many concubines symbolized the power of the Son of Heaven, his all-begetting possibilities. Girls, of course, beauties, were selected throughout China by special sovereign people.

It is clear that a thousand young ladies is excessive even for the emperor. Many were honored with the visit of the emperor once or twice in their lives, and many faded away, grew old, not seeing the face of the sovereign. And it was almost impossible to return home. Tragedy? Undoubtedly. But over time, this plot, this sadness of the harem maiden, turned into an absolutely symbolic theme, in no way connected with the real circumstances of the life of the imperial palaces.

Most likely, it was such a poetic mask for poems about love. It is difficult to say exactly when the substitution took place, but certainly long before Li Bo. The skill of the poet and tradition continued, however, to demand strict observance of all the signs of the original theme of the palace concubine. Thus, it is essential to make it clear that the action takes place in the imperial palace. Li Bo, an outstanding master, even dares to point out this circumstance twice - in the title of the poem and in the first line, repeating the “royal” epithet “jasper”; this is very generous, because the poet has only 20 hieroglyphic signs at his disposal.

"Jasper steps give birth to white dew." Why do they "give birth to white dew"? Because jasper / jade, according to Chinese beliefs and, it seems, due to its chemical properties, I am not an expert here, it retains heat in the cold - that is why there are such jasper benches in Chinese palaces, you can sit on them and not catch a cold in cold weather, but in in hot weather, they keep a pleasant coolness.

And this combination of properties leads to the fact that when the cold comes, moisture appears on the jasper - in our case, frost. "White dew" is the name of the calendar period of the year. There are 24 seasons in a year, the Chinese, as farmers, reacted very subtly to changes in the weather, and one of the seasons is called the “white dew season”. In addition, this line also contains a hidden reference to the main poetic canon - the “Book of Songs”, where “white dew” was first mentioned as a synonym for frost.

“The night lasts” is an indication of the length of what is happening in time. “The silk stocking is full”: “full” is my word, in fact, there is a hieroglyph that is now included in the word “aggression”, that is, it turns out that this is such an active process, this stocking is literally captured by moisture, dew. What is this stocking? In fact, most of all it resembles such lace boots, a few years ago, our ladies wore them. Here we are talking about something similar.

What is all this for? In order to show that the heroine is in terrible excitement, worries, complains and complains. Therefore, it is an impossible thing in everyday life! - jumped out into the street without shoes, without shoes. Accordingly, these stockings got wet, but she does not feel it and continues to stand on the jasper porch. These are the first two lines. I told you superficially how they are loaded with meaning.

"Return, lower / water-crystal curtain" - no grammar. We don’t know for sure at all whether it’s a man or a woman, if it weren’t for the title with the word “yuan” from the female language. Also stockings. The men didn't wear them. So she is. She - returned and lowers the water-crystal curtain. This is a curtain, such threads on which crystal beads are strung. And there is an erotic subtext here: if a lover comes to a lady, this canopy falls. And she has it raised. And she lowers him with a kind of hopelessness; and behind this gesture is another expression of her complaint. The poem ends with the phrase “contemplate the autumn moon”, and for the word “contemplate” a sign is taken that does not mean only “look”.

China, on the other hand, is very even in the center, which is why various hills, towers, and stairs are still very popular. If you ever find yourself in China with a Chinese excursion somewhere in an area with hills or towers, you will see how all the Chinese headlong - from young children to old people - climb these hills and towers together, because it is closer to heaven, and a fertile stream flows from there with all the content important to the Chinese. But the main thing is to rise above even nature, above even relief, and look into the distance in order to “see the four seas”, as they say poetically, that is, to see the borders of this middle country, beyond which there is barbarism and, in essence, nothing. And here Li Bo uses the word for this kind of looking - van, although it would seem that the ladies only look at the moon.

Well, with the "autumn moon" everything is more or less simple: autumn is the end of the year, although the height of autumn is still ahead, because the "white dew season" is September, and the peak of autumn is October and November. Autumn evokes thoughts about the frailty of life, the frailty of being; here it is also an experience of hopeless longing. Whose? Concubines? - Maybe. Poet? - More likely.

There's a lot more to this great poem, I even wrote about it great article trying to get to the bottom of its deeper meanings. But now I want to emphasize that the most virtuoso translation - and this poem was translated by knowledgeable and capable people - physically cannot cover all the overtones that an educated Chinese reader (there were no other readers in traditional China) grasped immediately and completely. In other words, in Russian there are more or less talented dummies, devoid of the full-blooded richness of the original.

Now let's stop talking about translation for a while and turn to, so to speak, the echoes of Chinese poetry, in Russian poetry. We are talking about the famous collection of Nikolai Gumilyov "Porcelain Pavilion". This collection was created when Gumilyov lived in France and England, and, apparently, some French versions of Chinese poems served as the basis for Gumilyov's arrangements. one of the French.

It looks like a real Chinese poem, perhaps, only the one that gave the name to the entire collection - "The Porcelain Pavilion". These are lovely poems, I'll read them to you:

Among the artificial lake

The porcelain pavilion has risen.

arched back with a tiger's back,

The jasper bridge leads to it.

And in this pavilion several

Friends dressed in bright dresses,

From bowls painted with dragons

They drink warm wine.

They talk merrily

And then they write down their poems,

Wringing yellow hats

Rolling up sleeves.

And it is clearly visible in the clear lake -

The bridge is concave like a jasper moon,

And a few friends over bowls

Turned upside down.

What we are waiting for is present in this poem in full. For everyone who has seen Chinese painting, this picture lives up to all expectations. Here is a humpbacked bridge, very accurately reflected in the smooth surface of the waters, and gentlemen, poets. There are also inaccuracies, the most noticeable being yellow hats. Yellow- belonging exclusively to the emperor, no dignitaries in yellow hats could be, but on the whole, intonationally all this is very interesting, even formally Gumilyov's transcription to some extent reproduces the form of the Chinese eight-line (in Russian, the number of lines of the original is traditionally doubled).

The charm of this poem is given not only by a visible poetic gift, deep intuition, but also - I'm sure - knowledge of China and Chinese poetry. The fact is that Gumilyov communicated quite closely with the second great Russian sinologist Vasily Mikhailovich Alekseev (1881-1951) after Vasily Pavlovich Vasilyev, who really introduced the then Russian society to Chinese poetry, releasing in 1916 the huge volume “Chinese Poem about the poet. Stanzas of Sykun Tu”, which contained a study and translation of 24 octets. Sykun Tu is a poet of the Tang era (UP - X centuries), who created a poetic poetology, very vague and dark, depicting, as Alekseev proved, he considered 24 phases of the inspiration of a Chinese poet.

This is a very complex thing; in Alekseev's book - a multi-page study, an interlinear translation of each poem with a detailed commentary, and in addition - amazing paraphrases that reproduce the Chinese favorite way of explaining the meaning: to say the same thing that has already been said in verses, but in other words and just as poetic. It is known that after the appearance of its Russian version, many poets of that time were fond of the “Poem about a Poet”, among whom was Gumilyov. So his knowledge of Chinese poetry had a very solid foundation.

V.M. Alekseev founded the so-called “second” Russian Sinological school. And to this day, many Russian sinologists trace their scientific pedigree from the Alekseev school. The same can be said about his role in translation from Chinese. He himself translated a lot of poetry and prose, his translations are wonderful. And he was also happy with his students, many of them were distinguished by truly outstanding talents.

You probably know the name of Nikolai Alexandrovich Nevsky (1892-1938), first a Sinologist, then a Japaneseist, Tangutologist, folklorist; Incidentally, the first independent work was a translation of Li Po's poems with detailed commentary.

Another Alekseevsky student Yulian Konstantinovich Shchutsky (1897-1938), genius translator the Chinese classical "Book of Changes", perhaps, showed his talent as a poetic translator more clearly than others; I will say more about this. His friend and classmate at the university, Boris Alexandrovich Vasiliev (1899-1938), is also a person not without poetic talents, but, alas, quite early felt, how to put it mildly, a taste for political betrayal, having participated in the persecution of his teacher Alekseev, that, however, did not save him from the fate of the firing squad. As well as Nevsky and Shchutsky who did not give up anything.

Aleksey Alexandrovich Shtukin (1904-1963) translated into Russian in verse one of the main canonical monuments of China, the Book of Songs. He escaped execution, but not arrest, ended up in a camp, in spite of everything he continued to translate from memory; thanks to the troubles of Alekseev, the camp was replaced with exile in some wilderness; then again the camp, release, a short time at large and death from the fourth stroke. But he fulfilled his mission - to this day his translation is the only complete translation of the “Book of Songs” into Russian.

As you can see, all Alekseev's students translated poetry. But for the general Russian reader, Chinese poetry was opened by a small collection "Anthology of Chinese Lyrics of the 7th-19th Centuries" of 1922, then they were still writing "on the Nativity of Christ", which was made by Shchutsky, and Alekseev himself wrote the introductory article and introductory remarks to the chapters.

