Interviews
Interview with Professor Haun Saussy (Continued...)
I’ll give you an example that is very close to me: inscriptions on ritual bronzes from ancient China. These were functional works of art. They had to be beautiful, since they were concretizations of the prestige and the power of the families that owned them and used them for their ancestral sacrifices. These items were often inscribed with historical events, dedications, things like that. In a thesis about ten years ago, Wolfgang Behr of the University of Bochum pulled together lots and lots of bronze texts and studied them for their rhyme, meter and stanza patterns. His work is based on things Wang Guowei was doing around 1900, and that Shirakaawa Shizuka was doing in the fifties and sixties. But Behr’s survey includes the largest corpus of bronzes, and he gives the most suggestive ethnographic results. Clearly, rhyme was an important part in early China because it was a way of getting the attention of the gods and spirits—of making language special. If you read the whole corpus you can see how rhyme emerges fairly early and then is doubled in its effect by a rhythmical regularity that aims at the same purpose, of making language special. It seems that rhythmical, rhymed language must have put ancient listeners into a kind of trance. These bronzes frequently use rhyme syllables that end with nasals (-n and –ng), because the resulting sound is reverberant, like a bell. It lasts in the ear and in the mind. Here is a clear case of an ethnographic approach to an exotic document leading us to its likely meanings through the forms.
Often the bronze texts are not very “poetic” in our twentieth-century sense of the word. They are short on beautiful poetic metaphors. In breaking free of rhyme and meter, twentieth-century poets and critics said, “We’re not so interested in the sound of verse; poetry isn’t composed to the metronome; what counts is imagery, that is the point of using free verse.” In all this perfectly justifiable poetic revolution, we have lost track of what was important in an earlier revolution, namely the discovery of rhyme which was so important for early Chinese poetry. Among all the types of language, there is language that, we can imagine, had a kind of hypnotic effect on the hearer, and that’s the origin of Chinese poetic forms. Maybe of other poetic forms too, if rhyme is a virus that migrates out of China.
That’s a long digression, but it’s an example of how, when you’re asking, “What is poetry?” it is helpful sometimes to go to an ethnographic level, where you are trying to slip past cultural specificity and locate very easily generalizable features of language or even human nature, if that’s not too embarrassing a topic. A little bit like good old Herder in the eighteenth century: the perspective of humankind licenses you to go looking at Eskimo songs, Plains Indians songs, beautiful stuff collected by Franz Boas in the early 20th century—the kinds of things I like to use in the classroom to open up a Chinese or modern English poem. Students quickly notice the appearance of a lot of the same properties in texts from different cultures. The end is not to say that “it’s the same everywhere,” but rather—given that the human mind and the human ear everywhere are receptive to similar things—perhaps there is a general or universal level to literary study. The objects created in different cultures are dissimilar on the level of the text and the cultural background, but if the mind is receptive to certain patterns and regularities, maybe that is where we would find “literary language.” What does it do to language when you subordinate it to those regularities? When you make it strange in that particular way? I guess I am trying to reconstruct the possibility of a formalism, of a theory of literariness, that has taken on board the existence of cultural diversity and accepted a wider canon (though Shklovsky’s canon was in no way narrow).
To come back to your question: I do try to bring in the materiality of a text, because that is the thing about poetry: it is a material kind of language. Translation idealizes what you’re talking about because it reduces it to theme and imagery. Teaching Chinese poetry is often very frustrating in this exact way, because you give people this little four-line poem that seems to tell a fairly simple experience, and they read it and say, “Okay, that was nice.” Like a potato chip—it’s gone like that! You can try to translate it, or to annotate in a way that shows every word has a background, that every word makes a cross-reference, but that too isn’t the same thing as the experience of simultaneity that the well-informed Chinese reader has. As a Chinese-speaker, when you hear these twenty or twenty-eight words, they immediately call up their associations, so that your little twenty-four-word poem has perhaps two thousand words of background behind it, background that is called up in a symphonic way and makes the reader very happy. This is hard to represent for readers outside the tradition. And that is not just a question of translation, but of getting the meaning, of representing the experience of the prepared reader. Maybe this is a helpful way of talking about translation. Any translation is a report on an experience a reader has had. I can’t give you Sappho’s poem itself, but I can report to you on what it does to me. A truthful title to put at the top of a Sappho translation might be, “What Reader X Experienced on Reading Fragment 6 with the Liddell-Scott Dictionary at Hand, June 12, 1978.” Maybe that’s a good way to go.
1 On these television epics, their history and political impact, see Arvind Rajagopal, Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). I thank Keller Easterling for this reference. [Addition, HS, September 2008.]
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