West Wind Keen.

Back in 2018 the Paris Review published a piece by Anthony Madrid called Guy Davenport’s Translation of Mao that’s so irresistible I can barely resist quoting the whole thing. But I am strong, so I will just quote the start:

In 1979, Guy Davenport’s second book of “stories” appeared: Da Vinci’s Bicycle. He was fifty-one. I put quotation marks around the word stories because almost nothing happens in any of them. When they’re good, they’re good for other reasons.

Davenport was a disciple of Ezra Pound and James Joyce, and like everyone answering that description, he was a supreme crank. The main problem with all of these guys is that they vastly overestimate the value of literary allusion. And I know all about it, ’cuz I was ruined in my youth by these lizard-eating weirdos. Davenport certainly did his part.

They were all brilliant. They could write sentences that stick with you forever. Most people never write even one; these guys could practically cut them off by the yard. Yet, none of ’em knew when to stop. They always, always got carried away. My hypothesis is that too much of their motivation for writing was to enshrine their crankitudes. They were always trying to get away with something.

Zoom in on Davenport. Let me ask you: How much Chinese do you suppose he knew? I think the smart money is on “very little.” He probably knew about as much as I do—which is to say, as much as can be learned from one semester of study, augmented by the eager observation of one or two native speakers reciting a handful of classic poems.

But a supreme crank knows how to exploit every little drop of whatever he or she knows. […] Armed with this thought, he did a translation of a famous poem by Mao Zedong. The form of his translation is unique in American letters: The text is set up as quatrains (that’s normal enough), but the individual lines have only three syllables each. Davenport knew that this did not accurately reflect the original Chinese, but—and this is where the brilliance comes in—it does get across (like nothing else available in English) the collapsed syntax and staccato pacing of classical shi poetry.

And here’s the start of the poem:

West wind keen,
[Up] steep sky
Wild geese cry
For dawn moon.

I’m skipping over the hilarious setting of the translation (a deadpan account of Nixon’s visit to the People’s Republic of China) and the original poem (not a shi but a ci) and two other translations of the same poem and leaving you to visit the link for them; here’s one last snippet:

But there’s the pity of it, Iago! Davenport’s version is misleading, damnably misleading, if our object is to “work towards the Chairman” and his particular poem. But! If we want to be led to a more general truth about what most Chinese poems were bound to sound like, both to Nixon and to Davenport as native speakers of English, then “West wind keen, / Up steep sky / Wild geese cry / For dawn moon” blows the other translations out of the water.

And I am forced to add that I made the mistake of clicking on the link for Madrid’s name and finding this page of his contributions to the Review, and they’re all just as delightful. Here he investigates the origin of the famous saying “Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer” (“‘In what ancient text does that passage appear?’ Answer: it appears nowhere”), and here he raves about “Russia’s Dr. Seuss,” Kornei Chukovsky, throwing in a caricature by Mayakovsky and a clip of Chukovsky reading his own “Telephone” (1926). He also quotes the first stanza of “Putanitsa” (“The Muddle”), adding the Google Translate version:

The kittens were crocked:
“I’m tired of meowing!
We want, like a pig,
Grunt!”

“The line ‘We want, like a pig, grunt!’—especially if performed with a strong Russian accent—has great charm and authority, and has indeed acquired, in my household, the status of a classic line, like something out of Virgil.”

OK, I’m off to spend the rest of the day investigating his past contributions and cackling. Enjoy!