This book was extraordinarily popular; The translations were immediately liked and remembered for a long time. There was something in them, consonant with the traditions of the Silver Age that had not yet died, and at the same time - some unusualness, spice, or something. I will cite, by the way, one of the amusing testimonies of the unprecedented popularity of Shchusev's arrangements.

A well-known St. Petersburg scientist mentions such a case in his memoirs. During the war on the Northern Front, in a moment of calm, a company of translators at headquarters and newspapermen started a game: someone utters two poetic lines, and the other must continue the poem and name the author. Failed - lost. The Moscow poet Alexander Kovalenkov, who served in the local newspaper, was simply “stuffed” with poems and invariably emerged victorious. And then one day he asked the author of the memoirs the next two lines:

All our hard, troubled days,-

and he suddenly continued with unexpected ease:

This has nothing to do with

To educate my soul.

Kovalenkov was so sure that his “strike” would be unanswered that he was confused and did not even ask who the author of the poem was, which, of course, involuntarily saved his opponent: he, of course, did not remember the name of the Chinese poet Wang Ji. But the translation of Shchutsky turned out to be so charming that among the few translations from Chinese it became, as they say, a fact of Russian poetry (whether this is good is another matter).

I PASS IN FRONT OF THE TAVERN

(7th century, from Wang Ji)

I'm drunkenly in the flow

All our hard, troubled days.

This has nothing to do with

To educate my soul.

And where the eyes do not rush -

Everyone is drunk everywhere, and therefore

How dare I resist

To be sober for me alone?

And one more evidence of the unprecedented popularity of this translation: a parody was even written on it:

“I see pleasure around me -

Burdocks, thorns, wheatgrass.

However, this has nothing to do

To the upbringing of my soul."

You understand that they only parody what is “on the ear”, otherwise the parody is meaningless.

In connection with Shchutsky, I will return to the subject of the lecture parallel to the translation - to Chinese motifs in Russian poetry. You already know how tragically this remarkable scientist and translator ended his days. But even on the “nights of execution”, his life was not cloudless. A man of many talents, who took a great interest in the mid-twenties, he openly joined the already persecuted anthroposophists; moreover, he fell in love with the active anthroposophist Elizaveta Dmitrieva-Vasilyeva (the famous Cherubina de Gabriak, who caused the duel between Guliyev and Voloshin). The times were still relatively vegetarian, and soon she was not arrested, not killed, no, she was condescendingly sent to Tashkent.

Shchutsky goes to visit his beloved. She lives in a tiny adobe house, through the porch of which a pear tree has sprouted. They are endless, including about poetry; day after day, the poetess composes the poetic cycle "The House Under the Pear Tree". It is difficult to say how much Shchiyutsky, as we know, also an outstanding poet, participated in the creation of these poems, but the fact that we have one of the most clear examples"germination" of Chinese imagery, intonation, strophic, symbolism in Russian poetry, no doubt. I hope you hear it all for yourself.

On the table a blue-green bouquet

Peacock feather...

Maybe I'll stay for many, many years

Here in the desert...

If you stepped on frost,

So, close and strong ice ...

“If you stepped on frost,

This means that strong ice is also close ... ”- this is an expression from the ancient Chinese“ Book of Changes ”, as you remember, translated by Shchutsky. At that time, he was just beginning his studies of this monument and, probably, shared his observations with his girlfriend. In general, this old proverb was very much in tune with the then moods of the intelligentsia: the signs of cold weather in public life were quite clearly distinguished, and the coming glaciation could be seen without much difficulty; I had no illusions: what should come will come!

Another poem:

"Behind the houses, in a back alley,

So the branches of willows are bent,

Like a wave frozen on the crest,

Like carvings on my jewelry box...

My walks are lonely

Silently took a departing friend

Willow branch from remembering hands.

According to the tradition of the Chinese, to a person leaving - and they often left, especially Chinese officials (the fight against corruption did not begin yesterday) - at the city gates, saying goodbye, they broke hanging willow branches and handed them to the traveler as a memory of their native land. As you can see, Chinese motifs are quite alive in these verses and do not seem alien at all.

Now let's go back from student to teacher and talk about translation again.

Chinese poetry, as already mentioned, was translated by Vasily Mikhailovich Alekseev himself. It must be said that his poems have some incredible, mysterious property. You look at them like an x-ray of a Chinese poem. This is a mysterious thing, because the "backbone" of the Chinese poem comes through. At the same time, these are Russian poems, where the words are arranged in the right order and they are wonderfully chosen.

Alekseev is so high that he is neither cold nor hot from my words, so I risk saying some evaluative words.

Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov said that only Gnedich translated the Iliad not into “general cultural” Russian, but into a language specially designed precisely and only for the transposition of this single work.

If you don't remember, read it again - you can't speak or write in this language. It was invented so that you and I would feel the truly divine, unearthly origin of the great poem.

Alekseev acted in approximately the same way, shifting his Sykun Tu. This is exactly how his translations were assessed by the most insightful contemporaries. It was said that he discovered the "Chinese Khlebnikov" - which in contemporary Russian poetry could be compared in quirkiness with the language of Khlebnikov's original poems.

I will read you a few lines of Alekseev and I will start not with Sykun Tu, but with the poem that we have already talked about, “Lamentations on the Jasper Steps” by Li Bo.

Jasper platform gives birth to white dew...

The night is long: they have mastered a fleur stocking.

I'll leave, I'll lower the water-crystal curtain:

In a transparent pattern, I will look at the autumn month.

Many modern readers believe that this is a slightly "rhythmic" interlinear. Don't know. Even in the syntax, in the choice of words, I see a bizarre Russian-Chinese amalgam; This translation will never become a “fact of Russian poetry”, but to the reader who wants to know not “what” the poems are about, but “how” they are arranged, this arrangement will tell a lot.

I will return to Vasily Mikhailovich's translations, in particular, to his Sykun Tu, but now I would like to talk again about the work of his students - researchers and transcribers of Chinese poetry.

Boris Alexandrovich Vasiliev, who was already mentioned, translated quite a lot, published much less, almost everything in the 1935 collection Vostok; the collection later, when the vast majority of its authors were, as it was then called, “withdrawn”, was withdrawn from libraries, part of the circulation was put under the knife, so that Vasiliev as a translator was practically unknown for many years. I suggest you listen and appreciate one of his translations.

First the subscript:

One path of the setting sun spreads over the water,

Half of the river is azure-azure,

Half of the river is red.

Who does not love the ninth moon (i.e. the ninth lunar month) the initial third night?

Dew, like a true pearl,

The moon is like an onion.

Now translation:

Spreads the road from the glare of fire

The setting sun over the river.

The floor of the river is like the azure of a bygone day,

Half - red, like a ray of fire.

How I love the third day of the ninth moon

At the evening hour, when in the middle of silence

Like pearls, dew suddenly lights up

And in the sky - the moon, like a curved bow.

If you were able to compare the translation with the interlinear by ear, you noticed that there are quite a few words missing in the original, almost half. And, of course, intonation - sublime, even pretentious - hardly corresponds to the spirit of Chinese poetry, “insipid”, as the Chinese themselves defined it. For comparison, I will read you another translation of this poem, made decades after Vasiliev by the last student of Alekseev, Lev Zalmanovich Eidlin (1910-1985):

Walkway one setting sun

Stretched into the depths of the water ..

Half of the azure-azure river,

The river is half red.

I feel tender passion for the third night

The beginning of the ninth moon.

Dew, like a pure pearl of grain,

The moon is like a curved bow.

Eidlin is the greatest connoisseur of Chinese poetry, a major translator of it. Even the Chinese admired his ability to read and understand ancient poems (and you rarely get a kind word from them about foreign Sinologists). I hope you heard the crispness, the clarity of the Eidlin transcription, an almost verbatim match with the original.

To tell the truth, he, like Vasiliev, allowed an hardly justified grammaticalization of the fifth line of the translation, introducing the pronoun “I” - in Chinese poetry, personal pronouns, as a rule, are absent and ours is no exception. In general, this line is clearly not set: "I feel a tender passion for the third night" - everything is here - from intonation to the choice of words "contrary" - and the original, and Eidlin's translation principles, and even his restrained closed character. God knows what happened, translation is almost a mystical thing.

Now I would like to tell you about one interesting episode connected with the existence of Chinese poetry in Russian poetry. There was such a poet - Bobrov. It cannot be said that it is completely forgotten, but not one of those whose name is well known. He lived a long life, in his youth he was a member of the Centrifuge political community, before that he had joined the Futurists; then he took up translations, did mathematical work (he was a mathematician by education), wrote a lot on the theory of verse.

In 1916, Alekseev's book fell into his hands, Bobrov was completely shocked by the translations from Sykun Tu. He tried to translate from these translations as if from interlinear, and tried to write, as he called, "fantasies" on Chinese topics. Sent a very timid letter to Alekseev, Sykun Tu admired him, asked him to evaluate his own experiments. Not spoiled by the attention of his colleagues, Alekseev reacted to Bobrov's attempts exceptionally kindly, encouraging him to continue mastering Chinese imagery.

