Chinese philosophical classics in poetic translations. Abramenko, Vladimir Petrovich - Chinese philosophical classics in poetic translations

It is well enough known that the most natural way of self-expression for traditional Chinese philosophy was the literary form, and in this parameter it is comparable to, say, Russian philosophy. Therefore, for an adequate understanding of Chinese philosophical thought, an analysis of its poetic and metaphorical means of expression is necessary (for more details, see), but, on the contrary, for an adequate understanding of classical Chinese poetry, it is necessary to fully understand and identify its deep philosophical nature. Chinese poetry cannot be rid of the appearance of frivolous primitiveness until its wisdom is animated by the "holy" spirit of Chinese philosophy. The often-common tenderness of the supposedly childish spontaneity and simplicity of this poetry is nothing more than a misunderstanding. Chinese poetry is the "finest juice" of Chinese culture, and it is already a priori clear that the quintessence of such a complex and refined culture cannot be simple and direct.

As for Chinese philosophy, within the spiritual culture that gave birth to it, it has (to use a mathematical term) a larger area of ​​​​definition than any Western philosophy. The reverse side of this circumstance is that philosophical ideas in China have a more extensive arsenal of means of expression. This statement does not contradict the narrowness of the problems and the categorical apparatus of traditional Chinese philosophy, often noted by researchers, since the recruitment of expressive means by it is carried out “vertically”, i.e. due to the specific universal classification of concepts and the reduction of the elements of the obtained classes into a one-to-one correspondence. An early, but already quite developed example of such conceptual schematism is the 24th chapter of the Shujing, Hong Fan (The Majestic Pattern). Such a construction makes it possible to express the ideas embedded in the "foundation" through the structural elements of both the first "floor" and the "roof". Moreover, inside each "floor" there is a kind of binding material that guarantees the strict unambiguity of transitions from one level to another. In order to avoid unfoundedness, let us try to illustrate the stated thesis with concrete material, i.e., to catch the metaphysical meaning where it seems that one cannot count on its presence.

Let us turn to two, at first glance, far from philosophy, poems by Du Fu. Their choice is dictated precisely by earthly concreteness, and not by the empirical abstractness of the content. The key to success in the ongoing search can be considered, firstly, that we will talk about the classical examples of the work of the coryphaeus of Chinese poetry, from which we should expect the maximum realization of the potentials described above, and secondly, that at least the non-uniqueness of their meaning is reliably established. Behind the immediate semantic plan of the poetic description, another semantic plan is clearly recreated - a specific socio-political situation, given by the sum of realities. Moreover, the art of borrowing and allusion, developed to virtuosity in Chinese literature, drawing certain particles of the classical literary heritage of the past into the orbit of poems, creates in them a kind of individual literary microworld, which stands out in a special semantic plane. As the Tao Te Ching teaches, "One begets Two, Two begets Three, and Three begets Ten Thousand Things" (§ 42). Therefore, there is reason to assume the existence of some other (some) semantic plan.

So, it is necessary to show at least four semantic levels of the hieroglyphic poetic text: the first is given directly in translation, the second is historical realities, the third is the “literary microworld”, the fourth is metaphysical speculations. Since in this case we are mainly interested in the latter, more or less special comments on the poetic translation are followed by their general analysis, in which, with the help of canonical philosophical treatises, one of the leading themes of Du Fu's poetic masterpieces is interpreted. It appears at the very beginning of both poems and can conditionally be called the theme of water. The general analysis ends with an attempt to explain the metaphysical commonality of the two poems, paired from the point of view of the Chinese cultural tradition. As for the comments given by paragraphs, they are interspersed with information relating to the second, third and fourth plans.

The translations are from Three Hundred Poems [of the] Tang with Detailed Explanations. A special literary analysis of the first of the proposed poems was carried out by L. A. Nikolskaya in the article "On Du Fu's poem "Beauties"". Our translation of this poem was also published there in an incomplete form. Both poems, as far as we know, have not been translated into Russian before .

Song of the beauties 1

On the spring holiday of purification 2
Breathing renews the firmament 3 .
In Chang'an capital 4, near the waters
Beauties are a wonderful combination.

Thoughts are far away, majestic to become,
Cleanliness combined with beauty.
The whole appearance is full of lovely tenderness,
Marked by the highest bodily harmony.

Spring, which is waning,
Shines festively in the silks of dresses,
On them a unicorn burning with silver 6
With the firebird 7 golden-woven crowded.

What do they have on their heads?
woven with green petals,
Hanging gracefully over the temples,
They are clothed with kingfisher light fluff.

What does the eye find behind the back?
Pearls with an oppressive veil
Frozen dress train dressed,
As if cast on the body 8 .

Inside, behind a canopy embroidered with clouds—
Relatives of the queen from the Pepper Palace 9,
Gifted from a higher person -
Qin, Guo 10 - great principalities names.

Camels brown humps
From emerald vats grow,
And fish scales shine with silver
In crystal bowls that are clearer than water.

Rhino bone sticks 11
Almost frozen, having done their work,
But with bells, knives multiply in vain
A blind abundance of fine dishes.

Lifting the bridle, the charioteer-eunuch 12 rushes,
Dust does not sway - so fast is the flight.
Palace cook in a continuous line
He sends eight priceless dishes with him.

Pipes and tamburas mournful reckoning
Disturbs pure spirits and devils.
A motley assembly of courtiers and guests
There is a gathering of dignitaries of high distinction.

But here is the confused trampling of the horse
Accompanying someone's delay!
At the pavilion the guest leaves the horse,
He hurries to take the patterned carpet.

Down covers the poplar
A simple duckweed with an avalanche 13 .
Agile magpies on the tail
Spreading joyful news 14 .

The power of the minister 15 is not to match -
A touch threatens to burn -
Beware of approaching him
Fear before his menacing gaze to appear.

1 “The Song of Beauties” (“Li Ren Xing”) was written in the spring of 752. It is ideologically connected with the extraordinary growth of power at the court of the Yang family, based on the attachment of Emperor Li Longji (Xuanzong, 712-756) to his concubine - the famous beauty Yang Guifei. The vicissitudes of the events described are a favorite plot of the Far Eastern literatures. Of the works on this topic available in Russian translation, it is enough to indicate.

All poems are based on rhyme. zhen- "true, genuine" (perhaps a hint at the veracity of this "poetic information"). The hieroglyph "zhen" itself completes the 3rd verse, it is also included in the official name of Yang Gui-fei - Taizhen (Great Truth), given to her by order of the emperor ( Guifei- her personal title, meaning "Precious Sovereign Concubine"). This poetic device more than compensates for the absence of Yang Guifei's own name in the poem. The song is clearly divided into three semantic parts, successively transferring the description from the general appearance of the celebrating beauties of the capital to the feast of the imperial favorites, and then to the manifestations of the omnipotence of the temporary Yang Guozhong (more on him below).

2 Literally: “on the third day of the third moon,” that is, on the feast celebrated on that date. In 752 it fell on the third decade of March. Further, in the third stanza it is called the end of spring (mu chun). According to the Chinese calendar, the year began in spring, so the third month of the year was also the last month of spring.

3 Literally: “heavenly qi is renewed” (tian qi xin). The hieroglyph "tian" means not only the sky itself, but also nature in general, taken in the unity of its spatial and temporal characteristics. It can also denote the nature of an individual person (see, for example,), apparently, due to the idea of ​​​​the homomorphism of the macro- and microcosm, and also due to the etymological relationship: the hieroglyphs "tian" and "ren" (man) go back to a single etymon . "Air, breath" (qi) - in the philosophical sense, this is a kind of material-spiritual pneuma that makes up the dynamic substance of the universe. Hence, tian qi not just air and not just weather, but the essential state of nature (the universe), including human nature. Thus, by indicating the renewal, or change, of this state, a metaphysical exposition is set at the very beginning, warning of possible deviations from the usual course of things and the normal behavior of people.

4 Chang'an, now Xi'an, one of the two capitals of Tang China, the main city of the Shaanxi province.

5 Combination si ni(charming tenderness) can also be understood as “subtlety and fullness”, “graceful fullness”, apparently hinting at the fullness of Yang Guifei herself.

6 In the original: qilin- a mythical annunciatory animal with the body of a deer and one horn.

7 In the original: kunzue(peacock).

8 Drawings of the aristocratic women's costume of the Tang era, see:.

9 "Pepper Palace" - the palace of the Empress, in the plastering of the walls of which pepper was used, which, according to the organizers, contributed to the preservation of heat and created aroma. For the present context, it is significant that the exciting spice (pepper) symbolized fertility.

10 In 748, the emperor, as a sign of special favor, granted the three sisters of Yang Guifei the titles of the principalities of Han, Guo and Qin (see, however, here, in contradiction with what was said on p. 15, it is said that Lady Qinguo is “one of the aunts” , not older sister Yang Guifei).

11 The horn of the rhinoceros, like the antlers of the maral and deer, has an exciting effect, thereby once again emphasizing the immoderation of the festival.

12 In the original: huang men(yellow gate). This well-established designation of court eunuchs is due to the fact that yellow symbolized everything imperial. It is also known that Yang Guifei was especially fond of the color yellow.

13 Poplar in Chinese - yang. These lines contain an allusion to the protege of the Yang family, Yang Guozhong, officially the elder cousin of Yang Guifei. Some sources report that he was her brother. This is a clear mistake. According to other sources, Gozhong illegally appropriated the surname Yang, being in fact the son of a certain Zhang Yizhi. A similar point of view was held by Lu Xun, considering him to be Yang Guifei's half-brother (see). His own name was Zhao, and Gozhong (Loyal to the State) was his personal title. The allegory with "poplar fluff" alludes, according to commentators, to Yang Guozhong's assignment of the surname Yang (Poplar) and his love affair with Mrs. Gogo mentioned in the poem. Therefore, it is difficult for us to agree with the opinion of L. A. Nikolskaya, who believes that Du Fu hints at the intimacy of Yang Guozhong with Yang Guifei herself. Duckweed flowers were previously used in the wedding ceremony and, apparently, are also intended to symbolize intimacy - Gozhong and Gogo. A similar symbol was the burial of Mrs. Gogo under a poplar. To demonstrate the non-randomness of this kind of symbolism, one can point out the similar role of the plum in the life of Yang Guifei's rival, the favorite of Mei (Plum). She had a fondness for the flowers of this tree and was buried near a plum tree.

14 Literally: “blue-green birds fly away, holding red handkerchiefs in their beaks” (qing niao fei qu xian hong jin). This line is very saturated with mythological imagery. In the Book of the [Dynasty] Later Han, in the Biography of Yang Zhen (tsz. 84), a commentary on the name of Yang Zhen's father Yang Bao (here the same surname Yang as Yang Guifei) reports the following about him. As a nine-year-old boy, he saved from death and came out a yellow bird (huang qiao - Passer rutilams?), which then returned to him in the guise of a boy in yellow clothes, who introduced himself as a messenger from Xi-wang-mu (the mythical Western mistress) , who “brought in his beak” (xian) four white rings (bai huan) and predicted prosperity for the descendants of Yang Bao. The connection of this story with Du Fu's verse is indicated primarily by the use in both cases of the hieroglyph "xian" "to hold in the mouth (in the beak)". Thanks to the story with Yang Bao, the hieroglyph "xian" paired with the hieroglyph "huan" formed the phraseological unit "xian-huan" (thank for mercy). Therefore, although the character "huan" does not accompany the character "xian" in the text of Du Fu's poem, its semantic influence can be found there. This virtual presence, in all likelihood without much difficulty, should have been actualized in the minds of readers due to the fact that the hieroglyph "huan" was part of Yang Guifei's childhood name - Yuhuan (Jade Ring).

