May 20, 1905.]
REVIEWS.
Cantonese Love Songs. By C. CLEMENTI, M. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2 Vols.
Price 21 s.
CHINA OVERLAND TRADE REPORT.
baldest colloquial. Why should it be tricked out as for three and two months"? In this case the difference may be slight But when the same process of glorification is applied to the stock slang of the house of ill fame, the meaning of the original is deliberately sacrificed. A is & customer, there is no other word, Much credit is due to Mr. Clementi for the
Since Dr. To metamorphose him into a 'gay gallant' production of a scholarly work. Eitel published his dictionary, there bas
is misleading. Gallant and gay he may And so appeared no such interesting contribution to be, but the author never said so. the library of the student of Cantonese as the throughout, by the talk of Willowy Arbours and book under review. The English volume is Flowery Lanes ideas are imported which are absent from the author's thought: for though printed at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, a sufficient guarantee of clear type and good the words are here, their original significance binding.
has completely faded from them. The Chinese volume printed by
Clementi owns as much in bis introduction. Messrs. Noronha does not satisfy the eye so well. The type is not of the bes'. Mr.
We spoke of the simplicity of th se ditties. Clementi's translation is in prose, his lines
When the author forgets his similes of ice and anow (which in the month of a Southerner are being numbered in correspondence with the Chinese text: had the lines in the latter been treated in the same way, comparison would have been still easier. At the end of the English volume are notes in explanation of the various allusions. The vocabulary appended to
41
the Chinese volume leaves us in much doubt as to the precise class of readers to whom Mr. Clementi would appeal Glancing through it we select almost at random such notes as ke
ind, e “果
other people, men Surely such information as this, and much more of the same kind is of use to the newest beginner only, for whom however the study of such a work would be altogether too difficult. Does the translator write for more advanced scholars ? Then it seems to us that he should have added to his notes others on points of scholarship, and in justification of his renderings. We hope
that in an early second edition this course may
be followed, and the more so because the mean. ing of the original is obscure in places-uor is it always obvious in Mr. Clementi's translation. To give one rather curious instance: the ninth line of Song LXXXVI reads ✯✯É**‡K⠀⠀¤
which is translated, ""Tis mainly for your sake that since youth I lost my maidenhood." This we submit is nonsense. Moreover the word means a beginning or a cause, either of which translations makes the passage comprehensible. Surely Mr. Clementi should here and els- where have explained by means of notes his departure from the obvious. In XII iv he translates "I grieve, I do but grieve that by the willow banks the transience of wind and moon is understood so easily" An alternative would be "It is my sorrow that by willow bank the moon of passion quickly changes to dawn." That is, joy may endure for a night, but heaviness cometh in the morning. The next line supports this rendering,
"The moon sinks, crows caw, men are full of
care." It is not to be thought that Mr. Clementi has overlooked the original meaning of
|
Indeed Mr.
about as sincere as the Strephons and shepher- desses of eighteenth century poetas ers), he can ba touching in a simple way. For instance; in Song XXIX. the carrier goose, scilicet Homing Pigeon, is apostrophised:
"Perchance thou hearest letters carelessly, and hast lost them in country-side or at city barrier.
Should he be in deep sorrow, but indolent
in writing letters; Then, if he has unsent letters written in his
mind, bring me the empty cover.
So will I, spreading out the blank paper imagine it holds ten thousand, thousand words:
For each of our two hearts is as a mirror to the other's thoughts, even though no words be spoken:
*1
This is direct and good, and the language appropriate to the speaker, while the trans lation is in suitable plain prose. It is a pity that this style is not maintained through- out. In Song XI iii there is a line of 8 words "A thousand reds, a which literally mean, myriad greens, so splendid," said in apostrophe of a lotus lily. This is expanded in the transla tion to " What luxury of splendour is in those thousand flushes of red, those myriad tints of green."
These volumes appeal to us as students of the Chinese and their language, and not for any gr at artistic merit of the original songs. But Mr. Clementi holds that they are poetry. And when he speaks of them as illustrating "the extreme sentimentality of the Cantonese. even of the coldest business man or the most
seems
to
prove
88
attitude
the attitude of Chinese towards women, and
uncouth coolie," he is issuing a challenge which it would be pusillanimons to ignore. At least that is so if he uses the word sentimentality in a good sense,
his whole he does.