Their correspondence lasted more than one year - Bobrov managed to spend 8 years in exile, everyone forgot him, except for Pasternak, who regularly sent money to Bobrov, thanks to which he survived. He returned, not surprisingly, a completely different person, to an essentially different country and a completely changed translation environment: during this time, views on translation have changed dramatically.

All the guidelines of the Gorky World Literature were rejected, the so-called "Soviet realistic translation" prevailed. If translators from the world literature, scientists, high connoisseurs of different cultural traditions, sought to make the reader feel the difference between Arabic, English, French, Spanish, Chinese and other poetry, now the main thing was the comprehensibility of the translation to the general reader. Bobrov - it is not for us to judge him - quickly became imbued with new trends (and he hardly had a choice).

One way or another, he strove to create from Chinese poetry, to which he was committed, such texts that would be understandable to the proletariat. He wrote an extremely arrogant article as a preface to his translations, where he dragged everyone in - both Europeans and someone else, trying, completely without knowing the matter, to explain the essence of Chinese poetry. And then he did not hesitate to write a long letter to Alekseev, saying in plain text that he was outdated, did not understand translation well, and was poorly versed in Chinese poetry, lagged behind. But with all this, he condescendingly invited the scientist to participate in the book of Chinese translations he conceived on new, “progressive” grounds.

The shocked Alekseev tried to explain to his colleague, refusing the flattering offer, that he was “a Russian scientist, not an insolent one”; he did not heed and even pretended not to understand what it was about. However, he stopped insisting.

Bobrov, of course, had talent and had an ear. Here is one of his transcriptions, so that you feel that this is not an empty bag:

The wind of living inspiration floats,

I will not touch the signs.

You don't touch me, words,

My unquenchable sadness.

Truth rules in empty clouds

A moment - and I will arise with you,

Full to the brim. Like a lotus I

Curled up in the wind - I hide.

Air dust dances through the void,

Droplets of darkness - sea mist:

Myriads crowd, soar, glide -

And a single world will form a wave.

This is his version of Sykun Tu's poem, in which one of the main postulates of the Chinese poetic tradition is carried out - all the meanings behind the words. “Without putting a single sign, I can exhaust the breath-fluidity,” the poet claims. And Bobrov’s deep thought (he is a little more clearly expressed in Alekseyev’s paraphrase: “The poet, without denoting it with a single word, can fully express the whole living current of his inspiration”) is expressed tritely and indistinctly: “The wind of living inspiration floats, I will not touch the Signs I". It seems that he simply did not understand what the Chinese said. Or did not believe Alekseev. After all, he had other authorities.

On this instructive case it would be possible to end our story. But still, there is something else that needs to be said.

After the war, when the “great friendship” with China began, transfers began to flow in full flow. In 1957, the four-volume Classical Chinese Poetry was published. Today, before the lecture, I looked at the table of contents: more than 90% of translators are literary day laborers, laborers of translation. Well, the quality of work is the same. And where did the masters come from in the right amount - thousands of the most difficult lines needed to be translated almost instantly, four volumes were published in one year, the executive editor N.T. Fedorenko served in China on the diplomatic side, no one looked after the translators, and they translated - and God knows what.

However, this edition is rather a sign of the times than a stage in translation evolution.

It should not be forgotten that during the war he defended his dissertation, in which a translation of about 260 poems by Bo Ju-yi, already mentioned by L.Z. Eidlin, and he was the only Russian Sinologist known to me, translated so accurately that he risked including his literary translations in scientific works, considering them, quite rightly, to be so “quotable” that there was no need for the usual philological translations. Eidlin continued to work until the mid-80s. True, he translated very little.

Usually in scientific papers nevertheless, substrings are used. He is the only one in the dissertation and later ... The only thing that he translated was extremely little. And, in general, of all Bo Jui's quatrains, he translated one quarter. Then he published a book of translations, which was his doctoral dissertation, about the poet Tao Yan Ming, of whom only 170 poems remain. I talked quite a lot with Eidlin, but I did not dare to ask, he did not translate all 170 poems either. Someone can stop misunderstanding of the text. Eidlin understood everything masterfully. Here is some poetic oddity.

I will name a few more names, these are my colleagues with whom I communicated and lived nearby in translation. It was a close and benevolent community, I am extremely grateful to them. Most of them, unfortunately, have passed away.

I will mention the Moscow translator Leonid Cherkassky, who left for Israel in the early 1990s and died there more than ten years later. He translated the great Chinese poet Cao Zhi, studied a lot of new Chinese poetry, and was almost the only one who translated poets of the 20th century in our country.

Lev Menshikov, an outstanding world-class Sinologist from St. Petersburg, who translated all his life, but modestly never published. We ended up together in 1989 in China, and both for the first time, although he was much older. On the train, he told me: “If I die in this China (he was afraid of the climate there), then please print my translated poems.” Thank God, he lived for years and years, saw a collection of his translations, to the publication of which I was fortunate enough to have a hand. He translated wonderfully, very accurately, and with all the accuracy - into rhyme, it was his idea-fix that needs to be translated into rhyme.

Another figure very significant in translation is Boris Vakhtin. A talented playwright, prose writer, professional sinologist, he published two collections of Chinese folk songs in his translation. Due to a combination of many, not always plausible circumstances, his translations became the object of condescending criticism in an article by L.Z. Eidlin "Ideas and Facts". This article was directed against the well-known Japanist N.I. Konrad, whose younger friend was B. Vakhtin, and aimed at Konrad's favorite idea of ​​the Eastern Renaissance. Bakhtin shared the idea, but actually it had nothing to do with his translations, except that the preface to the second book was composed by Konrad and promoted "Renaissance" thoughts in it. It seemed to Eidlin not enough to sniff (in my opinion, to a large extent to the point) the author of Konrad's idea; he undertook the irreverent task of proving that Vakhtin could not read Chinese poetry.

It was somehow not accepted in the sinologists corporation to write devastating reviews even on very weak translations, at worst, they wrote a private letter, noting oversights and failures.

And mistakes in our craft happen to everyone. By the way, Eidlin's teacher Alekseev noted many cases of incorrect translation in Eidlin himself, who was not yet a master at that time. But what can I say: I happened to prepare for publication a book of unpublished translations of Alekseev, and there were many mistakes! The Chinese said that "the mast was upright" - Alekseev writes that "the mast was lying." Why? Don't know! Have you looked and thought? True, I dealt, in essence, with draft translations.

And B. Vakhtin was a good translator. He died suddenly at the age of 50. Only two books of translations remained after him.

And - who has moved away from translating classical poetry in recent years, unfortunately - my classmate and classmate at the institute, a contemporary whom we knew as Lenya Bodylkina, and he, turning to writing, took the pseudonym Bezhin and under this pseudonym became a famous prose writer . In translation from Chinese, he left a noticeable mark.

Of the non-Sinologists, it is necessary to mention, of course, Alexander Gitovich, who made an era in our craft, who in the 50s mysteriously ended up as a correspondent in warring Korea, where he was impressed not so much by the war (although he wrote a few things that did not need to be written), but by nature Korea - indeed, impressively beautiful, in those years completely untouched by civilization. Then somehow “by adjacency” he switched to China - perhaps this was due to the fact that Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, who was his neighbor in Komarov, began to translate Chinese from interlinear to earn money, and he followed. And translated a lot.

For their time, these translations were comparable to Marshak's translations in terms of fame and influence on people who were interested in China. They are also comparable in their approach to the material - now it has become almost a good tone to prove that Marshak did not understand Shakespeare. He understood, but this is the time when translation became not an intensive, but an extensive matter, when it was necessary to involve as much as possible in the reading of world classics. more people, Marshak's translations (were) explanatory. Gitovich's translations were about the same explanatory. A wonderful sinologist Boris Mikhailovich Pankratov, a former Russian intelligence officer in China, worked with him. He knew the language grandiosely - he turned into a monk and into whom he just did not turn.

And, probably, one of the few main people in my life is Arkady Akimovich Steinberg, an artist, an outstanding poet, a translator who translated Milton's Paradise Lost into Russian verse. From his youth, having read Wang Wei's treatise "On Painting" translated by Alekseev, he dreamed of translating Wang Wei's poems.

In the early 70s, after completing Milton, he asked me to do interlinear. I didn't know a damn thing, I didn't even know what it was. And Chinese poetry, barely graduating from the University, read rather weakly. In general, I gave him this ... He was a very courteous, polite person, he did not condemn me in any way. On the other hand, I found him an excellent scientific expert, V. Sukhorukov, who worked with Steinberg on Wang Wei. Their joint (Steinberg insisted on this) book turned out to be a wonderful miracle.

In order, so to speak, to loop the plot with a jasper porch and acquaint you with the handwriting of the master, I will give the Steinberg translation of Li Po's poem already known to you:

On the porch of jade

white frost lay in bulk.