The story of Yang Bao ends with the following words of the “yellow-mouthed” schist: “Your descendants (sons and grandsons) will achieve [degrees] san shi what these rings correspond to. The Yang Bao clan, according to Hou Han shu, originated from Huayin County (Shaanxi Province), but the Yang Guifei clan also originated from there, so their relationship is quite likely. And from this it follows that the above prediction can also be considered as extending to Yang Guifei. Some other circumstances could lead the poet to the idea of ​​​​playing this situation. The term "san shi" (three things) in the quoted phrase is synonymous with the term "san gong" (three high dignitaries), and the names of all these three positions first included the hieroglyph "tai" (great), later - "yes" (big ), so they were also called "san tai" (three great ones). Thus, the presence of the sign "tai" in the name-title Taizhen, as it were, equated Yang Guifei with three guns, or san shi. The reason to consider it as the fourth "supernumerary" gun arose-lo also due to the fact that the messenger Si-wang-mu brought four rings, but correlated them with three shea, i.e., as if he left one ring unassigned to any of these three. Poetic imagination thus acquired a legitimate right, by means of literary reminiscence, to address this ring - a symbol of the highest social position - to the probable descendant of Yang Bao, who became at the helm of state power. Moreover, the “white ring” (bai huan) perfectly matches the name Yuhuan (Jade Ring), since jade (yu) in China has always been associated with white.

The name Taizhen connects Yang Guifei with another thread with Xi-wang-mu - the same name was also given to one of the daughters of the mythical Western mistress (cf.).

The source of the well-established metaphorical name of the messengers - "blue-green birds" (qing niao), Chinese philologists find in the following story from "Han Wu Gushi" ("Stories [related to] Han Wu[-di]"): -my day of the seventh moon (pay attention to the holiday date. — A.K.) blue-green birds suddenly appeared - flew in and sat down in front of the palace. Dong Fanshuo said: “This [means] that Si-wang-mu will arrive.” And soon [really] Si-wang-mu arrived. Three blue-green birds accompanied her on the side ”(quoted from). Three blue - green birds - a standard attribute of the Western mistress (see, for example, "Shan hai jing" - here they are translated as "green birds").

Modern Chinese commentators on Du Fu's poem identify blue-green birds with three-legged (we pay attention to the significance of the number "three" here) ravens - messengers of happiness (san zu wu), and the entire line is interpreted in the sense that to Yang Guozhong messengers are sent with joyful news. But the three-legged crows, the messengers of happiness, are the same as the red crows (chi wu), which, in particular, are mentioned in Lu shi chun qiu: “Before the time of Wen-wang came, Heaven revealed fire. Red crows, holding red letters (xian dan shu) in their beaks, sat on the altar [of the house] of Zhou. And here again we see how birds holding red objects in their beaks (xian) [writings (shu) are very close to handkerchiefs (jin)] express the idea of ​​the gospel.

The fact that “blue-green birds” are associated in China primarily with good news is evidenced by the translation into Chinese of the term “qing niao” of Maeterlinck’s “Blue Bird”.

In the light of all that has been said, and also taking into account the fact that in China even magpies are traditionally considered harbingers of happiness and good luck, the use of Russian messengers - forty - in translation seems justified to us.

15 The formidable and all-powerful minister is Yang Guozhong. Shortly before the Song was written, in 752, he became a "right" minister, and in 753 he also acquired the position of head of the Office of Public Works. Subsequently, during the rebellion of An Lushan, who declared his overthrow as his goal, this temporary worker was executed along with Yang Guifei herself.

The Song of Du Fu very colorfully depicts all sorts of excesses that lucky favorites indulged in, but, according to the primordial belief of the Chinese, nothing that violates the measure can exist for a long time. Therefore, "the culprits of the rebellion of An Lushan, the rumor unanimously named three - Gozhong, Lady Guogo and Yang Guifei", which is why Du Fu's lines are fraught with condemnation. However, the cruelty of the violent death of the favorites was also a violation of the measure, but in the other direction, to which the poet accordingly reacted by condemning what had happened, in an inverted form of regret for the past.

Crying at the head of the river 1

Old peasant from Small Hill 2,
We crush with groans, we torment with sobs,
On a spring day, lurking, wanders there -
There are 3 meanders to the Winding River.

Palace at the head of the river
He put locks on thousands of gates.
So for whom are the emerald tides
Young reed and tender willow? 4 .

In the memories of the gleam of bygone times,
When over South Park grew
Glittering Rainbow Banners
And the darkness of things gave birth to diversity.

Empress and first person
Palace of the Radiant Sun 5
Sat with the sovereign in the carriage,
Serve him like a loyal guard.

Ladies of state, at the head of the cortege,
They carry a bow and arrows with them.
Their horses are snow-white 6
Golden bits gnaw.

Here, turning suddenly to the sky,
A bow aimed at a cloud of arrows -
Headlong flying, one arrow
Knocks down two wings.

But where are the eyes clear today? 7
And bright pearl teeth?
stained with blood - defamed -
The spirit wanders, having lost shelter! 8

Seeks to the east transparent Wei 9 current,
But Jiange has to enter into the depths.
Remaining here and the one whose purpose -
Leave, they won’t be able to give each other a message 10.

And the person in whom the feeling is alive,
Chest 12 will irrigate with sad tears.
Her abode - river flowers, water
There is no definitive limit.

The golden luminary withers,
Twilight descends and hu 13 ,
Chasing horses, rushing on horseback,
Filling the capital with a dusty whirlwind.

Falls south of the city
Keep your sad way.
And the northern limit from there
Contemplate with hope 14 .

1 “Lament at the head of the river” (“Ai jiang tou”) was written in 757, apparently during Du Fu’s time as a prisoner of the rebels, which can be judged by the “secrecy” (qian) of his journey to the Winding River.

2 The Old Villager from the Small Hill is Du Fu's pseudonym, taken by him due to the fact that his family lived near the Small Hill (Shaoling), located in Chang'an County.

3 Winding River - the name is not a river, but a lake located near Chang'an. "River bed" (jiang tou) thus actually means the end of the lake. The Winding River was often visited by Yang Guifei. By this lake the events described in the Song unfolded; even the Han emperor Liu Che (Wudi, 141 - 87) arranged a park dedicated to spring (I chun yuan) on its shore, and in the Tang era and, consequently, in the time of Yang Guifei, it was near its waters that festivities and feasts took place on the third day third moon. Therefore, the very title of this poem throws a bridge to the previous one. The mention of Liu Che as the organizer of the lake is necessary in order to show one more thread from a tangle of symbolic connections - usually in works dedicated to Yang Guifei, a parallel is drawn between Emperor Li Longji and her, on the one hand, and Emperor Liu Che and his wife Li - with another.

4 The willow branch is a traditional symbol of longing in separation.

5 From the emperor's visit to the Palace of the Radiant Sun (Zhao yang dian, also translated as the Palace of Splendor and Splendor), Yang Guifei began to ascend, and then she occupied this palace, so by the "first person" it means herself.

6 The snow-whiteness of the suit is not accidental, but a constant epithet, which speaks of the high value of the horse. At the same time, it apparently carries a hint of a mourning outcome, since white is the color of mourning (compare with the similar mourning symbolism of Du Fu's poem "White Horse").

7 Clear eyes "-" bright pupils "(min mou) - an indicator of spiritual purity (more details below).

8 This refers to the murder of Yang Guifei, whose exalted spirit (hun) is doomed to wander.

9 The Wei River (a tributary of the Huang He), which is distinguished by the clear purity of its waters, is opposed in the popular mind to the muddy Jing River, with which it connects, which is captured in the idiom "Jing-Wei". The poetic opposition of these two rivers appeared already in the Shijing (I, III, 10). Having such a figurative meaning, the name of the river. Wei once again reports the spiritual purity of Yang Guifei, buried by her waters.

10 Jiange (Castle of Swords - translated by B. A. Vasiliev) - a county in the province of Sichuan, where Li Longji went deep, hurrying to the west in order to hide from the rebels in Chengdu. Yang Guifei, on the other hand, was left dead off the coast of the eastward-rushing Wei.

11 This line (in the original - zhen sheng yu qing) can be understood as "people and everyone who has feelings", i.e. all living beings; supports such an interpretation and a similar combination of homogeneous members in a parallel line: jiang shui jiang hua"river waters and river flowers".

12 The chest (s) is not just a part of the body, but a material symbol of the soul, which is reflected in the hieroglyph And, which consists of the signs "meat" and "thought". The chest owes its high status to the proximity to the heart, from the traditional Chinese point of view, the center of all human mental abilities.

13 Hu- the designation of the Uighurs and other peoples who lived north and west of China. The rebel general An Lushan himself was hu, and his army that occupied Chang'an consisted mainly of non-Chinese "barbarians".

14 Winding River Lake, located south of Chang'an, was on a hill that made the area easy to observe. The north attracted the attention of the poet by the fact that from there (from the province of Ningxia) he expected the arrival of the liberation troops of the new emperor, Li Heng (Suzong, 756-762).

General analysis

Let's start with the first verse of the Song. Another designation for the holiday of the third day of the third moon is "double three" (chung san). There are many such double holidays in China, for example: the fifth day of the fifth moon, the seventh day of the seventh moon, the ninth day of the ninth moon. The symbolic connection of the holidays with each other is also superimposed on the numerical symbolism of dates. In particular, dual dates themselves form dyads. The third day of the third moon is associated with the ninth day of the ninth moon both through the numerological unity of the three with the nine, and due to the symmetrical position in the cycle of time - in the annual cycle of months. Rituals performed in the fall are associated with the mountains, and spring rituals are associated with the waters. On the ninth moon, according to the ancient custom, it was necessary to climb the mountains and make prayers, and on the third moon, cleansing ablutions were supposed to protect from evil influences. Therefore, the Song begins the description with the beauties by the waters. The connection between mountains and waters in the Chinese worldview is more than close, brought together two hieroglyphs denoting them express the concept of landscape, thus showing that mountains and waters are presented as a kind of coordinate grid thrown over any natural phenomenon. These coordinate axes operate not only in the field of attitude and perception of nature, but also in the field of worldview. Confucius said: “He who knows rejoices in the waters, the humane rejoices in the mountains. The one who knows is active and mobile (dun), the humane is calm. The one who knows rejoices, the humane lives long” (“Lun Yu”, VI, 23). Here is an example of the binding material mentioned above. If the superposition operation is carried out, it turns out that on the “water” holiday of the “double three” it is supposed to enjoy and rejoice, and the time of the “double nine” corresponds to a minor mood and sublime (literally and figuratively) reflections. The latter is fully confirmed by the invariable minor key that sounds in the poems dedicated by Chinese poets to the ninth day of the ninth moon (see, for example,). This means that the major intonations of the Song of Du Fu are prescribed by the "statute" of the holiday itself, to which it is dedicated. The cheerful character of the "water" holiday on the third moon associated with love was already noted in such classical monuments as "Shujing" (I, VII, 21) and "Lun Yu" (XI, 26).

The image of water, which pops up at the very beginning of the poem, immediately directs it into the mainstream of its symbolic meanings. It stretches as a thread of allegory to the not directly named, but nevertheless the central character of the Song - Yang Guifei, for the legend says that it was after bathing in the palace reservoir (precisely in the spring!) that the emperor's love descended on her. The extraordinary role of ablutions in her fate is evidenced by the famous painting by Zhou Fang (?) “Yang Guifei after bathing”. It is also significant that a pond was named after her. Yang Guifei's career began by the water, and it ended by the water: she found her grave near the Wei River. It is no coincidence, it seems, that the emperor, doomed to death, saw off the favorite “to the northern exit to the postal road” and “to the north of the main road” she was buried, because in the Chinese universal system, water, as one of the five elements, corresponds to the country of the world - north. In Lament, written after the death of Yang Guifei, when the seriousness of the mission of water in her fate was revealed to the end, the theme of water sounds with even greater force.

