Oranges & Peanuts for Sale by Eliot Weinberger

Author:Eliot Weinberger
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2631-8
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2009-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

The T’ang invented a genre that would remain popular for centuries: a landscape where the artist inserts a portrait of himself admiring the scene, the painting or drawing accompanied or surrounded by a first-person text, often lengthy, written by the artist himself. Chinese art historians call this “scholarly painting,” but in the West, the current combinations of the visual and the textual are “postmodern.”

3.

The T’ang was, above all, a time of poetry. It is universally considered their golden age, unmatched since, perhaps because golden ages of poetry nearly always occur when the nation becomes international, when new things and new ideas flood in. And, until quite recently, this was never quite the case again in China, absorbed in its own vastness.

Since Ezra Pound’s 1915 Cathay, T’ang poetry has been an inextricable element of Anglo-American modernism—as it is not in the other Western languages—and hugely popular among general readers. Many of its greatest poets have become familiar: Li Po through Pound, Po Chü-i through Arthur Waley, Tu Fu through Kenneth Rexroth, Han Shan through Gary Snyder, and these and others through Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-hu’s 1929 The Jade Mountain (a translation of the classic 300 Poets from the T’ang anthology) and a shelf of books by the great Sinologists Burton Watson and, lately, David Hinton. It was the kind of poetry that, in English, poets wanted: a poetry about everything, from stomach aches to the collapse of the empire; a poetry of precise observation and concrete images of everyday life and of nature, where the transcendent or the sublime and a range of human emotions were expressed by not expressing it at all, where they were shown and not told.

Moreover, it was a poetry of the individual at home in the city, or in exile or reclusion in the wilderness, where war and the burdens of history were always on the horizon. For the moderns, China a thousand years ago seemed like today. And equally attractive to a poetics promoting concision and compression, the T’ang poets seemed able to cover a lot of ground and to say it all with very few words. Here is Tu Fu, as translated by Kenneth Rexroth, in a poem that, in Chinese, has eight lines:

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