Wet in the long night

lace patterned stockings.

At home, the canopy is transparent

lowered, sat down by the window;

Through the crystal drops

looks at the autumn moon.

As you can see, Steinberg translated masterfully. In his translations, Chinese poets are truly remarkable, if you have not read it, read it, enjoy it. But, as almost always happens in translation, “if you pull out your nose, the tail will get stuck”: because of this high skill, the Chinese verses in Steinberg’s translations acquire some kind of decisive certainty, which, perhaps, is not in the original, built on reticence, omissions.

I hope I didn’t miss any of the major translators, if I missed it, I’m sorry.

Now about why, from my point of view, all their works turned out to be, by and large, a failure. I have already mentioned one of the reasons by mentioning Gasparov's remark about Gnedich's translation of the Iliad. A special language is no less necessary for translating ancient Chinese verses than for translating the Iliad.

Why is it needed? Not even because the poems are written in Chinese, and the Chinese language is radically different from Russian. All the poetry that we call "Chinese classics" is poetry of a medieval type. This is the Middle Ages with which Europe parted in the Renaissance, not immediately, but parted. And China continued to exist in this medieval culture until 1911; the idea of ​​transferring this poetry, which is alien in word and spirit, to everyday modern Russian language seems to me stillborn, and individual successes - they, of course, happened - do not change things.

I will also note one particular, perhaps not the most important. Any, the most modest poet of modern times, the most inconspicuous, comes into literature in order to say something new that no one has said before him. The medieval Chinese poet lives with a fundamentally different attitude. He looks, as it were, back into tradition, knowing that everything has already been in it. And his task is to make this “already former” intelligible for his contemporaries by the maximum effort of his spiritual forces. Hence the apparent monotony of Chinese verses, hence their imaginary simplicity. After all, almost everything important is hidden in the depths, it is behind the line. And we, translating and reading translations, are content with obvious and not at all the main meanings; the main thing inevitably eludes us.

The whole centuries-old movement of Chinese poetry is a relentless choice of a model in the past, in order to, by imitating, somehow change this past and update it for today. And, of course, this is a language that very early ceased to be understandable by ear. This is a "dead language", which had its own grammar, vocabulary, and specifics. The entire poetic tradition in China has been created in this long silent language. So without creating a special - I don’t know which one, I don’t dare to fantasize - a language in the translation of old Chinese poems is indispensable. In a word, Gnedich is required.

In conclusion, I will read you a poem translated by Lev Zalmovich Eidlin. Perhaps this is just one of the happy exceptions in the series of our professional failures.

I remember in early years when I did not know what sorrows bitterness is,

I used to like to climb the tower.

I used to like to climb the tower

And compose poems in which he sang to himself about imaginary sorrows ...

Now, when I know to the end what bitterness is,

I would like to talk about them, but I am silent about them.

I would like to talk about them, but I am silent about them,

And about that I say how pleasant the day is, how beautiful autumn is!

Unfortunately, I didn't have time to say a lot of important things. But thanks for your attention.

Lecture discussion

Boris Dolgin: Thank you very much, Ilya Sergeevich. And I have a lot of questions and, I'm sure, the audience. Before questions, I would like to say a few words about the fact that our today's lecturer is actually related to the topic in very different ways. This was partly clear from the story, but perhaps not completely.

I introduced him in his current position, but did not say that Ilya Sergeevich worked in the eastern editorial office of the Nauka publishing house and was an editor for many years. Secondly, I did not say that Ilya Sergeevich created and published collections of translations of Chinese poetry; many books were published in his own translations.

Thus, there are several points of view and, of course, it is very interesting when they are all combined in one person: from the author through the person who works with this as an editor, collector, to a researcher and translator. But I will start with my question, then I will alternate. When you spoke about the anthology of 1914, did you say that from the present moment, perhaps, one can look at this translation not so pessimistically?

Ilya Smirnov Yes, sorry, I had this ring composition in my head, but I got tired and missed the necessary completion. I had to discuss the situation with Chinese translations with Gasparov. Many of his thoughts seemed to me very curious, and his practice of experimental translations seemed even more interesting. He published them as a separate book. In short, the essence of the Gaspard experiment is as follows. he translates the poem, and then says: “Look, there are a lot of extra words they give nothing to the mind or heart, they are empty.” And - oops! - squeezed out all these unnecessary words.

Sometimes the reverse move was used: Gasparov took a short poem, which, for one reason or another, remained incomprehensible in translation and included the necessary explanations directly into the text. In other words, I did approximately what Yegoriev and Markov, who were scolded so many times, did, with a story about which I began today's lecture. They did it poorly, clumsily, they did not understand Chinese well, and, finally, they were simply not talented. But, if a person comes who has determination, talent, knowledge, perhaps some sense will grow from this.

I tried to do something similar, but I had a different move. I asked myself the question: what are we missing in Chinese translations? Answer: We are out of context. A Chinese connoisseur remembers millions of lines by heart, while reading Chinese verses, a million associations immediately unwind in him, and a small quatrain grows into a mental poetic “lump”.

And I began to write commentaries on the Chinese verse. Not so formal: such and such lived then, this city is located there, but trying to include these comments in the artistic fabric, as far as possible. Most importantly, if there were translations in Russian of at least part of the poems to which this poem referred the Chinese reader, I cited these translations. If there were none, I tried to translate at least some of the poems myself, to expand the context.

I confess that this is not an easy job and I did not have enough gunpowder for a long time. I hope someone will continue to do something similar or turn to Gasparov's idea.

Boris Dolgin: Thank you. Please questions.

Question: Ilya Sergeevich, you mentioned that the tradition of translating twenty Chinese characters twenty words. When did it happen?

Ilya Smirnov: Not recently at all. Or I misspoke, or you misheard. This was introduced by Alekseev. Before that, there were no rules, as in "The Pipe of China", where, as you remember, twenty hieroglyphs turned into two hundred Russian words. Such was the all-European manner - so translated, for example, the Frenchwoman Judith Gauthier. Alekseev was disgusted by this method, and he came up with the idea and began to translate so that every meaningful Chinese word"responded" to a meaningful Russian word.

Question: Are they trying to keep the rhyme or not?

Boris Dolgin: Yes, about the discussion of rhyming and non-rhyming.

Ilya Smirnov: There is a complicated story here. All Chinese poetry begins with the "Book of Songs", which includes texts from the 11th century BC to the 6th century BC, a colossal length, they are all rhymed. But the evolution of the Chinese language led to the fact that quite early rhymes were no longer perceived as rhymes, phonetics changed. And for the current Chinese reader, classical poetry is practically devoid of rhyme.

In addition, rhyming in Chinese is relatively easy.

And Russian rhyme, as you know, requires a lot of effort. Therefore, one has to choose: rhyme - and then monstrous semantic losses, or the rejection of rhyme for the sake of fullness of meaning, overtones and nuances.

At different periods I translated either into rhyme or not, with exact rhyme and with assonance, but I never found a single recipe for myself. Eidlin never rhymed, but Menshikov always did.

Question: I also wanted to clarify about the rhyme. But I have a general question. Languages ​​- Chinese, Japanese, Korean - do they have a common basis?

Ilya Smirnov: Japanese and Korean have nothing in common with Chinese, except for writing, and in Korea they have not used hieroglyphs for a long time. Japanese and Korean belong to the Altaic languages, Chinese to the Sino-Tibetan languages.

Boris Dolgin: We had a lecture by Georgy Starostin on how language kinship is studied. You can watch the recording or transcript.

Question: I wanted to ask about tones in Chinese poetry. More?

Ilya Smirnov: Every Chinese word is pronounced with a certain tone.

Question (continued): Yes, I know it. But what did this give poetry, poetry?

Ilya Smirnov: The alternation of tones, which was set by special rules, gave the line a special melody; in the next line, the melodic pattern changed. Thus, the whole poem acquired a musical originality. It is impossible to reproduce a melodic pattern in Russian, as you understand. Two features of the Chinese poem are irretrievably lost for us - melody and hieroglyphic picturesqueness.

Boris Dolgin: Thank you. Why was Chinese poetry so unlucky in the 1950s? I mean that in the 1950s people began to actively translate not only poetry. Novels and short stories seem to be more fortunate. What happened?

Ilya Smirnov: It is hard to say. Maybe poetry is a more reverent kind of literature? There is some kind of plot in prose that makes it easier to understand. Moreover, in China fiction appeared much later than poetry and for a long time was considered a disrespectful thing. Although, for example, the novel "The Dream in the Red Chamber" is very, very complex, full of complex symbolism, difficult to decipher and comment on.

Question: Until the 20th century, as far as I know, there was Chinese spoken and Chinese, in which poetry was written. In the 20th century, poetry began to be written in spoken language. Have you looked at translations of poetry from "colloquial Chinese" into Russian, is there something better or worse?