Probably, among all peoples, water was associated with a sensual-bodily feminine principle (see, for example, Porfiry). The mermaid element of water in traditional Chinese poetry turned into a metaphor for carnal beauty imbued with voluptuousness (see, for example,. For totemic and early animistic ideas associated with the cult of mountains and rivers, see). For us in this case, it is important that this coordination was not only present in mythological representations, but also ratified by philosophical thought. In the systematics of correspondences of Hong Fan, the natural-physical property of water to flow down is fixed as a metaphysical attribute (chow 1, see). And in Lun Yue, the direction of downward movement is already an attribute of low people (XIV, 23), in the subsequent reasoning, they are reduced to the same category with women (XVII, 25). The numerical symbol of water is six, and it is the six in the I Ching system that serves as the standard designation for the feminine yin. As an element in opposition to fire or soil (that), water forms the opposition "female-male". The expression, literally meaning "water color" (shui se), has the meaning - "female physique, female appearance." In addition, the "double three" is in some way identical to the six. The connection between water and the feminine, obviously, is based on the common property of passivity, the ability to perceive a different form. Water is an ideal symbol of passivity, since it perceives any images with its surface mirror, and fills any forms with its substance. In this sense, it is significant that in the "Hong Fang" the statement of "the majestic model" hong fan is associated with the ordering of "majestic waters" (hong shui): the sample finds in the water the best recipient of exemplary.

The image of water in Chinese philosophy was also a traditional symbol of human nature. The beginning of this tradition was laid by the controversy between Mencius and Gaozi, in which both sides recognized human nature (hsing) like water, and its essential quality - goodness or unkindness - like the desire of water to flow in one direction or another. The indifference of water to whether it flows east or west, Gao Tzu considered analogous to the indifference of human nature to good and evil. The inevitable desire of water to flow down Mencius considered analogous to the inevitable inclination to good inherent in human nature ("Mengzi", VI A, 2). It is important to keep in mind that the hieroglyph “sin” denotes not only the nature of a person in general, but more specifically, his gender (sexus), therefore, the analogy between syn(nature) and Shui(water) naturally contains a feminine characteristic; on the other hand, the hieroglyph "sin" in its most general meaning "nature" extends to the nature of water. In this sense, the identity of the characteristics of the feminine and water in the Daodejing is quite natural in this sense: “The female usually defeats the male due to [her] calmness, [because] thanks to [her] calmness, she tends down” (§ 61); “In the Celestial Empire there is nothing more pliable and weak than water, but among those who overcome hard and strong there is nothing that could defeat it” (§ 78). The femininity of water in this treatise is also expressed by the fact that it is likened to tao(§ 8), which, in turn, is represented by the “mother of the Celestial Empire” (§ 25, § 52), “the mother of the darkness of things” (§ 1).

Both poems perfectly demonstrate the triumph of the weak female nature: in the Song - physical and real, in "Lament" - metaphysical and ideal, that is, the triumph of an unforgettable image.

Attention should also be paid to the connection of knowledge with joy and enjoyment, which is the opposite of the biblical idea: knowledge is sorrow.

The fact is that in China, socially significant (effective) knowledge was traditionally considered true knowledge, and it was supposed to bring success to its owner. Refined metaphysical knowledge lying outside the framework of the social context, say, Taoist speculation, could be highly valued, however, passing through a different category: self-understanding as wise ignorance, it was accepted by society as an individual lifestyle. The very semantics of the sign "zhi" - "know" contains the idea of ​​social application in the form of the meaning "manage", "know". Using the above aphorism of Confucius as a key, we can conclude that the lines of Du Fu depict such “knowers” ​​who, fundamentally different from the humane, adherents of the mountains, are engaged in active social action, having fun and enjoying themselves. This means that the picture of historical reality created by the poet fits exactly into the "frame" of metaphysical speculations behind the symbols he used.

In the aspect of historical and cultural parallels, the etymological connection of the Russian verb "to know" with the Indo-European root ĝ en“to be born (sya)”, now manifested in the euphemistic turnover “to know a woman” (since the vocabulary generated by the root ĝ en, originally denoted relations only between people, and not between a person and a thing. Cf .: "Lun Yu", XII, 22: "knowledge is the knowledge of people"), is worthy of being used to explain why the knower loves water. By the way, in European philosophical thought, there was also an understanding of the connection between knowledge and love, although this connection was interpreted very differently. This issue is not ignored by modern Western philosophy; for example, in the arguments of A. Camus about Don Juan, love seems to be a kind of knowledge: “To love and possess, conquer and exhaust; here is his (Don Juan. - A.K.) way of knowing. (There is a sense in this word, beloved in Scripture, where "knowledge" is called the act of love) ".

The final Song (as if unexpected) motive of formidable danger actually brings its emotional and metaphysical “melody” to its logical end, again returning us to the idea and image of water, because, according to the Yijing, the property “danger” corresponds to the image of "water", the unity of which is sealed by a single sign - the trigram "Kan" and its doubling, the hexagram of the same name No. 29 (see).

Lament, like the Song, does not name Yang Guifei, although all his pathos is directed at her. In addition to the realities directly related to Yang Guifei, such as the Winding River or the Palace of the Radiant Sun, it is indicated by the same passwords as in the Song. Again, everything begins with spring and waters, ending with a glance towards the "side of the water", that is, to the north. Moreover, as noted above, the motive of water becomes even stronger. This is not difficult to confirm statistically. In the Song, for 181 hieroglyphs of the text (together with the title) there are 8 hieroglyphs that include the sign "water" or are actually it, and in the "Lament", respectively, 143 - 19.

(Our calculation was based on a purely formal criterion, so that the "fish" and "weeping" involved in moisture, as well as the "north" symbolically associated with water, were not taken into account.)

In Lament, instead of the “distant thoughts” of predatory beauties, whose characteristic “shu tse zhen” can be interpreted not only as a “combination of beauty and purity”, but also as clarity and clarity of intentions, combined with a sober realistic aspiration, there are "light eyes". And about the pupils in Mencius it is said: “From what is inherent in a person, there is nothing better than a pupil. The pupil cannot hide his evil. If it is righteous in the soul (chest), then his pupil is clear, if it is unrighteous in the soul, then his pupil is cloudy ”(IV A, 15). It turns out that this seemingly external, outward sign contains a high positive assessment of the intellectual and moral state of the spirit.

The observation of L. A. Nikolskaya, who notes that in the Song, descriptions of beauties are given, relating only to the body, but not to the face, is very important for us, while in Lament, on the contrary, there is an idea of ​​the face. Indeed, in Lament, against the background of the absence of any bodily descriptions, “pupils and teeth” create an image of a face. Therefore, we have before us, as it were, two halves of the Chinese credentials tag, the addition of which allows us to obtain a holistic image of the personality of Yang Guifei, a person understood as a single spiritual and bodily organism (shen), in which the face and body are also united (more about the personality—body—shen cm. ).

In terms of emotional mood, "Lament" is diametrically opposed to the Song: in the first - in minor, in the second - in major. And in terms of semantic orientation, the poems contradict each other: the Song looks like a sophisticated satire on a beauty who has seized power, eager for entertainment, and her retinue, and “Lament” sounds like a sad elegy about a lost beauty surrounded by a halo of tragic love. Paradoxical in appearance, the contrast is a brilliant embodiment of the most important Chinese worldview principle - the principle of universal polarized duality. The world dyad is made up of the polar forces of yin and yang, modeling in the image and likeness of their connection the most diverse structures in ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic terms. Relationship yin And yang not just counterargumentary, it is dynamic, and the seed of its antagonist is embedded in each of the opposite principles. Therefore, in the Song, the spring holiday of the "double three" is joyful, and in the "Lament" spring evokes sadness, which is why the major Song "suddenly" ends with an alarming note, and the minor "Lament" "unexpectedly" concludes with an optimistic exclamation of hope. Such a powerful ideological modulator as the concept of universal interpenetrating polarization not only determines the interdependence of the poems in question, but also acts as one of the factors in the high aesthetic merit of this pair.

Cited Literature
1.Anthology of Chinese poetry. T. 2. M., 1957.
2.Wo Juyi. A song about endless longing. - East. Sat. 1. M.-L., 1935.
3. Zenchiku. Yang Kui-fei - East. Sat. 1. M.-L., 1935.
4. Ancient Chinese philosophy. T. 1. M., 1972; v. 2. M., 1973.
5. Catalog of mountains and seas (Shan hai jing). M., 1977.
6. Kobzev A.I. On the role of philological analysis in historical and philosophical research. — NAA. 1978, no. 5.
7. Kobzev A. I. On the understanding of personality in Chinese and European cultures. - NAA. 1979, no. 5.
8. Li Qingzhao. Strophes from faceted jasper. M., 1974.
9. Lu Yu. Poems. M., 1960.
10. Le Shi. Yang Guifei. - Jade Guanyin. M., 1972.
11. Nikolskaya L.A. About Du Fu's poem "Beauties". — Bulletin of the Moscow University. Series "Oriental Studies". 1979, no. 1.
12. Porfiry. About the cave of the nymphs. — Questions of classical philology. Issue. VI. M., 1976.
13. Serkina A.A. Experience in deciphering ancient Chinese writing. M., 1973.
14. Sychev L. P., Sychev V. P. Chinese costume. M., 1975.
15. Tao Yuan-ming. Poems. M., 1972.
16. Trubachev V.N. Ancient Slavic terms of kinship. - Questions of Linguistics. 1957, no. 2.
17. Cao Ye. The Tale of the Favorite Mei. — Tang novels. M., 1960.
18. Chen Hong. A tale of endless longing. — Tang novels. M., 1960.
19. Shijing. M., 1957.
20. Shchutsky Yu.K. Chinese classical "Book of Changes". M., 1960.
21. Yuan Ke Myths of ancient China. M., 1965.
22. Yuefu. From ancient Chinese songs. M. - L., 1959.
23. Daodejing (Canon of the path and grace). - "Lao-tzu jin and" ("Lao-tzu" ("Daodejing") with a translation into modern [language]). Beijing, 1956.
24. Lun yu i zhu (“Judgments and conversations” with translation and comments). Pekin, 1958.
25. Lu-shi chun qiu (Spring and autumn of Mr. Lu). - Zhu zi chi cheng (Corpus of philosophical classics). T. 6. Beijing, 1956.
26. Meng-tzu and zhu (“Philosopher Meng” with translation and commentary). T. 1, 2. Beijing, 1960.
27. Tang shi san bai shou xiang si (Three hundred poems [of the era] Tang with detailed explanations). Beijing, 1957.
28. Hou Han shu (The Book of the [dynasty] Later Han) — Er shi wu shi (“Twenty-five [dynastic] chronicles”). T. 1. Shanghai, 1934.
29. Tsy hai ([Dictionary] Sea of ​​words). Shanghai, 1948.
30. Zhuangzi ji jie ("Philosopher Zhuang" with a collection of interpretations). - Zhu zi ji cheng (Corpus of Philosophical Classics). T. 3. Beijing, 1956.
31. Camus A. Le mythe de Sisyphe. R., 1967.

Art. publ.: The problem of man in traditional Chinese teachings. M.: Nauka, 1983. S. 140-152.

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Discover the amazing and unique world of ancient Chinese poetry! Tender sadness from separation from loved ones, admiration for the surrounding nature, philosophical reflections on life became the main theme of the poets' poems. For the most part, they were in the service of the Chinese emperors - poets at any time needed patrons. We can admire the lightness of the lines and the beauty of the images, of course, thanks to the hardworking translators from Chinese, and it is no small merit of them that these poems are so beautiful. Perhaps, in Chinese, their melody is somewhat different, as well as the sound, but not all of us know the original language.

