Paul Claudel's English Poems After the Chinese

 Paul Claudel (1868-1955) is best-known for his plays and for his poetry collection Five Great Odes.  Two of his lesser-known works, though, are short collections of adaptations of Chinese poems, fittingly titled Little Poems After the Chinese and Other Poems After the Chinese.  Both collections include French poems, but the former collection also includes English versions, which Claudel claimed to have translated based on his French versions.  

If they are taken as strict translations of the French poems, they are quite poor, quite inaccurate.  They go far too far off on their own.  As adaptations, though, or as "poems inspired by," they are excellent, often, I think, much better poems than the French they are supposedly based on.  (I do not have the Chinese originals of these poems, nor can I read Chinese, so I cannot compare: perhaps the English versions are closer to the Chinese than to the French.)

For instance, one of the poems, from an original by Lieou Tchang King, is entitled, in French, "The Blue Night."  A literal translation of the French version reads:

The forest slowly behind me closed up upon god
I hear the clock behind me strike after strike down below, which tells me "goodbye"
I enter, climbing, descending, and I push little by little
Into the night that becomes almost black by force of being blue.

This poem is actually quite good, particularly with that odd opening line, with the phrase, "closed up upon god" (s'est refermée sur le dieu).  I should also note that the French original rhymes its long lines, with a single rhyme for all four.  The English version, though, entitled "Blue Darkness," is very different:

I walk in a forest of questions to which there is no clue
I am sinking in mistery I am soaked through and through
My ear is sworn to silence my foot is matched to the Untrue
To the path which is moonshine and the Darkness which is blue.

It replicates the four-line rhyme of the French; it has the imagery of the forest, and a blue becoming black; but the rest is original.  In the English, there is no striking clock, no god sealed up in the forest; in the French, there are no questions in the forest, no soaking, no Untrue, no moonshine.  Based on my—fairly amateur—knowledge of Chinese poetry, I would lean to the French being more accurate: simpler images, physical, without abstractions, striking more through the juxtaposition of images than through odd grammar and turns of phrase.  "I am sinking in mistery I am soaked through and through" and "my foot is matched to the Untrue" are fantastic images, fleshening the fleshless, but they feel wholly unlike traditional Chinese poetry, to me, anyways.

Another example is "The Wrinkled Face," by Lieou Tcheng.  The French version:

I look at my face, what wrinkles! what lines traced through time!
Under the curtain of willows the lakewater insensibly withers.

Now, the English version, entitled, "Wrinkles":

Dear my face is the mirror yellow and hollow
    Wrinkles all over
'Neath the willows water wan and shallow
    Ripples all over.

We have the face, the wrinkles, the willows, the water; the French implies something like a mirror (how else can one see his own face?), but it is not explicit, as in the English.  The French rides can mean both "wrinkles" and "ripples"; the English use of both explicit words makes the juxtaposition clearer.  The parallelism of the English ("Wrinkles all over" vs. "Ripples all over") emphasizes the juxtaposition further.  Here, I think it is the French that adds a less-Chinese-sounding phrase ("what lines traced through time!"); again, the French is much clearer and direct, though, which is a Chinese trait.  The English, though, plays with language in a way that is appealing to me, with its increase of rhymes and the alliteration of the third line.  I still would tend to consider the French a more "Chinese-feeling" poem than the English, though.

One final example: Li Tai Pé's "The White Frost."  In French:

I slept all night in the rays of the moon
And my lashes in the morning were all frosted with white frost.

And the English, "Lying in Moonshine":

I am lost in a flood of whiteness  I wallow in a pool of sacramental wine
Do not wake for my eyelids are glued with moonshine.

The two most basic images are shared: moonlight, and glued/frosted eyes.  But the vibe of each poem is very different.  The French poem, at first, seems like a simple statement of facts: 1) I slept in the moonlight last night, 2) my eyelashes were frosted by the cold.  The "White Frost" of the title, though, seems to be the moonlight itself, hence why the English version has "my eyelids are glued with moonshine."  The English makes explicit what the French leaves implicit.  The English is also overwrought and bombastic, with the poet now being "lost" (instead of merely "sleeping") and being in "sacramental wine," for some reason.  It is a new, strange take on a simple poem.

All in all, at least based on these examples, it does seem that Claudel's original French versions are more like the Chinese, or, at the least, they have more of the feel, of simple, juxtaposed, fleshly images that is common in Chinese poetry.  (Without having the text of the Chinese originals and knowing how to translate them, I cannot say for sure.)  Based on the French, then, Claudel went off on wild fantasias in crafting the English versions.  They can be striking, and they have the shortness and condenseness characteristic of Chinese, but I feel the tone is off.  As original poems, they can be quite good; as adaptations of Chinese, I think they are too off on their own.  "Inspired by," yes; "translation," or even "adaptation": I would not call them so.

Source: The poems included here are found in Paul Claudel, Œuvre poétique, ed. Stanislas Fumet (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1957), 926-929; the full collection of Little Poems After the Chinese is on 921-937.  French versions are on the odd-numbered pages, English versions on the even-numbered.

Text and Translations from French ©2024 B. P. Otto.  Licensed via CC BY-NC.  Feel free to redistribute non-commercially, as long as credit is given to the author.