Ilya Smirnov: In any language, written and spoken languages ​​coexist throughout its development. In Chinese, whose history dates back more than one thousand years, the picture is much more complicated. In different eras, the ratio of “spoken language - written language” looked very different. Without delving into this difficult topic, I will say that, for example, the great poet of the Tang time, Bo Juyi, wrote many poems in spoken language bai hua and, allegedly, read them to village old women, checking the accessibility of his poetry not only to connoisseurs of high classics. The latter, of course, is a legend. The language of Bo Juyi's poetry is a highly refined version of the colloquial bai hua, hardly understandable by ear even to scholarly contemporaries.

Another thing is that when the traditional exams for a bureaucratic position were canceled at the beginning of the 20th century, there was no need to learn classical written wenyan and the entire gigantic corpus of texts written in it, at least for those who were going to make a public career. State language was appointed colloquial, which quickly fell apart into the actual spoken and into the language of written texts. But aren't we? Do we speak the way we write?

Today's poetry is somewhat more complex than the classics. If that one was saturated with allusions, quotations and other signs of traditional verse, then the current one is imbued with the spirit and signs of a fast-paced time, which are not at all easy to catch.

I had to somehow translate the modern Chinese poet Yang Lian, who, by the way, was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize. He left China in the 1980s and lives in England. He is a wonderful poet. His poems are complex with some completely new complexity: they have a clear echo of poetic classics (Yang Lin's favorite poet is the first ancient poet Qu Yuan known to us by name), and are truly modern - they are free verses, multi-layered, saturated with new, unusual imagery. Translation of such verses is incredibly difficult.

Boris Dolgin: And no one is trying on wenyan now?

Ilya Smirnov: I can’t say for sure, but it seems that Mao Tse-tung was the last known character.

Question: You mentioned the problem of Chinese poetry - that Chinese poetry is very capacious, based on in large numbers references to other poems. And without context, it is very difficult to understand them, in order to translate them, you need to “deploy” them several times, or write huge comments on them, explaining for a long time. And I heard that now all Chinese anthologies can be found quickly. There is Albert Krisskoy, who runs a popular Chinese language blog. He had such an example: a poem in which a certain turnover occurs. Based on it, he found in an anthology three poems from different centuries. He laid them out in a row.

Boris Dolgin: Your question is, is it now easier to prepare poems for translation, given the ease of searching for contexts?

Question: Is it possible to group poems not by poet, not by age, but by context? Would it make it easier to understand if we said that the poem is related to this and in this poem?

Ilya Smirnov: The computer certainly makes things easier. You have described exactly what you can do with it. As far back as the 18th century, the Chinese created a multi-volume dictionary called "Pei wen yun fu". it was made by a whole collegium of scholars in order to make it easier for those going to the exams to select elegant expressions to rhyme from thousands and thousands of poets, starting from ancient times. When translating a Chinese poem and encountering some kind of two-syllable / two-word combination, for example, “clear moon”, you can use this dictionary to determine when and by whom this expression was used. Probably, someone will prefer a computer, but to think that a computer will solve all the difficulties of understanding and translating ancient texts is, in my opinion, a serious misconception.

Boris Dolgin: In some ideal future, if you imagine the digitized Chinese classics, perhaps this is not a fantastic task?

Ilya Smirnov: No, not fantastic.

Boris Dolgin: Perhaps one can imagine the rather automated work of a philologist who is preparing some kind of work for publication?

Ilya Smirnov: Yes, but I won’t have to live in this beautiful time. I don't know, anything is possible, but I'm sad to part with the book. Even the process itself is familiar and pleasant: I met a complex turn in the text, got up from the desk, went to the shelf, found the necessary dictionary, found the hieroglyphs ... well, and so many times a day. Probably, someone will prefer manipulations with the computer to all this tediousness.

Boris Dolgin: There was one more aspect to the question: the listener asked whether it makes sense sometimes to publish poems not by authors, but by some complexes of poems that are “built” around one poem, for example, and in order to explain it, a set of those with which it is related. True, then there is the question of what each of those is connected with ...

Ilya Smirnov: Here is the first Russian anthology that Shchutsky translated under the direction of Alekseev, I mentioned it in a lecture - it was organized not according to a chronological principle, but according to the thematic. Some themes of Chinese poetry were singled out, six or seven, to which Alekseev wrote amazing introductory explanations, and the verses were grouped according to these themes. There are many thematic Chinese anthologies - old and new: "Poems about wine", "Poems about tea", "Poems about parting". Of course, from such collections it is easier to trace the repetition of motives, the roll call of poets. It would be nice if someone could take on this job.

Boris Dolgin: But in general, the idea of ​​hypertext, in which the links between texts are built multiple times and it is impossible to say whether the text is in this section or in that one, it is in each of the sections for which it is marked up - it is probably somehow close to a multiple understanding of meanings and connections. ?

Ilya Smirnov: From the outside, we are all, of course, outside observers, it is not easy to judge. There are Chinese verses called "shan shui" - "mountains and waters." And to a profane look it seems that these are poems about the beauty of nature. They are especially loved by translators not only in our country, because these verses are close to the heart of a foreign-language, not Chinese, reader, because this is exactly what they expect from China: so that there is a lake under the moon, a boat floats, and in it a Chinese poet with a thin long beard and something there played on some kind of lute. It's so universal, isn't it?

But these verses are not about that. And about what? Don't say right away. There are a great many landscape poems, it is hard to imagine that all of them implicitly spoke about one thing; every time the poem needs to be analyzed, to get to the deepest meaning.

But as for the corpus of poems about the abandoned concubine, in comparison with the landscape forces of a small one, I have a timid guess: apart from the earliest, around the turn of the new and old era of poems on this plot, written later, outwardly remaining within the framework of a traditional theme, become just poems about love, about love sadness and the like.

I will not now substantiate my guess, which must be checked and verified, but it seems to me that there is something meaningful here. In fact, it is not such a rarity in the world poetic tradition when a living feeling is expressed in frozen, canonized forms. For example, in the old Indian poetry there are also verses in which something completely different is hidden behind the “manifested” meaning.

Apparently, a long tradition develops such specific techniques, when the outer layer, which the layman reads, is very clear and accessible, and the meaning is hidden in the depths, and only experts can understand it.

Boris Dolgin: Thank you. But were there any attempts to publish in the form in which you are talking about the editions of Chinese classical poetry in China, classical, that is, along with the entire set of Chinese commentaries superimposed on it, comments, it does not matter, Russian or European, comments to text or comments to comments? That is, here is such a multi-layered?

Ilya Smirnov: One of the works that Alekseev left behind the impossibility of printing was an attempt to translate not poems, but the famous monument "Lun Yu" - "Judgments and Conversations" by Confucius. What did Alekseev do? He translated a phrase from a treatise, then translated a classical commentary on it, then translated another commentary of a later time, and then he wrote his own commentary on everything. The impression is amazing.

In this manner he translated several initial chapters. very, very convincingly, but no one was going to print this, and the scientist left such a promising idea. And the modern translator, who undertook the full translation of Lun Yu, wrote in simplicity, they say, translating with the Alekseevsky method is unbearable work, and I will not try. Because the comments are almost more difficult to read than the text itself. Because the text still implies a larger number of readers. And the Chinese commentary is written not so that the text will explain to you and me, but so that the same knowledgeable smart scientist as the author of the commentary understands how smart and learned the author of the commentary is.

Boris Dolgin: Apparently the last question. Why, in your opinion, did Chinese and Japanese poetry in the domestic cultural consciousness take the place it did? Yes, there was Persian poetry somewhere, but by and large, nothing compares to Chinese and Japanese poetry in their status for the Soviet intelligentsia. And this, in part, in general continues. Why? With all that kind of failure.

Ilya Smirnov: I would like to start my speech today with the assertion that Chinese poetry has had a much lesser impact on Russian culture than the Middle Eastern poetic tradition. The entire Russian XIX century is literally full of quotations, allusions, translations, imitations, transcriptions of the best poets of the Persian-Arabic poetic tradition. China, although it is also not overseas, up to the second half of XIX existed for centuries. as if outside of Russian verbal culture. What happened later, when Chinese literature began to be translated, I tried to briefly demonstrate to you.

It seems to me that in the 20th century after 1917, the taste for Arabic-Persian poetry, which became the poetry of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, was spoiled by mass translations of the national poetry of the Soviet republics, which did not smell of any classics, they spoiled the reputation of classical poetry. But the Middle Eastern classics were translated by wonderful poets, the same Arseniy Tarkovsky. But that influence and that admiration that was in the 19th century was not in sight.

The theme of the Caucasus as the abode of an ideally simple life, not spoiled by civilization, has completely disappeared. There, on occasion, it was possible to hide "from pash e y”, that is, from cruel power. AT Soviet time no one would think of such a thing.

Boris Dolgin: Is this why the Arab-Persian influence has declined?

Ilya Smirnov: But the thirst to hide from the vigilant gaze of the authorities did not go away, and it became much more difficult to physically move somewhere, so people tried to go into some kind of spiritual retreat, to avoid propaganda chatter. Someone chose ancient literature, someone was closer to Indian wisdom, and someone was attracted Far East, including the poetry of Japan and China, elegant, distant, devoid of obsessive didacticism.