Chinese civilization is the only civilization on our planet that has developed continuously (all other ancient civilizations have long ceased to exist), and thanks to this, it created and preserved the richest cultural heritage. Writing has existed in China since ancient times, and the invention of paper has made it possible to preserve “literary gems” to this day unchanged, in contrast to those cultures where poems were transmitted orally, most often in the form of songs, and have undergone significant changes over time. Pay attention to how brightly the lines give birth to pictures - you read and see right away! As if the poet paints a picture with words... Flowers and plants are very common - chrysanthemums, lotuses, pines. They are also loved by Chinese artists. I find it particularly striking that most of the surviving poems were written by men! Not all women can feel the beauty of the world around them so subtly, and this is admirable.

One of the greatest and most famous poets outside of China is Li Bo. His poems are charming, like watercolor paintings. The graceful style makes them works of art.

I look at the waterfall in the Lushan mountains

Behind the gray haze in the distance

Burning sunset

I look at the mountain ranges

To the waterfall.

He flies from the clouds

Through the mountain forest

And it seems that the Milky Way

Fell from heaven.

white heron

I see a white heron

On a quiet autumn river;

Like frost, flew off

And floats there, in the distance.

My soul is saddened

The heart is in deep anguish,

I stand alone

On a sandy empty island.

flowing water

In flowing water

autumn moon.

On the south lake

Peace and quiet.

And the lotus wants me

Say something sad

So that my sadness

The soul was full.

Lilac wisteria.

Flowers purple haze wrap around

The trunk of a tree that reached heaven

They are especially good in the spring -

And the tree adorned the whole forest.

Foliage hides birds singing a flock,

And a fragrant light breeze

The beauty will suddenly stop

At least for a moment, for the Saami for a short time.

Li Bo (701 - 762) In the mountains of Penglai

Another name among the great poets - Doo Fu (712 - 770)

At the sight of snow

Snow from the north

Breaks into the changsha

Flying with the wind

Above houses.

flies,

Rustling autumn leaves,

And with rain

Interferes in the fog.

Empty wallet -

And they won't lend

Pour wine

Into my silver teapot.

Where is the person

What just treats?

I'm waiting.

Perhaps it will come by chance.

Moonlight night

Tonight

The moon is shining in Fuzhou.

There in the bedroom is sad

Wife loves her.

For small children

Sadness seized me -

They are in Chang'an

And they can't think yet.

Light as a cloud

At night, the wife's hairstyle,

And hands like jasper

Frozen in the glow of the moon.

When to the window

We will come at midnight

And in the moonlight

Will our tears dry?

Du Fu "Old Man's Farewell"

Doo Fu "Alone"

Meng Haoran

I spend the night on the Jiande River

sent the boat

On an island shrouded in mist.

It's already evening,

A foreign guest is saddened ...

Endless spaces -

And the sky fell to the trees.

And the waters are clear

And the month approached the people.

spring morning

me in the spring

not the morning woke up:

I'm from everywhere

I hear the calls of birds.

All night long

rain and wind roared.

fallen flowers

how much - look!

Xie Lingyun

sunset of the year

I'm overwhelmed with sadness, I can't sleep.

Yes, and sleep will not save you from sad thoughts!

Moonlight illuminates the snow veil.

The north wind is blowing, and wild and gloomy.

Life goes somewhere, not a day's delay ...

And I feel: old age has touched me...

Gao Qi (1336 - 1374)

I listen to the sound of rain, I think about the flowers in my own garden.

Capital city, spring rain,

I sadly say goodbye to spring.

The wanderer's pillow is cold

I listen to the rain at night.

Rain, do not rush to my native garden

And don't knock off the petals.

Please save until I return

Flowers at least on one branch.

Night at the end of spring

Sobered up. I write parting poems -

Spring is already leaving.

Light rain, withered petals,

One more branch in bloom.

Distant distances do not beckon the eye.

Subtle herbal aroma.

The traveler is sad this spring

Just like a year ago.

In the garden, flowers bloomed on one branch of a pear tree.

Spring lingered for a long time,

Didn't come.

This morning

I saw a flowering branch.

The heart trembled

Suddenly not at the beginning of flowering,

And at the end

And this is the last thread.

Tao Yuan-ming (4th-5th centuries).

In the world of human life

Has no deep roots.

She flies like

Light shadow over the road

And scatter everywhere

Following the wind, circling, it will rush off.

So am I, who lives here,

Not forever dressed in a body...

dropped to the ground -

And already among ourselves we are brothers:

Is it so important that they

Bone from bone, flesh from flesh?

Newfound joy

Let's make us have fun.

With the wine that is found

Let's treat our neighbors!

Life's heyday

Never comes again

Yes, same day

It is difficult to rise twice at dawn.

Without wasting a moment.

Let's inspire ourselves with diligence,

For years and moons

Man will not wait!

Li Jingzhao, Chinese. 12th century poetess

Chrysanthemum

Your foliage - from jasper fringe -

Hanging over the ground layer by layer,

Tens of thousands of your petals,

How chased gold burns...

Oh, chrysanthemum, autumn flower,

Your proud spirit, your unusual appearance

On the excellence of valiant men

He tells me.

Let meihua drown in flowers,

And yet her outfit is too simple.

Let lilacs be strewn with flowers -

And it's not easy for her to argue with you...

You don't pity me at all!

So generously spill the aroma,

Giving birth to sad thoughts about that.

Who is far.

Wang Wei

Stream near Mr. Luan's house

Whistle-lash

Wind in autumn rain.

Splash-splash

Flow between stones.

I break

Jumping, waves into drops ...

Flies again

Frightened heron.

Gu Kaizhi

Four Seasons

spring water

The lakes are full

Freaky in summer

The mountains are silent.

Radiance flows

autumn moon,

Fresh in solitude

In winter - pine.

Lu Zhao-lin

Lotuses on a pond with bends

Over winding shores

A wondrous smell circles, swims

Outline of lotuses in circles.

The entire overgrown pond covers.

I was afraid that the wind would blow

Autumn leaves too soon...

Only you, my friend, would not notice

How they, having fallen, will whirl strangely.

TAO QIAN

bloom colors

It is difficult for us to save for a long time.

No one can postpone the days of withering.

What once

Like a spring lotus blossomed,

Today has become an autumn box of seeds ...

Hoarfrost is cruel

Will cover the grass in the fields.

Wither, wither,

But she won't die!

sun with moon

It circles again

We don't leave

And we have no return to the living.

Heart with love

Calls to times gone by.

Remember this -

And everything will break inside!

BAO ZHAO

darkened sky

Dragged in a continuous veil,

And poured in streams

Endless torrential rain.

In the clouds at evening sunset

And there is no glimmer

In drizzling streams

Dawn breaks in the morning.

On the forest paths

Even the beast will not leave a trace

And a frozen bird

Will not leave the nest unnecessarily.

Clouds of fog are rising

Over the mountain river

Clouds

They sit on the steep bank.

In bad weather shelter

The homeless man has no sparrow,

lonely chickens

Dispersed at an empty housing.

From total misfortune

The river spilled under the bridges,

I thought of a friend

How expensive it is far away!

I'm getting old in vain

To quench my bitterness with wine

Even the ringing lute

Will not console in sorrow about him.

Lu Yu (1125-1210) IN HEAVY RAIN ON THE LAKE

Hao-zhan (689-740) SLEEPING ON THE JIANDE RIVER

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Chinese classical poetry

Chinese poetry is known all over the world. The period of its heyday, the centuries of its greatest artistic achievements, the centuries of closeness and attention to human life fell to the share of this collection.

What is important and most attractive to us in Chinese classical poetry? Unusualness, national astringency, everything that she reflected from customs, worldview, from nature and what distinguishes her from all other poetry of the East and West. If it were only so, then nothing but curiosity, and it would not cause a non-native reader. But we see how translations of her beautiful samples attract hearts to themselves. And this means that the main thing in Chinese poetry is still its universal human principle, which is contained in it and before translation is hidden from an unprepared look behind a mysteriously bewitching ornamental wall of hieroglyphs.

Is it really so much to know in order to feel the beauty and naturalness of the lines of a building or a vase, to delve into the meaning of a painted picture, if they were created by the genius of a people far from us? Here there are no clear barriers between the viewer and the object of his admiration, here even a stranger can sometimes be no less a connoisseur than an artist's compatriot. The poetry of another people, in order to communicate with oneself, requires the translation of words and the transmission of thoughts, which is always difficult and not always accessible. Thanks to the translation of the literature of countries and peoples, in their totality, they rightfully become the literature of the whole world, that is, the literature of all mankind.

Thanks to the translation, we also learned Chinese poetry. And they realized that her national identity is only a frame for our common thoughts and feelings with her. And, having understood this, without the slightest prejudice, but rather in anticipation of new joys, we bend over what the translator of Chinese poets was able to convey to us.

And now we are already reading the poems of Cao Zhi, placing him at the entrance to that rather unsteady space that is called the Middle Ages and begins in the 3rd century: in the first decades it was created by an outstanding poet. Next to Cao Zhi, the peak of Chinese poetry, perhaps the highest, is Tao Yuan-ming. He shocks us with the unexpected simplicity of a word that expressed a strong thought, the certainty and pure uncompromisingness of this thought, always aimed at finding the truth.

So we are approaching the threshold of the Tang state, with an abundance of poets, whose mind and art, it seems, can no longer be surpassed, but they are followed by the Sung poets, with their new view of the world, and then the Yuan and Ming, although repeating a lot, but endowing the history of Chinese literature with fresh, original personalities.

Isn’t it really strange that a journey of one thousand six hundred years from Tao Yuanming (not to mention the relatively “close” distance from Li Bo, Du Fu, Su Shi, Lu Yu), isn’t it strange that this remoteness did not erase the unrest experienced poets, did not prevent them from combining them with the anxieties of our present day? The patina of antiquity, lying on the bright surface of all these verses, did not obscure the living life beating in them. Poems have not lost their fascination and have not remained primarily a literary monument, as happened with a number of classical works of world literature.

Poets of old China before the reader. They do not require detailed recommendations and speak about themselves in their poems. We will talk about the time and circumstances of their work, as well as its main features, due to time and circumstances. We think that only one of our guiding movements is enough for poetry itself to sound with full force and tell about those for whom it was created.

The poems are written in hieroglyphic characters. This is their first feature, which could not be noted, since it is obvious. But hieroglyphic writing also makes translation different, giving it more freedom in choosing the concepts and words behind the hieroglyph. We would be mistaken if we assume, as is sometimes done, that a Chinese poem is a pictorial spectacle and is itself a kind of picture. Such an assumption, if not a final lie, is, in any case, a huge exaggeration, especially for the modern Chinese reader, who sees in the hieroglyph an expression of the concept, and only, and forgets about the beginning of the origin of the sign. But the concept embraced by the hieroglyph is "multifaceted" and verbose, and thus a Chinese poem is, of course, more subject to the reader's imagination than a poem written in phonetic alphabet. The translator is also a reader, and he chooses one of the reader's interpretations available to him and offers it to his reader.

About Wang Wei and his poetry

Chinese poetry, one of the oldest in the world, has been around for almost three thousand years. She knew on her long journey epochs of ups and downs, times of rapid ups and downs and discoveries, and centuries of stagnation with endless rehashings of what had once been found. The first milestones on her path were the "Book of Songs" ("Shijing") and "Chu stanzas" ("Chutsy"); later - folk songs collected by officials from the "Music Chamber" ("Yuefu"), and "Nineteen Ancient Poems", the poetry of Cao Zhi (3rd century) and Tao Yuan-ming (4th-5th centuries). The significance of the latter is especially great: according to the greatest Soviet Sinologist Academician V. M. Alekseev, this poet played in Chinese poetry "the role of our Pushkin" - his work to a large extent determined the development of poetry in subsequent centuries and prepared for its hitherto unprecedented flowering in the Tang era. During this period (7th-10th centuries), the possibilities laid down in Chinese poetry were most fully and completely embodied. A pleiad of poets created then, unparalleled in the abundance and variety of talents either in previous or in subsequent centuries of the development of Chinese poetry: Li Bo and Du Fu, Meng Hao-ran and Bo Ju-yi, Han Yu and Liu Tsung-yuan, Li He and Li Shang-yin, Du Mu and Yuan Zhen and many, many others. Perhaps only the later, Sung era (X-XIII centuries), the era of Su Shi and Lu Yu, Xin Chi-chi and Li Ching-zhao, is comparable with the Tang era. And one of the first places in this list of glorious names rightfully belongs to Wang Wei, whose work, along with the work of his great contemporaries Li Bo and Du Fu, has become one of the pinnacles of Tang, and, consequently, of all Chinese poetry.

