River Snow

I gave my eight grade class this Tang century poem by Liu Zongyuan (read top to bottom, right to left):

I suggested that when translating Chinese poetry it doesn't matter whether one has studied Chinese for 10 years or 2 months (they have studied Chinese for 4 months).  As long as one has a dictionary and has translated all of the words, one has about all the information one needs.  The syntax is largely based on word order, and otherwise there is no punctuation, no sense of time occurring, and, at least here, no clear speaker.

Here's the poem with the English definitions:

thousand/mountain/bird/fly/vanish
ten thousand/path/person/trace/extinguished
solitary/boat/cape/hat/fisherman
single/fishing/cold/river/snow

Some words are hard to translate into a single English definition.  "Thousand" and "ten thousand" are counting terms, but here they can also mean, "myriad."  The word translated above as "cape" actually specifically refers to the palm leaf raincoat that peasants wear, and the "hat" refers to the conical, bamboo leaf hat often associated with rice farmers.  Furthermore, "mountain, bird, person, path" and other nouns, since they are described in characters, have no distinction of being plural or singular.  Likewise "to fly" and "to fish" have no distinction of past, future, or present tense.  The word that is translated above as "solitary" in its most literal sense means "orphan."  "Fisherman" actually seems to mean "an old fisherman."

Also worth noting, since you do not have the phonetic translation of the poem, the last character in the first, second, and fourth line rhyme thus, "jue, mie, and xue."  Solitary and single also rhyme, "gu and du".

Maybe you already have a sense of the poem.  In class, we discussed how the first two lines mimic each other, most notably the first and last words ("thousand"/"ten thousand" and "vanish"/"extinguish").  However to compare each word in the first and second lines elicits some interesting contrasts.  So "mountain" is lined up with "paths."  I asked my students how many paths each mountain had.  It took a while, but ten, right?  It reminded me of "Loveliest of trees," the poem by A. E. Housman:

"Now of my three score years and ten
Twenty will not come again.
And take from seventy springs a score
It only leaves me fifty more.

"And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty years are little room.
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow."

Of the first verse quoted here, the first two lines can be described in this equation: (3 X 20 + 10) - 20.  And the last two lines describes the same thing: 70 - 20 = 50.  There is something absurd about having math in poetry.  However, both poems perhaps push readers' sense of numerical abstraction to overlay their sense of beauty.  The poet literally "abstracts" (lit. draws away) himself from the whole sensual experience, making the vision more pathetic and profound.

Continuing the comparison of words in the first two lines, "birds" are then associated with "people," and "fly" with "trace."  Birds vanish from the skyline, and the tracks of people along trails disappear--the contrast comments on the phenomenon that birds in flight leave no trace (unlike humans when they walk), and also suggests that human footprints, symbolic of human activity, also vanish with no more lasting remnant than the paths of birds through the sky.  It's very powerful to meditate simply on those first two lines.  We start to notice that after giving us the image of birds flying, the poet takes that away from us--by the final word, "vanished."  So there aren't birds there after all, it seems.  This first line also suggests that the poet has been there awhile--long enough to have noticed the birds passing.  And yet, now that one thinks of it, where did they go?  Have even birds left this forbidding region?  Secondly, the traces of people are disappearing.  Perhaps readers can assume it is raining or snowing, obscuring all tracks.

Again "solitary" and "single" suggest another two line comparison, especially since these two words rhyme as well, as noted earlier.  That means we have "boat" and "fishing" and then "cape/hat/fisherman" with "cold/river/snow."  The last three lines could be thought of us "a cold river with snow" or "a cold river and snow."  But if readers choose to strictly correlate it with "cape/hat/fisherman" perhaps it is also an adj./adj./n clause, as in "snow that is cold and in the river = cold, river snow."  The three words, "cold" "river" and "snow" seem to me a heavy paring.  There is no escaping the sense of coldness and dreary-ness.  Now, because I'm thinking of the two lines as parallel, I can imagine the figure slumped over itself, the fisherman barely visible under his cape and hat, himself almost like just another pile of snow in the river.

Here is my translation*:

The birds flying have vanished beyond the mountains          

No trace remains of man's footprints along the trails             

An orphaned canoe, a straw hat and cloak                            

Someone fishes in the icy river

*It is notable to mention that Chinese is nearly always more brief than English.  To write an English poem that suggests the succinctness of the Chinese poem one cannot comment on each character.  For example I have no English corresponding term for 5 of the 20 characters in the poem, including "thousand," "ten thousand," "fisherman," "single," and "cold".  However, I feel that I have not negated the sense that they lend to the poem.  Canoe, which is anachronistic, was a compromise against "boat" because I didn't want it to rhyme with "cloak."  