Boris Dolgin: Thank you very much for the lecture!

Discover the amazing and unique world of ancient Chinese poetry! Tender sadness from separation from loved ones, admiration for the surrounding nature, philosophical reflections on life became the main theme of the poets' poems. They were for the most part employed Chinese emperors- poets at any time needed patrons. We can admire the lightness of the lines and the charm of the images, of course, thanks to the hardworking translators from Chinese, and it is no small merit of them that these poems are so beautiful. Perhaps, in Chinese, their melody is somewhat different, as well as the sound, but not all of us know the original language.

Chinese civilization is the only civilization on our planet that has developed continuously (all other ancient civilizations have long ceased to exist), and thanks to this, it created and preserved the richest cultural heritage. Writing has existed in China since ancient times, and the invention of paper has made it possible to preserve "literary gems" to this day unchanged, in contrast to those cultures where poems were transmitted orally, most often in the form of songs, and have undergone significant changes over time. Pay attention to how brightly the lines give birth to pictures - you read and see right away! As if the poet paints a picture with words... Flowers and plants are very common - chrysanthemums, lotuses, pines. They are also loved by Chinese artists. I find it particularly striking that most of the surviving poems were written by men! Not all women can feel the beauty of the world so subtly, and this is admirable.

One of the greatest and most famous poets outside of China is Li Bo. His poems are charming, like watercolor paintings. The graceful style makes them works of art.

I look at the waterfall in the Lushan mountains

Behind the gray haze in the distance

Burning sunset

I look at the mountain ranges

To the waterfall.

He flies from the clouds

Through the mountain forest

And it seems that the Milky Way

Fell from heaven.

white heron

I see a white heron

On a quiet autumn river;

Like frost, flew off

And floats there, in the distance.

My soul is saddened

The heart is in deep anguish,

I stand alone

On a sandy empty island.

flowing water

In flowing water

autumn moon.

On the south lake

Peace and quiet.

And the lotus wants me

Say something sad

So that my sadness

The soul was full.

Lilac wisteria.

Flowers purple haze wrap around

The trunk of a tree that reached heaven

They are especially good in the spring -

And the tree adorned the whole forest.

Foliage hides birds singing a flock,

And a fragrant light breeze

The beauty will suddenly stop

At least for a moment, for the Saami for a short time.

Li Bo (701 - 762) In the mountains of Penglai

Another name among the great poets - Doo Fu (712 - 770)

At the sight of snow

Snow from the north

Breaks into the changsha

Flying with the wind

Above houses.

flies,

Rustling autumn leaves,

And with rain

Interferes in the fog.

Empty wallet -

And they won't lend

Pour wine

Into my silver teapot.

Where is the person

What just treats?

I am waiting.

Perhaps it will come by chance.

Moonlight night

Tonight

The moon is shining in Fuzhou.

There in the bedroom is sad

Wife loves her.

For small children

Sadness seized me -

They are in Chang'an

And they can't think yet.

Light as a cloud

At night, the wife's hairstyle,

And hands like jasper

Frozen in the glow of the moon.

When to the window

We will come at midnight

And in the moonlight

Will our tears dry?

Du Fu "Old Man's Farewell"

Doo Fu "Alone"

Meng Haoran

I spend the night on the Jiande River

sent the boat

On an island shrouded in mist.

It's already evening,

A foreign guest is saddened ...

Endless spaces -

And the sky fell to the trees.

And the waters are clear

And the month approached the people.

spring morning

me in the spring

not the morning woke up:

I'm from everywhere

I hear the calls of birds.

All night long

rain and wind roared.

fallen flowers

how much - look!

Xie Lingyun

sunset of the year

I'm overwhelmed with sadness, I can't sleep.

Yes, and sleep will not save you from sad thoughts!

Moonlight illuminates the snow veil.

The north wind is blowing, and wild and gloomy.

Life goes somewhere, not a day's delay ...

And I feel: old age has touched me...

Gao Qi (1336 - 1374)

I listen to the sound of rain, I think about the flowers in my own garden.

metropolitan city, Spring rain,

I sadly say goodbye to spring.

The wanderer's pillow is cold

I listen to the rain at night.

Rain, do not rush to my native garden

And don't knock off the petals.

Please save until I return

Flowers at least on one branch.

Night at the end of spring

Sobered up. I write parting poems -

Spring is already leaving.

Light rain, withered petals,

One more branch in bloom.

Distant distances do not beckon the eye.

Subtle herbal aroma.

The traveler is sad this spring

Just like a year ago.

In the garden, flowers bloomed on one branch of a pear tree.

Spring lingered for a long time,

Didn't come.

This morning

I saw a flowering branch.

The heart trembled

Suddenly not at the beginning of flowering,

And at the end

And this is the last thread.

Tao Yuan-ming (4th-5th centuries).

In the world of human life

Has no deep roots.

She flies like

Light shadow over the road

And scatter everywhere

Following the wind, circling, it will rush off.

So am I, who lives here,

Not forever dressed in a body...

dropped to the ground -

And already among ourselves we are brothers:

Is it so important that they

Bone from bone, flesh from flesh?

Newfound joy

Let's make us have fun.

With the wine that is found

Let's treat our neighbors!

Life's heyday

Never comes again

Yes, same day

It is difficult to rise twice at dawn.

Without wasting a moment.

Let's inspire ourselves with diligence,

For years and moons

Man will not wait!

Li Jingzhao, Chinese. 12th century poetess

Chrysanthemum

Your foliage - from jasper fringe -

Hanging over the ground layer by layer,

Tens of thousands of your petals,

How chased gold burns...

Oh, chrysanthemum, autumn flower,

Your proud spirit, your unusual appearance

On the excellence of valiant men

He tells me.

Let meihua drown in flowers,

And yet her outfit is too simple.

Let lilacs be strewn with flowers -

And it's not easy for her to argue with you...

You don't pity me at all!

So generously spill the aroma,

Giving birth to sad thoughts about that.

Who is far.

Wang Wei

Stream near Mr. Luan's house

Whistle-lash

Wind in autumn rain.

Splash-splash

Flow between stones.

I break

Jumping, waves into drops ...

Flies again

Frightened heron.

Gu Kaizhi

Four Seasons

spring water

The lakes are full

Freaky in summer

The mountains are silent.

Radiance flows

autumn moon,

Fresh in solitude

In winter - pine.

Lu Zhao-lin

Lotuses on a pond with bends

Over winding shores

A wondrous smell circles, swims

Outline of lotuses in circles.

The entire overgrown pond covers.

I was afraid that the wind would blow

Autumn leaves too soon...

Only you, my friend, would not notice

How they, having fallen, will whirl strangely.

TAO QIAN

bloom colors

It is difficult for us to save for a long time.

No one can postpone the days of withering.

What once

Like a spring lotus blossomed,

Today has become an autumn box of seeds ...

Hoarfrost is cruel

Will cover the grass in the fields.

Wither, wither,

But she won't die!

sun with moon

It circles again

We don't leave

And we have no return to the living.

Heart with love

Calls to times gone by.

Remember this -

And everything will break inside!

BAO ZHAO

darkened sky

Dragged in a continuous veil,

And poured in streams

Endless torrential rain.

In the clouds at evening sunset

And there is no glimmer

In drizzling streams

Dawn breaks in the morning.

On the forest paths

Even the beast will not leave a trace

And a frozen bird

Will not leave the nest unnecessarily.

Clouds of fog are rising

Over the mountain river

Clouds

They sit on the steep bank.

In bad weather shelter

The homeless man has no sparrow,

lonely chickens

Dispersed at an empty housing.

From total misfortune

The river spilled under the bridges,

I thought of a friend

How expensive it is far away!

I'm getting old in vain

To quench my bitterness with wine

Even the ringing lute

Will not console in sorrow about him.