Like any great poet, he was a pioneer, a pioneer of new paths. And if Tao Yuan-ming, a singer of rural freedom, freed poetry from scholastic abstraction and again - many centuries after the "Shijing" - fully introduced it to the world of simple human joys, if Li Po gave her a powerful romantic impulse, if Du Fu gave it classical rigor "For many centuries of the history of poetic art, behind the individual variety of poetic forms, it seems essential for us to oppose two types of poetic creativity to each other. We will conditionally designate them as classical and romantic art ... We ... are not talking about a historical phenomenon in its individual richness and originality, but about some permanent, timeless type of poetic creativity "(V. M. Zhirmunsky. Theory of literature. Poetics. Stylistics. "On classical and romantic poetry. " / L .: Nauka, 1977, C 134).) and enriched it with high citizenship, then Wang Wei is the greatest and most inspired of the singers of nature.

Little is known about the life of Wang Wei, as well as about the lives of many other old Chinese poets - we do not even know the exact dates of his birth and death (It is generally accepted that he was born in 701 and died in 761. According to other, less reliable , given that he was born in 699 and died in 759). He was born in Qi (now Qixian County in Shanxi Province, located in the northwestern part of Central China), the son of an official. Poetic talent showed up in him very early, and by the age of twenty he had already created some of his famous works, including "Peach Spring" - a brilliant imitation of the famous poem by Tao Yuan-ming, as well as the famous quatrain, which became very popular, "On the ninth day On the ninth moon, I remember the brothers left to the east of the mountain. At the age of twenty, he passed the exams for the highest scientific degree of jinshi and received the post of musical manager at the court. However, a career that had begun successfully was soon interrupted: during the performance of a ceremonial dance, the court actors made some kind of mistake, for which Wang Wei was immediately removed from office and exiled to the provincial seaside region of Jizhou in East China, where he took a minor official post.

Only ten years later, he reappears in the capital and enters the service of the influential dignitary Zhang Chiu-ling. But a few years later, Zhang Jiu-ling, an enlightened and far-sighted minister who cared about the interests of the country and about attracting talented people to state affairs, fell into disgrace, was removed from high positions and exiled to the south, and his place was taken by a clever and unprincipled courtier Li Lin-fu, whose activities to a large extent hastened the onset of that severe crisis that broke out two decades later in the hitherto flourishing Tang state.

The fall of Chang Jiu-ling and the ensuing dominance of temporary workers and adventurers who surrounded the imperial throne undoubtedly affected Wang Wei's further life path and his aspirations. He did not leave the service, but his former belief that by his service he could benefit the country was, apparently, seriously shaken. He receives new positions and ranks in various regions of the vast empire, makes a trip to the western border - this trip is reflected in the magnificent cycle of his "frontier" poems. He has already become widely known as a poet, musician, calligrapher and painter; some of his poems, for example, "Memory of a friend" or "Under the cool wind, with a clear moon, bitterly dreary thoughts", set to music, became popular songs. There were legends about his musicality: they say that once, when he saw a picture depicting playing musicians, he unmistakably named not only the piece being performed, but even accurately indicated the beat. Before Wang Wei and his younger brother Wang Jin, also a gifted poet, the doors of the most noble houses open. But thoughts of retirement, of hermit solitude among "mountains and waters", "fields and gardens" over the years, more and more persistently take possession of the poet: "Every day is getting weaker // Love and habit for relatives. // Every day getting stronger // The desire for peace in me. // A little more - // And I'm ready to set off on the road. // Is it really possible to wait // for the coming of the evening years?" ("From verses in case", 1).

The origins of Wang Wei's hermitic moods are rooted in the centuries-old Chinese tradition, coming from the ancient sages, and in Buddhism, of which he was an ardent follower from childhood to the end of his days. One must think that they were also promoted by the failures of the poet's closest friends, whose talents did not find proper use in the state field, and the general deterioration of affairs in the country, which was clearly indicated in the last years of the reign of Emperor Xuanzong. Without completely breaking with the service, the poet more and more often alternates it with long "absences" in the world of "mountains and waters." At first, his home in the mountains of Zhongnan (or the Southern Mountains, as he often calls them in his poems) becomes his refuge. Then such an oasis in the world of bustle, "Peach Spring", became for Wang Wei his country house on the Wanchuan River - in a secluded scenic area in the capital's county, not far from the Zhongnan mountains. The early widowed poet lives here alone, but his friends constantly visit him. He was on friendly terms with many of his contemporaries, including the famous poets Pei Di and Chu Guang-hsi, and even earlier with Meng Hao-zhan. It was only by chance that he did not meet with Du Fu, who visited Wang Wei's Wanchuan dwelling, but did not find the owner of the house. He devotes his leisure time to poetry, music, painting; many of the masterpieces of his landscape lyrics are most likely created during these years. Among them is the famous cycle "The Wanchuan River" of twenty poems, in which the corners of local nature especially beloved by the poet are sung - the result of a kind of friendly competition with Pei Di, who created a response cycle of poems under the same name (Following the long and glorious tradition of placing these cycles in the corpus of one edition, we present them in an anthology of currently existing translations in the "Appendices" section. See pp. 387-498 of this edition. The way of life of the poet, by that time already a fairly high-ranking official, was, judging by the verses, the simplest and most modest - although the references to "poverty" and "shack" found in the same verses are most likely just a tribute to an established tradition.

The rebellion, raised in 755 by the imperial favorite An Lu-shan, who tried to seize the throne, and shook the huge empire to its foundations, interrupted the peaceful life of the old poet. Both capitals of the country - Chang'an and Luoyang - fell into the hands of the rebels, the emperor fled to the southwestern region of Shu and soon abdicated, and Wang Wei, like many other officials, was captured by the rebels and then forced to enter the service of the usurper. Even when he was under arrest in the capital’s temple of Putisa, Pei Di visited him there and told him about the feast arranged by the rebels in the imperial palace they had captured, on the shore of the Frozen Azure Pond: the court musicians, driven to the festival, burst into tears as soon as they started singing, and one of they threw a lute on the ground and, turning his face to the west (to where the rightful emperor was at that time), groaned loudly - for which he was immediately torn to pieces by order of An Lu-shan. Wang Wei, shocked by what he heard, folded the poem and immediately read it to his friend. Impromptu gained fame, he reached the new emperor - Su-zong, and together with the petition of the younger brother of the poet - Wang Jin, already a major dignitary - to a large extent contributed to mitigating the fate of the poet after returning to the capital of the imperial troops: for his forced service to the usurper, he was only demoted. In addition, the punishment was short, and soon Wang Wei again began to quickly rise up the ranks, reaching the position of shangshu yucheng - deputy minister. Shortly after this last appointment, Wang Wei died - as stated above, presumably in 761 - at the age of sixty.

The life and creative path of Wang Wei falls on the first six decades of the 8th century, which turned out to be a kind of "peak" in the history of Tang poetry, a kind of "golden age" in the "golden age". Moreover, Wang Wei was not just a contemporary and a witness of this "golden age", but also one of its active creators, for his poetry, which managed to combine the highest verbal skill with purely pictorial plasticity, became one of the highest creative achievements of the era.

The poet's work is diverse: it contains echoes of the "Chu stanzas", and ancient folk songs, poems by Tao Yuanming and his contemporaries; he wrote both "old verses" ("gu shi") with their freer form, and refined "poems of modern style" ("jin ti shi") - with a clear and harmonious alternation of musical tones inherent in Chinese words. He sang of friendship and hermitage, the hardships of distant campaigns and the longing of a lonely woman, the exploits of wandering daring men and the peaceful vigils of Buddhist monks; he has poems on historical themes and everyday sketches, reflections on old age and worldly frailty, poems about worthy men who find themselves out of work, and about the entertainments of the capital's nobility, and, of course, numerous poems about fields and gardens, about mountains and waters. It can be said without exaggeration that in one way or another he touched on almost all the topics that worried his predecessors and contemporaries in his poetry, and he did it in a peculiar and vivid way, managing even in topics that are clearly on the periphery of his work (for example, in his " frontier" verses or in verses denouncing the nobility of the capital), to somewhat anticipate the later achievements of such recognized masters as Bo Ju-yi or Xin Qi-chi.

How much energy and movement in such lines of his as "Whatever ten - // They drive the horse at a gallop. // Whatever five - // The whistling swing of the belt. // Report to the governor // Arrived on time: // Jiuquan laid siege // Hun army. // Snowfall at the outpost // Everything was covered, // Even the smoke of signal fires // Can't be seen" ("At the Border").

And how it differs from the usual idea of ​​Wang Wei as a purely "quiet", even "quietest" poet!

But don’t these verses by Wang Wei remind of the future “Qin melodies” of Bo Ju-yi: “Carefree, careless // Youth dressed in silk. // In the first houses // She often appears. // Born in wealth, // The hereditary treasury // Gifted by the Tsar's favor // Gifted from youth. // Not trained since childhood. // Meat food is plentiful. // In gilded carriages // Travels everywhere and always..." ("Zheng and Huo, inhabitants of the mountains ").

The "historical" poems of the poet are excellent, his poems about yearning women are deeply lyrical.

All this gives us reason to take a somewhat broader look at his work and move away from the usual assessment of Wang Wei as a "hermit" poet, a singer of hermit moods, and nothing more. The above examples (their number, if desired, can be easily multiplied) significantly complement and enrich the main flow of the poet's work and make it possible to more accurately and objectively judge this work as a whole. At the same time, they do not at all refute the fact that the main theme of Wang Wei, marked by his highest creative achievements, was the theme of nature and life among nature. It was here that Wang Wei, as a poet, was the most original and original, it was on this path that he was destined to make his main artistic discoveries and create his top creations.

The theme of nature in Chinese poetry has centuries-old traditions dating back to the Shijing. It is represented in the "Chu stanzas" and in the prose poetic odes "fu" with their magnificent descriptions, in the poetry of the 3rd-4th centuries, but it acquires independent significance only from the 5th century - in the work of the poet Xie Ling-yun, who is considered the true founder of the genre of landscape poetry. in its purest form. In the work of Wang Wei's elder contemporary and friend, the poet Meng Hao-zhan (689-740), landscape poetry reaches true maturity and high perfection. Pictures of nature in Meng Hao-zhan's verses are, as a rule, strictly defined, concrete and visible, they are already devoid of vagueness, approximateness and naive allegorism, which were still to a large extent characteristic of the landscape lyrics of his predecessors. It is easy to see this in the example of one of best poems poet "In the autumn I go up to Lanshan. I send it to Zhang the Fifth":

On Beishan

among the white clouds

old hermit

enjoy your peace...

Look out for a friend

I'm ascending to the top.

The heart is flying

disappears after the birds.

Kinda sad:

the sun sank to sunset.

But also joy

clear distances arose.

Here I see -

people going to the village

Out to the shores

rest at the pier.

close to heaven

trees like small shrubs.

On the pier

the boat is like a month...

(Translated by L. Eidlin)

In these verses, in their images and mood, there is already a lot in common with the poems of Wang Wei, who was influenced by the poetry of his older friend and, undoubtedly, owed a lot to him. Another confirmation of this is the famous "Spring Morning" created by Meng Hao-zhan in the genre of jueju lyrical miniature, in the genre that Wang Wei so talentedly developed in his work:

me in the spring

not the morning woke up:

I'm from everywhere

I hear the calls of birds.