The Island of Dr. Moreau

East Croydon, London, June 15th

Over the times I have traveled I have developed a certain taste of literature. Some of the works that I have picked up in my travels have been my most enjoyable reading experiences. Many of the novels I remember vividly and many were the first of that author, many of whom I have come to greatly enjoy later on, including Hemmingway, Graham Green, Dostoyevski, Sherwood Anderson, and Daniel Defoe. The last author falls into a furthermore specific genre of novels that I like to read while traveling: island narratives. When I traveled to Greece I read Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi and then Gerald Durrel’s account of his family moving to Corfu, the Greek island, in My Family and Other Animals. Two years ago, traveling in Tibet and Thailand, I read both Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and William Goldsmith?'s Lord of the Flies. Now I find myself in London reading H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, which has nothing intrinsically to do with my surroundings here. I suppose England is an island, and I also suppose that H.G. Wells is an English writer, but here the similarities stop.
Dr. Moreau as I expected is quite entertaining, in fact, quite a bit more so than I thought The War of the Worlds was, perhaps because the former is an island narrative. The novel begins, “I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the Lady Vain [this refers to a collision between two ships and the aftermath of finding the surviving men]…I have now, however, to add to the published story of the Lady Vain another as horrible, and certainly far stranger. It has hitherto been supposed that the four men who were in the dingy perished, but this is incorrect. I have the best evidence for this assertion—I am one of the four men.” And so his story begins.

Wells’ story can be easily plotted through the various “suddenlys” and moments of horrific realization that is characteristic of the adventure genre. In this way, there are no surprises to the experienced and savvy reader anticipates what occurs by twenty pages or so. Prendick, the antagonist, actually comes across as a bit stupid in this way figuring things out long after the reader has. He is a man only distinguished by his exceptional series of misfortune, first abandoned to die on a boat, forced to battle with his shipmates to survive. Once on the island he is chased by the strange beast-men who live there. He lives in perpetual disgust and moral aversion to the two other men that live on the island, Moreau and Montegomery; he breaks his arm; he has no chance to rest in the entire story.

As an H.G. Wells’ novel, this story offers an overarching fantasy that can be interpreted allegorically, rather like much of what George Orwell writes. What Wells presents is an investigation of a godless state fraught with suffering and meaninglessness.
More provocatively, he seems to map this vision through concepts derived from mythology. For example, once Dr. Moreau is finished operating upon his animals, grafting them into human-like creatures, they go about for a while as passable humans, even speaking. But eventually the animal instincts weigh upon them and they return to walking on all fours and so on. The dynamic is suggestive of the Christian duality of spirit and matter, the progression of Adam and Eve to Able and Cain (the last of course eventually is banished with “the mark of the beast”).
Ultimately, H.G. Well’s adventure is one without God. He writes, “A blind fate, a vast pitiless mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence and I(Prendick), Moreau, by his passion for research, Montgomery by his passion for drink, the Beast People, with their instincts and mental restrictions, were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite complexity of its incessant wheels.

In describing Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells also is able to advance a concern and doubt toward the creator figure himself. As Prendick, Wells writes, "Had Moreau had any intelligible object I could have sympathised at least a little with him. I could have forgiven him a little even had his motive been hate. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless. His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on, and the things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer; a last to die painfully. They were wretched in themselves, the old animal hate moved them to trouble one another, the Law held them back from a brief hot struggle and a decisive end of their natural animosities."
In Prendick’s view, God repeatedly messes up his experiments of creation and throws them aside unworthy of his further endorsement.

H.G. Wells’ motivation to have readers create the parallels between the lives of these beast men with normal human beings is made clear in the last pages of the novel. “I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not also other, still passably human, Beast People, animals half-wrought into the outward image of human souls; and that they would presently begin to revert, to show first this bestial mark and then that.” Here, he also seems to make an allusion toward Cain with the phrase “bestial mark.”

In his own elegance, H.G. Wells tries to further persuade the reader having Prendick write, “I would go into the streets and prowling women would mew after me, furtive craving men glance jealously at me, weary pale workers go coughing by me, with tired eyes and eager paces like wounded deer dripping blood, old people, bent and dull, pass murmuring to themselves, and all unheeding a ragged tail of gibing children.” Interestingly enough, Prendick finishes his story by writing, “I hope, or I could not live. And so, in hope and solitude, my story ends.” The solution for Wells it seems in this Godless universe fraught with pain is hope, which seems silly. However, Prendick doesn’t hold any sophisticated views and this is the way that he finishes.