Lu Yu (1125-1210) IN HEAVY RAIN ON THE LAKE

Hao-zhan (689-740) SLEEPING ON THE JIANDE RIVER

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Philosophical inspiration of poetry

This long crisis, which could have been fatal for the country, enriched China. It made it possible to identify and study both the consequences of the intellectual decline and the causes of the disorder of the senses, which were characteristic of China from about the beginning of our era, which very much worried the minds. The constant anxiety of philosophers was caused by various reasons: now regrets about the oblivion of ancient simplicity, now the scourging of governments incapable of renewal, now the search for peace in the general contempt of politics. So, Zhongchang Tong (born in 180), an adviser to Cao Cao, in his work “On a Satisfied Soul” wrote bluntly: “Let me have quite good land at home, a spacious house, behind it is a mountain, in front of it is a river, canals, a pond from all sides, so that bamboo grows around the dwelling, so that a garden and a current on it are arranged in front of the dwelling, and a fruit garden behind. For me, a boat and a cart will completely replace walking or fording, a servant, a courier will completely free my whole body from work. In order to feed my parents, I have everything dear, everything tasty that only I can put together in one hand. My wife and children have never known labors so depressing for the body. Good friends gather to me, sit, and then I give them both wine and food - everything to please them in their souls. When the holiday, on a good day and a good hour, I roast a pig and a ram and also serve it on the table, bringing it to my friends with a bow. I go and do not go with my field, garden. I walk, amuse myself in my forests and valleys. I bathe in clear water, I run after the coolness of the wind. Already swimming carps. I take high-flying geese on my bowstring. I am looking for cool breaths, as of old, on the steps of the altar at the temple, and singing songs I go home, and I sit in a high hall. I rest my soul in my family. I dream of a dark empty beginning based on the book of the philosopher Lao. I breathe deeply, absorbing harmony, the best in the world. I seek in my soul the likeness of a ghost higher man. Together with people who are shrewdly intelligent, I discuss questions about the Tao, the supreme Way of man, or I interpret texts with them. I am below on earth, I am above in heaven, I live among these great two. I weave in my mind, I gather both people and creatures of the earth into one. I will play this classical melody on the lute: “Young wind, fragrant wind…” It will emit enchanting sounds in a distinctly beautiful range of notes. And here I am in my dreams walking over the entire inhabited world, throwing random glances at the sky and the earth around. I am not subject to the complaints of the people with whom I live. I save for a long time to myself the term of life and destiny. During such a life, I can fly up to the heavens and the Heavenly River and go beyond all the boundaries of the worlds we see. Why should I strive to enter and exit through the doors of kings and sovereigns?

Literature, which constantly reproduced the forms and images of classical authors, seemed to have ceased to develop. The existing prose was either philosophical or moral, and it was constantly mixed with the speeches of state officials. Renaissance, which began in the II-III century. n. e., was not caused by literature, but by conversations, they were called "free and unconstrained conversations" ( qingtan). Meetings accompanied by such conversations became especially popular at the end of the Han Dynasty and played a role similar to our literary salons of the 18th century.

Their initiator was Guo Tai (128-169), around whom a circle of his friends gathered. They took pleasure in arguing against existing philosophical foundations and important people empire. This testified to nihilism, which from the beginning of the 2nd century. n. e. reigned in the intellectual sphere, such sentiments only exacerbated the already difficult situation in the state. When the rebellious "yellow bands" on their swords brought the destruction that the increasingly numerous "interlocutors" had already despaired of waiting for, this gave rise to a fundamental problem of the nature and existence of a person who accidentally found himself threatened, in addition to political changes. Armed uprisings, which were accompanied by countless examples of banditry, at the same time gave rise to the deepest despair. This desperation and the doctrines of Taoism, which questioned everything except the value of the individual, began to have a serious impact on society.

The religious void, which had nothing to fill but immorality, and the confusion of people who saw the collapse of their world, led to the fact that the hearts of the Chinese were opened to two feelings that had only touched them only slightly before - lyricism and religious zeal.

Of course, people at all times conveyed through poetry and music the joys and sorrows of their short lives. The “Canon of Songs” (“Shi Jing”), destroyed, like all classical works, during the general burning of books undertaken on the orders of Qin Shi Huang, was preserved in the memory of people thanks to the rhythm of its lines, consisting of four or five syllables. It was reprinted during the Han Dynasty in numerous compilations, of which only the one compiled by Mao Zhang has come down to us. Also very popular were the elegies of Qiu Yuan (343–277? BC), who was born in the kingdom of Chu. He opposed the horrors of slander until his death. Legend has it that Qiu Yuan was unjustly expelled and, desperate to regain the favor of the ruler, on the fiftieth day of the fiftieth moon, he threw himself into the river near Dongting Lake. Each year, the dragon ship competitions remind of the moral anguish of the one who was considered the greatest poet of antiquity.

However, the Han people understood that these ancient poems lost their meaning at the same time as the fall of ancient power. The hearts of the people of this period became callous, they were subjects of a delightful but very strict empire. Emperor Wu's court bored him, and official poetry, the withered flower of past centuries, generally drove him to despair. About 120 BC. e. he founded the Chamber of Music (Yue ugh). Its task was to collect folk songs and melodies from different regions of the country, which the emperor hoped to add to a strictly fixed repertoire of court music, closely associated with ancient government cults. The scholars of this chamber then developed the rhythm for these rural songs. Approximately in the 1st century. BC e. they succeeded in introducing the rules of the short quinary rhythm ( yuan), which were preserved not only for music, but also for poetry.

Nevertheless, conservatives strongly condemned the emergence of new melodies in music and new rhythms in poetry, which would differ from the melodies associated with ancient rituals. As a result, they achieved victory, and in 7 BC. e. Yue fu has been abolished.

Unfortunately, very few examples of this highly refined poetry of the Han period have come down to us, although it is deeply rooted in the hearts of the common people. Nevertheless, the true treasure of Han poetry has survived: these are the "Nineteen Ancient Poems", riddled with melancholy, which tell about the suffering of parting and death, special moments in human life when no more screaming is heard. These are the first works, harbingers of the coming collapse, the touching voice of the people, doomed and disappointed, because they no longer believe even in the elixirs of Taoist alchemy:

I drove the chariot

from the East Upper Gate,

I see a lot away

from the suburbs to the north of the graves.

And above them the aspens rustle, rustle their leaves.

Pines and cypresses

surround a wide path.

Under the ground of the body

in the old days of dead people,

that hid, hid

in an endless night

And they rested in the darkness where the yellow ones beat the keys,

where in a thousand years no one has risen from sleep.

Like a stream, like a stream

yin and yang are always moving

time allotted to us

like morning dew.

human age

flashes like a brief arrival:

longevity flesh

not like stone or metal.

ten thousand years

carried out one another.

Neither sage nor saint

could not transcend that age.

As for those who "ate"

in a row trying to stand with the immortals,

they most likely

brought potions of death.

Isn't it better for us

enjoy fine wine,

for your clothes

spare no silks!

Cao and the Jian'an Poets

This poetic direction, in which the lyrical scope of the elegies of the Chu kingdom, represented by the poetry of Qiu Yuan, was combined with the philosophical rigor of intellectual circles that revived ancient samples of folk poems, allowed Chinese poetry to escape the suffocating framework of ritual and stereotyped official literature. In the split empire, in China, shocked by changes, it was it that retained a sufficiently flexible prosody, which allowed the inspiration of the poets of that time to splash out, which easily described the best of their ideas in their works.

These ideas came from two completely different sources: reflections on politics and metaphysical lyricism, which was usually based on despair. The development of the first trend is associated with the names of the magnificent ruler of Northern China Cao Cao and his sons - poets who competed with each other. The development of this direction led to the formation of a "engaged" literary style, whose main theme was virtuous and noble indignation ( kankai) at the sight of the calamities of life. This feeling, rather moderately manifested in the poetry of Cao Cao, who trusted his own strength and the effectiveness of his actions, becomes much more gloomy in his sons.

As a result, their poetry inspired the creation of a circle, which later became known as the "Seven Poets of the Jian'an Era" (196-220). Literature turned into a sophisticated game of eloquence, into a science of reasoning, skillfully using which, at an opportunity, it was possible to change the course of events. The literary method was to present the touching theme of love, separation and death through political allegories. Here is how, for example, Cao Zhi (192-232), the third son of Cao Cao and, without a doubt, the greatest poet of his time, wrote:

Wind of sadness

In a lonely tower

Lots of wind

Oh, how much wind!

Beilin Forest

Already in the rays of dawn

I'm sad

About a distant soul.

Between us

Rivers and lakes,

Our boats

See you soon.

Wild goose

Soul devoted to the south,

He screams long

Flying away.

I will send news

To the south of China

With all my heart

Rushing towards a friend.

flapping wings

Sensitively catches the ear.

The bird has disappeared

The heart groans deafly.

Under the melancholy mask of a lonely spouse hides a poet, a man of action, tormented by political disgrace, which he was subjected to by his own father, who envied his talent. This elegy is actually a request for mercy.

Representatives of the Cao family gathered together to feast, compose poetry and talk, playing with concepts and never losing hope of reorganizing the empire, getting rid of the philosophers of the past and discovering new talents. Their activity, especially intense from 212 to 217, was abruptly interrupted in the last years of the nominal Han dynasty by a wave of epidemics that devastated the ranks of their supporters.

At this time, when the rejection of social conformity and the search for new norms favored the development of self-expression of the individual, poetry became a haven for supporters of this view of life. It conveyed the reaction of powerful individuals against the depersonalization and standardization brought about both in practice and in theory by various ideologies of power. These same harsh and turbulent years contributed to the flourishing of lyric poetry, which is aloof from sharp political discussions. Her constant themes were reminiscent of the melancholy from the fast pace of life, the bitterness of disappointment, the hardships of fate and the inevitable tragedy of death. The only thing that could alleviate these sorrows was the enthusiasm of enjoying the current moment, similar to the European carpe diem

The black whirlwind carries away wonderful days.