All night long

rain and wind roared.

fallen flowers

how many - look!

(Translated by L. Eidlin)

In addition to the discoveries of Meng Hao-zhan, Wang Wei's landscape lyrics absorbed the achievements of many other poet's predecessors, organically assimilating all the centuries-old experience of old poetry. Wang Wei's poems are full of "calls" with "Chu stanzas" and "yuefu" songs, with the poetry of Tao Yuan-ming and Hsieh Ling-yun, they abound with hidden and semi-hidden "quotes", skillfully played up in a new context. At the same time, the abundant "quoting" of predecessors by no means overloads Wang Wei's poems, does not harm their artistic integrity and originality - the foreign vocabulary is so naturally and organically woven into Van Wei's text. Those who will read the landscape cycle "The Wanchuan River" will probably not even think that almost half of these light, transparent, airy, as if in one breath created quatrains contain images from ancient works - especially from especially beloved by the poet "Chusky stanzas". For the great erudition of the poet easily and freely entered his inner world and dissolved in it, and the high literacy, in the best sense of the word, of his poetry was simply and naturally combined with the living, unique, direct poetic feeling and observation of the artist.

Wang Wei's poetry is characterized by a particularly attentive and intent look at nature, which the former Chinese poetry, perhaps, did not know before him. The philosophy of Chan (Zen) Buddhism, which Wang Wei professed, as well as the Taoist philosophy of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, taught him to see in nature the highest expression of naturalness, the highest manifestation of the essence of things. Any phenomenon in nature, no matter how small it may seem, any moment in the eternal life of nature is precious, how precious, every moment of communication with it is full of high meaning. For a true poet of nature, there are no themes large and small, there are no high and low pictures, there are no trifles. Perhaps this is the reason for Wang Wei's inherent love for the "close-up" in depicting pictures of nature, for those "little things" that former poets often passed by and the artistic recreation of which became one of the highest achievements of Van Wei's poetry: "The rain drizzles // On a gloomy dawn. // It dawned languidly // Day in the yard. // I see a lichen // On the old wall: // Wants to crawl// On my dress" ("I am writing from nature").

Almost the first in Chinese poetry, Wang Wei drew attention to this modest event in the life of nature - and dedicated poems to it. This desire and ability to see the whole world in a drop of dew, to recreate a picture of nature or to convey the mood born by it with the help of a few sparingly selected details is a characteristic feature of Wang Wei's landscape lyrics, which he brought to perfection and became the property of all subsequent Chinese poetry. It is possible that to an inexperienced reader, many poems by Wang Wei or his student and friend Pei Di will seem "empty", written as if "about nothing": a sunbeam crept into the thicket and lay down on the moss... On the slope of the mountain, touched by the colors of autumn, the evening haze wanders - from this the foliage seems either brighter or darker ... The duckweed on the sleepy pond closed after the passing boat - and the branches of the willow swept it again ... The heron took off, frightened by the splashes ... The cormorant caught a small fish ... Frequented rains in the mountains - there is no one to sweep the fallen leaves ... The sun is setting - it is cold on the river, and above the river there are colorless clouds ... The bright light of the moon frightened the dormant birds, and they sing over the spring stream ... A light breeze carries flower petals everywhere - and the oriole plays with them... But all this is great nature in its countless manifestations and changes, in its infinite diversity and unity, in its eternal and perfect beauty. And in order to tell about this and express its innermost essence in a word, poets do not need large canvases and detailed descriptions at all - a few - as if random - strokes, two or three - as if carelessly thrown - color spots are enough ... Only these strokes are thrown and stains by the unmistakably faithful hand of the great masters.

There are also high moments of sudden "enlightenment" in the poet's communication with nature, when, contemplating, he suddenly comprehends the truth about the world in its entirety, finds a sudden answer to all the mysteries of being. These moments come unexpectedly: they can be generated by the sight of plum blossoms or moonlight penetrating the thicket of the forest, the smell of cinnamon flowers or mountain dogwood fruits, the murmur of a stream or raindrops on the leaves ... The poet seeks to capture these moments, fix them in a word and convey others as good news. Ready-made, stable formulas that repeat from poem to poem serve the same purpose: white clouds, a locked gate, silence and solitude - symbols of hermitage, solitude, detachment from the world, designed to immediately awaken the corresponding associations in the reader. All this makes Wang Wei's poetry multi-layered, as Sufi lyrics are multi-layered, full of hints and understatement. She teaches not only to contemplate nature, but also to reflect on it and, reflecting, to understand.

It is easy to see that Wang Wei's poetic world is a world seen and depicted not only by a true poet, but also by a sharp-sighted artist. Wang Wei was an artist, and - as far as we can now judge from the reviews of contemporaries and the few surviving copies from his paintings - an artist no less significant than a poet. In one of his later and "final" poems, he himself half-jokingly, half-seriously says that in his past rebirth he was most likely an artist, and not a poet - completing, however, his words with the fact that his heart does not want to know about the glory of the artist, nor about the glory of the poet... He is considered the founder of the so-called "southern school" in Chinese Buddhist painting, which, according to the researcher, "... relatively speaking, includes those masters who preferred multicolor ink, a sketchy, free manner - pedantic and descriptive, the expression of the essence (idea) of a thing - its concrete authenticity and, finally, not the plot and everyday life were associated with literature, but a complex system of associations "(E. V. Zavadskaya. Aesthetic problems of painting of old China. / M .: Art, 1975, p. 201.). He is also credited with the famous treatise "Secrets of Painting" - one of the fundamental works on the theory of painting, which had a great influence on the subsequent development of the theory and practice of painting in China. This work, written in excellent, highly poetic rhythmic prose, can also be considered as a kind of commentary on Wang Wei's landscape lyrics, where poetic images for the most part are difficult to separate from purely pictorial images, it is not by chance that the words of the poet Su Shi became winged: tse (Mo-tse - the second name of Wang Wei.) - in his verses - pictures; I look at the pictures of Mo-tse - in his pictures - verses. Indeed, Wang Wei's landscape lyrics are surprisingly picturesque, a "picture" in the best sense of the word - a classic example is again the Wangchuan River cycle, where most of the poems (with the exception of a few filled with historical and mythological associations) represent a kind of painting in the word - or paintings made with the word: "Shoal by white stones // Transparent, shallow. // Reed thickets - // Next to me. // To the west and to the east - // River and river: // Waves wash the sand // Under a clear moon" ("Shoal at the White Stones").

And how much freshness, purely picturesque harmony and perfection in a small spring picture from the cycle "Joys of Fields and Gardens", as if descended from a scroll of an old Chinese master: "Peach blossom // Sprinkled with rain at night. // Spring fog // Willows wrapped around again. // Petals are flying - // The servant will sweep later. // The oriole is crying, // And my guest will sleep."

It would probably not be an exaggeration to say that Wang Wei, an artist who was irretrievably lost to us in painting, has survived to a large extent and has come down to us in his poems, thus clearly confirming the above judgment of Su Shi, for painting in Wang Wei's poetry present visibly and unmistakably.

It remains to be added that in poetry about nature, Wang Wei showed himself to be a versatile artist: he knew how to write with rare perfection about flowers and birds, about peaceful life among fields and gardens - and he could, on occasion, for example, in his "borderline" poems, literally with a few mean, sharp strokes to convey the harsh beauty of the desert steppes. Majestic pictures of nature were also subject to his brushes - expanses of water, mighty mountain ranges (see the poem "Mountains of Zhongnan").

The impact of Wang Wei's landscape poetry on the work of his contemporaries and poets of subsequent generations was enormous and can be traced through the centuries. In the work of Wang Wei, Chinese landscape poetry rose to an enormous artistic height and acquired its main features, which determined almost all of its further development. Having become an indispensable, and often the most important part of the work of the vast majority of Tang and Sung poets, developed with amazing completeness, depth and artistic perfection, Chinese poetry of nature has become a phenomenon of world significance, one of the highest achievements not only of Chinese, but also of world poetry. And one of the most honorable places in the history of the development of this genre deservedly belongs to the great poet and great artist Wang Wei.

V. T. Sukhorukov

chinese poetry wang wei

TWAN WEI IN TRANSLATIONS BY Y. K. SCHUTSKIY

Untitled

I saw: in the spring chill

Beauty plum blossomed.

I heard: they sang in the distance

I am in my spring languor

I see: green, new,

In front of the house to the jasper steps

Grass stretches timidly.

Seeing off spring

Day by day I'm getting old all the time

Somehow in vain, in vain.

Returned year after year

Spring comes to us.

There is a glass of wine, and no doubt

You will find pleasure in it.

Let the flowers fly to the ground -

Don't feel sorry for them!

Song of the Far-Looking Zhongnan Mountains

I dedicate to Senator Xu "yu

You go down, down from the Senate,

And you see, it's time for sunset.

You mourn (I know, I know!),

That these worldly affairs are very disturbing.

You're about two old and slender

Trees jumped off his horse, looking calmly.

You don't go home. Look into the spaces

And you see blue mountains in the foggy distance.

FROM THE POETRY "HUANGFU YUE'S HOUSE IN THE VALLEY OF CLOUDS"

The stream where the bird sings

I live alone in freedom

Showered cassia flowers.

The whole night passes peacefully...

Spring mountains are empty.

But a bird in the mountains for a moment

Scared, rising, the moon:

And her song over the spring

Stream in the middle of the night is heard.

In response to brother Zhang Wu*

wheatgrass shack

Zhongnan has. Facade

Meets her from the south

Peaks of the Zhongnan range.

I don't see guests all year,

My door is always closed.

All day freedom is here and with it

There is no effort in my soul.

You fish, you drink wine

And it doesn't harm you.

Come! - and we will be with you

Walk to each other, my dear!

Together with Lu Xiang I pass the gazebo in the garden of the scholar Cui Xing-tsung

Trees green dense shade

They covered themselves everywhere.

Here the moss thickens every day,

And, of course, there is no dust here.

He sits cross-legged without a hat

Under this tall pine;

Looks at the world only with squirrels with contempt

Living earthly life.

Leaving Cui Xing Tsung

Stopped horses in a row; we are ready

Separate sleeves and floors.

Over the Great Imperial Canal again

Pure cold begins.

Ahead of beauty shining high,

Massive mountains rise

From you I'm leaving alone,

And again, heartbreak.

Seeing off Yuan the Second, appointed to Anxi

Morning rain in Weicheng *

Slightly moistened pollen.

Green at the house of the shadow,

The freshness of willows has been updated.

Drink, friend, when parting

Another glass of our wines!

You will leave Yan-guan *

And you will be left alone.

On the "High Terrace" see off the censor Li Xin

I'll accompany you up

To the "High Terrace" and follow,

How immeasurably far

The valley and the river stretched out.

The sun has set; and back

The birds are flying back.

You keep going

And don't stop to take a breather.

On the ninth day of the ninth moon, I remembered the brothers in the mountains

I live alone in a strange side

Like a freaky stranger. And so,

Only the joyful holiday of Chun-yang * will come,

I miss my family doubly.

All brothers are now with magic grass,

(Remembered by me in the distance)

To stick the stems, they climbed the mountains ...

But there is no one there.

Maid of Honor Ban Jieyu *

It's strange to everyone that I closed the doors

In the tower where I keep the white.

The king descended from the reception hall,

But I didn't meet him.

I watch endlessly, I watch all day

In this royal garden of spring.

There, I hear the voice is heard:

Someone * between the bushes laughs.

I pass by the temple of "Gathered incense"

I don't know where it stands in the mountains

Xiangji temple *. But on the cliff

I ascend and my path is braided

Between the steep in the misty clouds.

Ancient trees around...

There are no paths here. Between the rocks

Distant bells sound

In the wilderness, he rose from somewhere.