But surely the word means false sentiment: in this sense alone can we admit that it fitly describes particularly the attitude of the author towards the unfortunate class, whose feelings he namely, dawn ; but for preferring the professes to interpret. There is a good reason commoner and derived meaning to understand why Chinese writers must find it hard to he must have had his reasons, and we think express a true emotion when they feel one, we should have been told them. In XII. which is, they are so tied and bound to the past, that they can hardly perform even the most 聲翠蛾 means literally "paint my King-natural action or become aware of the simplest emotion, without recollecting that there is a classical precedent for expressing that emotion But apart from or performing that action. this our author fails as an interpreter of unhappy women, lecause his sympathy with them is not genuine. As moralists we may we please remember his environm nt and pardon him. But art knows no extenusting circumstances. As an artist he fails in good taste, and stands condemned. We give one instance of supreme bad taste, and that the one, if any, where genuine feeling might have been looked for. Chin Tsz-yung the author had, we learn, a concubine, whom after two or three months he deserted. Penniless she was driven t an immoral life, and unable to support her misery and degradation committed suicide. In such circumstances an honest man might have feit remorse, a true
words to poet would have found
express
fisher moths," and so "lustrous eyebrows arched like a moth's antennae." We despair of finding a satisfactory translation, but we can not com- mend "paint my eyebrows with aniline." Anilise is a most unpoetic product of coal tar invented long after these songs were written. More- over is an adjective, an epithet of While there are but few passages where an every day critic would boldly aver. Here he is wrong, there are many where the meaning is suff ciently doubtful to deserve a justification of the translator's opinion.
Mr. Clementi's style does not strike us as very well suited to the matter. What charm these songs possess is due to their simplicity, and that is violated too often by a diction at once prolix and precious. In 80 far as a translation fails to give the tone of the original it is faulty. But here we find a trans- lator who goes out of his way to mislead, in an effort to introduce ideas which the original never attempted to convey. In XLVII 6. is the phrase, for 2 or 3 months, There is not grain of poesy in it, it is the
it
if
And thus sings this heartbroken lover (Song XLVII.) as he twangs at his mandolin.
You died for your gallant? Then I cannot
grudge your death.
921
You have fung into the water that passion of
days gone by.
*
"Tis pity that I jilted you to drift all your life long among green arbours.
I know not whom you trust to worship
your white bones upon the green hill-side.
*
*
Yes, you were best have been a virtuoos wife, that I might have set your tablet in
Buddha's shrine.
desire of the man is for the woman. The desire Some one has wittily and truly said: "The of the woman is for the desire of the man. Failing to appreciate a psychological truth many erotic writers go astray, and our author "Water and fire can scarca among them. annul our passions," "My debt of wanton joy," and similar phrases recur on every page, and show clearly a misapprehension of the feelings they would explain. We may be quite sure that all the unfortunate girls asked for was peace and protection.
to
Be a God and hold me with a charm ; Be a man and fold me with thine arm. And above all, delivery from the house of bondage.
Nevertheless, there are some pretty passages
here be found
and
Mr. there; and Clementi does well to call attention to the emphatic form in which the metaphors are expressed. "The maiden is not compared to, she actually is, the royal flower of the Cinna. mon Garden. Similarly her lover is the pea- cock, the bee, the butterfly." Song XXXIV. is good instance of this. The translation is ours.
"
[1
The flower weeps: the moon is not scathed. Moon, look you, we flowers how wilted are we. Pity that as you wax, so must we fade away. The wild wind blows, and the rain gathers together: my day is ended."
It is not easy to find exact parallels to this figure of speech. One occurs to us, in Venns and Adonis, stanzas 39 and 40: "Then be my deer, since I am such a park." One simile is really beautiful, and that is "autumn waves for women's eyes. Any idea more expressive of dark depths and glancing flashing brightness than a ware at night, (and the idea of night comes with the context), it would be hard in- deed to discover. Of course it is not original.
Mr. Clementi has an interesting note on Buddhism, though not everyone will agree with him as to the extraordinary solace which the Buddhist faith,
still exercises over
But
the peoples of the Eighteen Provinces." The solace is the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, beyond which not one Chinese in ten thousand knows anything of Buddhism. this doctrine by itself is no more Buddhism than the belief in an after-life can be said to constitute the Christian faith.
Dv
A chapter on the musical notation of the phe pha or guitar will doubtless be of interest to musicians,
Daudet claims to have written Sappho to show his sons the fruitlessness of an immoral life. His intention though fatuous was probably sincere.
The writer of these love songs modestly prefaces them with a hope that this little volume may serve to resoue all such as are sunk in this world among the spells of the ocean of desire."
And here we bid him heartily farewell, with a profound conviction that he, the late Mr. Chiu Tsz-yung, with his phe pha, bis fripperies and a most extraordinary smugness, has been mory fortunate than he deserves in his in- dustrious expositor.
A large bird was observed to touch one of the wires over the street tramways. It dropped, a orumpled corpss. From faraway Bangkok comes a story suggesting other possibilities. The writer says: "Whilst I was sitting taking my dinner at 6 pm. this evening, a large paper kite became entangled in the electricity wires in front of my window, and instantaneously was consumed by fire. You will see how easily a fire might have been caused had the kite blown in the open window; and if the roof of the house had been attap, there might have been a terrible losa. Kite flying in the city should, I think, be forbidden except in open places where there are no tele raph or electricity wires. If the dear little children must fly their kitos let them go where they cannot wire in fire!”