In fright, we see how time passes irrevocably.

Happiness is instantaneous and unlikely to come back.

Life is good in luxurious purple palaces

But still, fragments of it lie in mountain tombs.

Are there immortals in our circle?

You know fate - why be upset?

This was how the "Epicurean", albeit pessimistic, philosophical basis of the time was conveyed. It is expressed most clearly in Le Tzu, a work of the 3rd century, the sources of which are traced back to Le Yu-kou (450-375 BC) by an unreliable tradition: “Life is given to us so rarely, and it is so easy to die in it! Is it possible to forget that our life is a rare gift, and death comes so easily in it? To try to surprise people by strict observance of the rules of decency and duty, suppressing one's natural inclinations for the sake of good fame, in our opinion, is even worse than death. We want to fully enjoy the life given to us and live it to the fullest.

The Seven Wise Men of the Bamboo Grove

Principles of renunciation of the world and inclination to hermitage, gradually elevated to the rank of official philosophy, were put into practice by the famous circle, which was called "Seven Wise Men of the Bamboo Grove", the bamboo grove is a small forest located north of Luoyang. The seven comrades used to gather there, living for their own pleasure and flaunting their contempt for social norms and generally accepted ideas. They did not expect anything from the world, they found everything they needed for life themselves and showed a tendency to laziness, only partly ostentatious. According to legend, the head of this circle was Ji Kang (223-262), who wandered through the mountains, busy collecting medicinal herbs. He was talking to his friend Wang Lei, a hermit who was 238 years old.

The truth was at the same time more brighter and sadder. Ji Kang was socialite in every sense of the word: younger brother one of the officials of Sima Yan, who, having overthrown the Cao clan, seized power in the country of Wei, Ji Kang was the husband of a princess from the imperial family. If Ji Kang's income protected him from material need, then his connections with high society were more important in his decision to withdraw from the world, since he refused to play the role that his rank prescribed for him: “It is difficult to wake up the common people. He will never stop chasing after material things. But the perfect man looks further, he returns to nature. All people are One. The universe is my refuge. I share it with Others, what should I regret? Life is a floating log: it appears for a moment and suddenly disappears. The cares and affairs of the world are disordered and confused. Let's forget about them. Even in the swamps, a hungry pheasant does not dream of parks. How can I serve by wearying my body and saddening my heart? The body is highly valued, but the empty name is despised.

There is neither glory nor dishonor. The most important thing is to follow your will and free your heart without remorse.”

As Ji Kang moved difficult roads mystical thinking, he increasingly found himself at the center of a public scandal. His behavior was a challenge to the lifestyle and tastes of the bureaucratic environment. In 262, his family's predicament gave the Confucians an excuse to sentence Ji Kang to death penalty. Enemies wrote an accusatory speech against him, the cruelty of which is evidenced by the fact that it was directed not so much against a specific person as against his philosophy. Moreover, the main target was not even the philosophy itself, but the asocial way of life, which led to following its canons: “[Ji Kang] refuses to serve the rulers and masters. He despises his era, he does not appreciate the world. It is of no use to other people. Useless for our time, it corrupts our morals. Once... Confucius sentenced Shaozheng Mao to death, because his people, who were proud of their talents, brought confusion into society, causing anxiety to the people. If Ji Kang is not punished today, then there will be no other way to purify the state Dao.”

Ji Kang, who accepted death with calmness and pity for the blind world that abandoned him, very soon became a legend: “Ji Kang was convicted and imprisoned. When the time of execution approached, his brothers and family came to say goodbye to him. Ji Kang didn't even change his face. He asked his brother, "Have you brought me a zither?" His brother replied, "Yes, I brought it." Ji Kang took it, tuned it and played the melody " Great world". When he finished, he said with a sigh, "The great world is dying with me."

However, in addition to fulfilling the requirements of the established order, “fate”, “rock” became the dominant concepts in society: the inevitability of physical death, which will always take you with it in one way or another, the inability to refuse its conditions, the need for everyone to come to terms with their lot (fen), to accept it is the basis of the teachings of the Confucians. The eternal dreams of the Taoists about escaping death, prolonging life, joy and harmony with nature were gradually disappearing. The vanity of these desperate searches for happiness was sadly written in his poems by Ruan Ji, the most famous, along with Ji Kang, from the “Sages of the Bamboo Grove”.

Under the canopy of beautiful trees, the path is visible.

Peach and plum blossoms spread out.

But now the autumn winds are flying on wings -

comes the fall foliage time.

Flowers withered, fertile days faded,

the house is overgrown with bindweed and thorny branches.

I curse my drive

to the foot of the western mountains

and so defenseless

that I am unworthy of having a house and a family.

Frost will freeze the leaves on the ground at night.

Everything is said, it's over, the year has flown by -

did not notice...

Yet the repression of the state was not able to change the natural course of things. The more ferocious the battles were, the more uncertainty about the future grew, the more pure hearts felt the need for enthusiasm and sincerity. This is an exceptional moment, the birth of true lyrical Chinese poetry, which balanced between the depth of feelings and the beauty of form, an impeccable sound, combined with real feeling and aesthetic perfection of content:

Time will never return

wilted plants will not bloom:

marsilia blooms in spring,

gardenia blooms in the winter.

And it's a pity that so many days have passed

and even today there is little joy.

So sad.

I hear the chirping of a cricket.

The wine is fine, the feast is cheerful.

My song is short

in anticipation of the silent darkness -

this was said not at all by a strict anchorite, but by a man of brilliant and restless life. It's about about Lu Ji (261-303), the son of an official from the kingdom of Wu, who was a famous commander. He paid with his head for the debacle for which he was wrongly accused. Lu Ji was an example of traditional Chinese universality, when a person wielded a sword as well as a brush. The hopes of the country were pinned on him, and at the same time he contributed to the development of new forms and content of Chinese poetry.

Tao Yuanming

Chinese poetry owed the best fruits of its heyday to the South of the empire, it is worth remembering at least the works of Qiu Yuan (343–277? BC). The features of nature and the turbulent manifestations of life create a special charm in the south that cannot be found in the rational North. This is why Tao Qian, also known as Tao Yuanming or Tao Yuanliang (365-427), had a profound influence on the following eras.

An incorrigible lover of simple life and countryside, a singer of chrysanthemums and melancholy, Tao Yuanming was from Jiangxi province. He spent his childhood in a village located at the foot of Mount Lu, the beauty of which inspired many artists. Once his family occupied the highest positions at the court, but one of his ancestors preferred a quiet life in their rural possessions to the greatness and disasters of power. Tao Qian himself held a government post in his younger years in order to increase his small income, but rather quickly left it, despite a large family - children, nephews, whom he had to support. His house turned into a place where the most interesting society of that time gathered, because among the friends of Tao Qian, high official, who turned into a simple landowner, were representatives of a wide variety of occupations: influential officials, Buddhist priests, adherents of Taoism, and even villagers.

Thus, his works reflect the main trends of the time. Tao Yuanming updated Chinese poetry with simple, unadorned words he borrowed from everyday vocabulary. He died unknown, but a hundred years later his works were included in Wenxuan, the official anthology of the empire's best poets, as new generations admired him as a person, who in poetic form described the course of life in its entirety.

The heat of the wine often helped him when he was alone with his shadow. Only in drunkenness, and in the East it was the last refuge of sincerity, did he find the necessary courage to look at the non-existence towards which his whole life seemed to be rolling.

By night the pale sun

in the tops of the western sinks.

White month to change

rises above the eastern mountain.

Far, far away for all thousands of miles of radiance.

wide-wide

illumination of heavenly voids ...

The wind appears

flies into the rooms of the house,

and a pillow with a mat

he is cold in the midnight hour.

Because the air is different

I can smell the change of seasons.

Because I don't sleep

I knew the endlessness of the night.

I want to speak -

no one to answer me.

Raised a glass of wine

and I call the orphan shadow ...

Days - and the moon behind them -

leaving people, they leave.

So your aspirations

I have not been able to put it into practice.

Just thought about it -

and the pain seized me

And before dawn

peace will not return to me!

On spring wine

foam ants walk.

When am I now

Will I taste it again?

And trays of food

full in front of me.

And relatives and friends

crying over me.

I want to speak,

but there is no sound in my mouth.

I want to see,

but there is no light in my eyes.

If in former days

I slept in spacious peace,

then today I will fall asleep

I'm in a grassy corner...

So I am alone in the morning

left the house in which he lived,

home, return to

the time will never come!

So with simple but skillful words, he conveyed the lessons of folk wisdom. Deeply imbued with Confucianism, it glorified the sages of ancient times. He retained the principles of his kind and always respectfully treated the ruling house - the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317-420). From Taoism, he borrowed primarily his spontaneity, as well as the art of accepting things as they are. In his poetic pursuits, Tao Yuanming found both his justification and his end. He never led an ecstatic search for agreement with the universe. He also never had any curiosity about Buddhism, which began its slow advance into China along the Silk Road during the Han Dynasty.

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