Behind a terrible stone is hidden, a stream

He swallowed his murmur.

Behind dark pine ardor

Cooled by sunlight.

Empty bend of the pond

Where the haze of twilight is light;

And tamed by contemplation

Sharpening the poison of the former dragon.

Went up to the Temple of "Fulfilled Insight"

Here, along the "Earth of the Beginning" * winds

Up the path in the bamboos.

The peak of non-nufars is issued

Above the "miracle city" * in the clouds.

Chu three countries on a slope

All here are visible in my window.

Nine rapids at a glance

Over there they caught up with the wood.

Instead of monastic seats

The herbs here are soft and tender.

Sounds of Indian chants *

Under the needles of a long pine.

I live in these voids

Outside the "clouds of the law" I am.

Contemplating the world, I comprehend,

That "Buddha has no existence" *.

I'm exhausted from the heat

Filling the earth and the sky

The crimson sun burns.

On the horizon, as if steep,

Fire sparkling clouds.

The leaves curled up, dried up, wherever

They didn't grow up. no edge

Dry meadows all around.

The river dried up.

I notice the weight of the dress

And in the lightest, rarest fabric.

Even in the dense foliage of plants

I suffer: too little shade ...

At the curtain I stand close

Now you can't at all.

Raw clothes now

My second and third time.

The whole world, blazing with heat, is bright.

Thoughts have gone beyond the limits of the universe.

Strive like a valley to the mountains,

They are in the air.

The wind blew from afar.

Where he comes from - and do not count.

River and sea from the wave

And restless and muddy.

But this eternal care

From the body only. I understand,

I just looked at myself...

I haven't woken up yet,

And suddenly I enter the "Gate

Dew of the Sweetest, Fragrant "*,

Where in the pure world is chill

Great joy for the heart.

The poems of the Chinese poet are also written, as it were, in simple ink, in monochrome, but this is the highest art - to reveal the very "nature of nature" by simple means. In China, they believe that Wang Wei did it brilliantly. Posted on www.allbest.ru

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We are publishing a transcript and a video recording of a lecture by Professor, Director of the Institute of Oriental Cultures and Antiquities of the Russian State Humanitarian University, a specialist in Chinese poetry and poetology Ilya Sergeevich Smirnov, which took place on November 26, 2015 in the I.S. Turgenev. Photos by Natalia Chetverikova.

Boris Dolgin: Good evening, dear colleagues. We are starting another lecture from the Polit.ru Public Lectures cycle, which we are now holding in the Turgenev Library-Reading Room. It is very pleasant that we can again see Ilya Sergeevich Smirnov, a sinologist, a specialist in Chinese culture, poetry, poetology, director of the Institute of Oriental Cultures and Antiquities of the Russian State Humanitarian University.

We are always very glad to lecturers from there, because it is an inflorescence of acting talents. We will talk about the tradition of Russian translation of Chinese poetry, about schools, about approaches to this. Please, Ilya Sergeevich.

Video recording of the lecture

Ilya Smirnov: Good evening, thank you to everyone who came today. The title of my speech is designated as "History of the translation of classical poetry in Russia", but rather, it should be clarified that this is not so much a history of translation as of the existence of Chinese classical poetry in Russia.

My story will be somewhat inconsistent, because there is no distinctly arranged chronological history of translation from Chinese in Russia. These are such “concentric circles”, schools, students. The relationship with the country from which this great poetic tradition came to us in different epochs changed, the attitude towards those who translated this poetry and the result of their labors also changed. Therefore, I will try to mix a few things: actually talking about translation, talking about Chinese poetry in culture - what is called the transcription or motifs of Chinese poetry in culture.

And, in conclusion, if I have time, I would like to talk about the unexpected - about the future. In the yard - 2015, 150 years, wonderful poets, outstanding scientists, people who happily combined this and that hypostasis in themselves, tried to translate the Chinese classics into Russian. And here we are, reviewing what has already been done, and, voluntarily or involuntarily, we think about further ways of poetic translation from Chinese.

Assessing what has been done over the past century and a half, I will express my opinion (in general, everything that I will say here today, except for dates and chronology, is solely my opinion) we find ourselves in the face of a radical failure: there is no Chinese poetic classic in Russian! There is no need to ask me if there are Arabic, Persian, Japanese classics in Russian - I do not want to touch on this, since I am not deeply immersed in these areas of translation. I know, maybe a little, but God knows how much. I know a little more about the Chinese classics.

Get ready for what will be the final, where I will try to explain why we encountered such a failure, could we have not encountered it, or was it predetermined by the whole course of the interaction of science called "Sinology" or "Sinology" or "Sinology" - and its "splash" in the form of translations of Chinese poems into Russian.

And one more note: I will try to do without any assessments in relation to the work of individual schools and translators. If these assessments somehow arise from what I will say, then it turned out that it was completely beyond my power to avoid them.

So. In 1856, in the 126th volume in the sixth issue of the journal Otechestvennye Zapiski, a translation of the remarkable Russian poet Afanasy Fet (this assessment is natural, it is not included in the "non-estimated" condition) of a Chinese poem appeared. It took probably 30 years for the school of Russian Sinology, which had been formed by that time, to determine that this was a poem by the Chinese poet Su Shi, a poet of the Song era, that is, the XI-XII centuries, no less remarkable than Afanasy Fet, - "Shadow".

Now we will see what has happened and will continue to happen with the translation from Chinese. Yeah, I haven't apologized yet for not having a presentation. I can't. And reading through the eyes of poorly understood lines would add little to your perception of Chinese poetry. Therefore, try to listen to poetry and, I think, you will understand the main thing

First, the interlinear of this poem, so that it becomes more or less clear what this poem is about:

Ledge after ledge

step by step...

The "ledge" is most likely a "floor".

But even for an interlinear, the word is not too poetic, so we will say "ledge".

Step by step, step by step

Climbing the Jade Tower.

No matter how much I order the servant boy,

He won't take her down at all.

Only a great luminary will take her away,

How the clear moon will bring it with it.

I’ll make a reservation right away that the interlinear is an extremely imperfect thing in general, and even more so in relation to Chinese poetry. I tried to convey as accurately as possible everything that is written in the Chinese text, but involuntarily, so that it does not look like a series of slurred words, I am grammarizing the text, while in the Chinese text all these grammatical connections must be established based on the context, experience reading text, prosody and many other things. Nevertheless.

Here is what Fet wrote:

The tower lies

You will count all the ledges;

Only that tower

You won't miss anything.

her sun

Can't steal

look at the moon

I put it down again.

Everything is in place, only the detail with the servant boy is missing. It seemed to be all that was left. The feta translator was scolded for everything, but here it seems that everything is in place. But what is this poem about? What did you understand from it? What is the poem about?

A certain person, a "lyrical hero", in European terms, climbs the tower. This tower has a shadow - the poem is called "Shadow" - and for some reason asks the boy to sweep away this shadow. And then everything is clear: the sun leaves, the shadow from the tower disappears, but then the moon rises and again the shadow from the tower lies on the ground.

What is really going on in this poem? The Chinese are not going anywhere. He walks along the shadow that lies on the ground - "ledge by ledge, step by step." Because the tower was built at the foot of the hill, so the shadow falls, practically reproducing this tower in all details.

It was customary to go for a walk, taking a kettle of wine, warm it on a fire, drink a glass, play such narrow harp, composing poetry. Naturally, a poet, a learned person, did not drag all this household behind him. He had a servant, usually a boy, who carried all this after him. Therefore, the poet jokingly suggests that he remove this shadow, but the boy cannot do this.

And this hidden playfulness is the whole point of the poem. An example, to tell the truth, from the simplest. And here is the question: how should the poet, if not Fet, have acted in order to manifest, convey to the reader not only the obvious, but also the latent?

By the way, many years later it turned out that the interlinear was made by Feta not by anyone, but by the wonderful, great Russian sinologist, founder of the first Russian Sinological school, Vasily Pavlovich Vasiliev. He could well translate the poem in its entirety! But if he wrote all that I have told you, what would the poet do with it? After all, the Chinese did not say all this in his poem, it lives there, "behind the line." That is why Chinese verses practically do not exist without commentary.

First, classical books ceased to live without commentary - those that typologically correspond in Chinese culture to the Bible or the Koran, determine some of the fundamental properties of the tradition, what is called the "picture of the world".

In general, Chinese culture is a philological realm, a realm of commentary. The Chinese practically do not have a tradition of direct utterance, a thought must be expressed gradually, implicitly, the external form - words, a line - only hints, leads to the deep content.

Let's return to Russian translations.

After Fet, the Chinese were translated by Mikhailov, Minaev - his translation, very far from the original, even entered one of the school anthologies in what was then Russia. Later, of course, it was not without Balmont, who translated everything and thought about everything, he translated the Chinese in his own way, he also translated Western poetry, talentedly, but “in Balmont’s way”, you see him, Balmont, rather than see the original .

The first collection that presented the Russian reading public with any extensive selection of Chinese poetry was China's Pipe in 1914. Little is known about the translators Egoriev and Markov. The latter was from the Latvians (Markov, apparently, a pseudonym), married the artist Varvara Bubnova. By the will of fate, she ended up in Japan, taught the Japanese of European painting and herself studied traditional Japanese painting from them, became famous, and in her declining years wrote something like a diary. This diary has preserved for us the meager information about the translator Markov.

Only the lazy did not kick the translations from the "Pipe of China": both knowledgeable people who had serious grounds for criticism, and perfect amateurs.

I will give an interlinear translation of a very famous poem, which is found in all Chinese anthologies, by the famous poet Li Po. From the point of view of the Chinese - the greatest, perhaps. Reveler, drunkards, according to legend, drowned in the lake, reaching for the reflection of the moon in the water.

Even the famous scholar Zhu Xi, who was such a Confucian of the Confucians, from whom you can’t expect a kind word about such “non-canonical” cases, directly said that these 20 words, more precisely, signs, in the five-word quatrain of Li Po, are worth hundreds of thousands of words of others poets. Chinese criticism is very metaphorical, so this is a very high mark. The poem is called "Lamentation on Jasper Steps". Here is the substring:

Jasper steps / give birth to white dew;

The night lasts... // The silk stocking is full.

Return, lower / water-crystal curtain -

Ringingly transparent… // Contemplate the autumn moon.

Now listen to what the most worthy Egoriev and Markov made of these twenty words. So, "Moonlight Staircase":

From white, transparent jade

The ladder goes up

Sprinkled with dew...

And the full moon shines in it ...

All steps shimmer with moonlight.

Queen in long robes

Climbing up the stairs

And dew, overflowing,

It wets the edges of noble covers.

She goes to the pavilion

Where are the moonbeams

Spin your own fabric.

Blinded, she stops at the threshold.

Her hand gently lowers the pearly curtain,

And wonderful stones fall

Rumbling like a waterfall

pierced by the rays of the sun.

And the queen listens to the murmur,

And sadly looks at the moonlight,

To the autumn moonlight

Flowing through pearls.

... And for a long time sadly looks at the moonlight.

Needless to say, they did a great job. For a long time it seemed that this was not a translation at all. But, if we reach the end of everything I want to talk about, then we will return to this opus and try to look at it from a somewhat unexpected angle.

In the meantime, using the example of Li Po's quatrain, I will once again show you the imperfection of even an ideally accurate interlinear translation of a Chinese poem.

“Lamentation on Jasper Steps” - what does this immediately say not to you and me, but to the Chinese reader? Firstly, that the poem was written on behalf of a woman, because the sign “yuan”, which means “complaints, complaints”, is a word from the female language. Men do not complain or complain, at least not through that word.

"Jasper steps" are the steps of the royal palace. Jasper is a sign of all the best. In fact, this is not jasper, but jade, but in Russian the word jade is steadily associated with kidney disease, so for a long time Russian translators preferred mineralogically erroneous jasper to medical jade. Be that as it may, it is important to say that natural jade comes in a wide variety of colors, from white to dark green; white is considered incredibly precious, jewelry is made from it, but in the royal palace, steps were made from it, regardless of costs. Therefore, no rich person can have "jasper steps", ever; in life, maybe yes, but not in poetry. In poetry, this is a sign of the imperial home.

Who can complain in the imperial palace? Only the imperial concubine. Much less often - the empress. The emperor had up to a thousand concubines. This, of course, is not about fabulous debauchery, but about the mystical function of fertility. A great many concubines symbolized the power of the Son of Heaven, his all-begetting possibilities. Girls, of course, beauties, were selected throughout China by special sovereign people.

It is clear that a thousand young ladies is excessive even for the emperor. Many were honored with a visit from the emperor once or twice in their lives, and many faded away, grew old, not seeing the face of the sovereign. And it was almost impossible to return home. Tragedy? Undoubtedly. But over time, this plot, this sadness of the harem maiden turned into an absolutely symbolic theme, in no way connected with the real circumstances of the life of the imperial palaces.

Most likely, it was such a poetic mask for poems about love. It is difficult to say exactly when the substitution took place, but certainly long before Li Bo. The skill of the poet and tradition continued, however, to require strict observance of all the signs of the original theme of the palace concubine. Thus, it is essential to make it clear that the action takes place in the imperial palace. Li Bo, an outstanding master, even dares to point out this circumstance twice - in the title of the poem and in the first line, repeating the “royal” epithet “jasper”; this is very generous, because the poet has only 20 hieroglyphic signs at his disposal.

"Jasper steps give birth to white dew." Why do they "give birth to white dew"? Because jasper / jade, according to Chinese beliefs, and, it seems, due to its chemical properties, I am not an expert here, it retains heat in the cold - that is why there are such jasper benches in Chinese palaces, you can sit on them and not catch a cold in cold weather, but in in hot weather, they keep a pleasant coolness.

And this combination of properties leads to the fact that when the cold comes, moisture appears on the jasper - in our case, frost. "White dew" is the name of the calendar period of the year. There are 24 seasons in a year, the Chinese, as farmers, reacted very subtly to changes in the weather, and one of the seasons is called the “white dew season”. In addition, this line also contains a hidden reference to the main poetic canon - the “Book of Songs”, where “white dew” was first mentioned as a synonym for hoarfrost.

“The night lasts” is an indication of the length of what is happening in time. “The silk stocking is full”: “full” is my word, in fact there is a hieroglyph that is now included in the word “aggression”, that is, it turns out that this is such an active process, this stocking is literally captured by moisture, dew. What is this stocking? In fact, most of all it resembles such lace boots, a few years ago, our ladies wore them. Here we are talking about something similar.

What is all this for? In order to show that the heroine is in terrible excitement, worries, complains and complains. Therefore, it is an impossible thing in everyday life! - jumped out into the street without shoes, without shoes. Accordingly, these stockings got wet, but she does not feel it and continues to stand on the jasper porch. These are the first two lines. I told you superficially how they are loaded with meaning.

"Return, lower / water-crystal curtain" - no grammar. We don’t know for sure at all whether it’s a man or a woman, if it weren’t for the title with the word “yuan” from the female language. Also stockings. The men didn't wear them. So she is. She - returned and lowers the water-crystal curtain. This is a curtain, such threads on which crystal beads are strung. And there is an erotic subtext here: if a lover comes to a lady, this canopy falls. And she has it raised. And she lowers him with a kind of hopelessness; and behind this gesture is another expression of her complaint. The poem ends with the phrase "contemplate the autumn moon", and for the word "contemplate" a sign is taken that does not mean only "look".

China, on the other hand, is very even in the center, which is why various hills, towers, and stairs are still very popular. If you ever find yourself in China with a Chinese excursion somewhere in an area with hills or towers, you will see how all the Chinese headlong - from young children to old people - climb these hills and towers together, because it is closer to heaven, and a fertile stream flows from there with all the content important to the Chinese. But the main thing is to rise above even nature, above even relief, and look into the distance in order to “see the four seas”, as they say poetically, that is, to see the borders of this middle country, beyond which there is barbarism and, in essence, nothing. And here Li Bo uses the word for this kind of looking - van, although it would seem that the ladies only look at the moon.

Well, with the "autumn moon" everything is more or less simple: autumn is the end of the year, although the height of autumn is still ahead, because the "white dew season" is September, and the peak of autumn is October and November. Autumn evokes thoughts about the frailty of life, the frailty of being; here it is also an experience of hopeless longing. Whose? Concubines? - Maybe. Poet? - More likely.

There is much more to this great poem, I even wrote a long article about it, trying to get to the bottom of its deeper meanings. But now I want to emphasize that the most virtuoso translation - and this poem was translated by knowledgeable and capable people - physically cannot cover all the overtones that an educated Chinese reader (there were no other readers in traditional China) grasped immediately and completely. In other words, in Russian there are more or less talented dummies, devoid of the full-blooded richness of the original.

Now let's stop talking about translation for a while and turn to, so to speak, the echoes of Chinese poetry, in Russian poetry. We are talking about the famous collection of Nikolai Gumilyov "Porcelain Pavilion". This collection was created when Gumilyov lived in France and England, and, apparently, some French versions of Chinese poems served as the basis for Gumilyov's arrangements. one of the French.

It looks like a real Chinese poem, perhaps, only the one that gave the name to the entire collection - "The Porcelain Pavilion". These are lovely poems, I'll read them to you:

Among the artificial lake

The porcelain pavilion has risen.

arched back with a tiger's back,

The jasper bridge leads to it.

And in this pavilion several

Friends dressed in bright dresses,

From bowls painted with dragons

They drink warm wine.

They talk merrily

And then they write down their poems,

Wringing yellow hats

Rolling up sleeves.

And it is clearly visible in the clear lake -

The bridge is concave like a jasper moon,

And a few friends over bowls

Turned upside down.

What we are waiting for is present in this poem in full. For everyone who has seen Chinese painting, this picture lives up to all expectations. Here is a humpbacked bridge, very accurately reflected in the smooth surface of the waters, and gentlemen, poets. There are also inaccuracies, the most noticeable being yellow hats. The yellow color belongs exclusively to the emperor, no dignitaries in yellow hats could be, but on the whole, intonationally all this is very interesting, even formally Gumilyov's transcription to some extent reproduces the form of the Chinese eight-line (in Russian, the number of lines of the original is traditionally doubled).

The charm of this poem is given not only by a visible poetic gift, deep intuition, but also - I'm sure - knowledge of China and Chinese poetry. The fact is that Gumilyov communicated quite closely with the second great Russian sinologist Vasily Mikhailovich Alekseev (1881-1951) after Vasily Pavlovich Vasilyev, who really introduced the then Russian society to Chinese poetry, releasing in 1916 the huge volume “Chinese Poem about the poet. Stanzas of Sykun Tu”, which contained a study and translation of 24 octets. Sykun Tu is a poet of the Tang era (UP - X centuries), who created a poetic poetology, very vague and dark, depicting, as Alekseev proved, he considered 24 phases of the inspiration of a Chinese poet.

This is a very complex thing; in Alekseev's book - a multi-page study, an interlinear translation of each poem with a detailed commentary, and in addition - amazing paraphrases that reproduce the Chinese favorite way of explaining the meaning: to say the same thing that has already been said in verses, but in other words and just as poetic. It is known that after the appearance of its Russian version, many poets of that time were fond of the “Poem about a Poet”, among whom was Gumilyov. So his knowledge of Chinese poetry had a very solid foundation.

V.M. Alekseev founded the so-called “second” Russian Sinological school. And to this day, many Russian sinologists trace their scientific pedigree from the Alekseev school. The same can be said about his role in translation from Chinese. He himself translated a lot of poetry and prose, his translations are wonderful. And he was also happy with his students, many of them were distinguished by truly outstanding talents.

You probably know the name of Nikolai Alexandrovich Nevsky (1892-1938), first a Sinologist, then a Japaneseist, Tangutologist, folklorist; by the way, his first independent work was the translation of Li Po's poems with detailed comments.

Another Alekseevsky student, Yulian Konstantinovich Shchutsky (1897-1938), a brilliant translator of the Chinese classical Book of Changes, perhaps showed his talent as a poetic translator more clearly than others; I will say more about this. His friend and classmate at the university, Boris Aleksandrovich Vasiliev (1899-1938), is also a person not without poetic talents, but, alas, quite early felt, how to put it mildly, a taste for political betrayal, having participated in the persecution of his teacher Alekseev, that, however, did not save him from the fate of the firing squad. As well as Nevsky and Shchutsky who did not give up anything.

Aleksey Alexandrovich Shtukin (1904-1963) translated into Russian in verse one of the main canonical monuments of China, the Book of Songs. He escaped execution, but not arrest, ended up in a camp, in spite of everything he continued to translate from memory; thanks to the troubles of Alekseev, the camp was replaced with exile in some wilderness; then again the camp, release, a short time at large and death from the fourth stroke. But he fulfilled his mission - to this day his translation is the only complete translation of the “Book of Songs” into Russian.

As you can see, all Alekseev's students translated poetry. But for the general Russian reader, Chinese poetry was opened by a small collection “Anthology of Chinese Lyrics of the 7th-19th Centuries” of 1922, then they were still writing “After the Nativity of Christ”, which was made by Shchutsky, and Alekseev himself wrote the introductory article and introductory remarks to the chapters.

This book was extraordinarily popular; The translations were immediately liked and remembered for a long time. There was something in them, consonant with the traditions of the Silver Age that had not yet died, and at the same time - some unusualness, spice, or something. I will cite, by the way, one of the amusing testimonies of the unprecedented popularity of Shchusev's arrangements.

A well-known St. Petersburg scientist mentions such a case in his memoirs. During the war on the Northern Front, in a moment of calm, a company of translators at headquarters and newspapermen started a game: someone utters two poetic lines, and the other must continue the poem and name the author. Failed - lost. The Moscow poet Alexander Kovalenkov, who served in the local newspaper, was simply “stuffed” with poems and invariably emerged victorious. And then one day he asked the author of the memoirs the next two lines:

All our hard, troubled days,-

and he suddenly continued with unexpected ease:

This has nothing to do with

To educate my soul.

Kovalenkov was so sure that his “strike” would be unanswered that he was confused and did not even ask who the author of the poem was, which, of course, involuntarily saved his opponent: he, of course, did not remember the name of the Chinese poet Wang Ji. But the translation of Shchutsky turned out to be so charming that among the few translations from Chinese it became, as they say, a fact of Russian poetry (whether this is good is another matter).

I PASS IN FRONT OF THE TAVERN

(7th century, from Wang Ji)

I'm drunkenly in the flow

All our hard, troubled days.

This has nothing to do with

To educate my soul.

And where the eyes do not rush -

Everyone is drunk everywhere, and therefore

How dare I resist

To be sober for me alone?

And one more evidence of the unprecedented popularity of this translation: a parody was even written on it:

“I see pleasure around me -

Burdocks, thorns, wheatgrass.

However, this has nothing to do

To the upbringing of my soul."

You understand that they only parody what is “on the ear”, otherwise the parody is meaningless.

In connection with Shchutsky, I will return to the subject of the lecture parallel to the translation - to Chinese motifs in Russian poetry. You already know how tragically this remarkable scientist and translator ended his days. But even on the “nights of execution”, his life was not cloudless. A man of many talents, who took a great interest in the mid-twenties, he openly joined the already persecuted anthroposophists; moreover, he fell in love with the active anthroposophist Elizaveta Dmitrieva-Vasilyeva (the famous Cherubina de Gabriak, who caused the duel between Guliyev and Voloshin). The times were still relatively vegetarian, and soon she was not arrested, not killed, no, she was condescendingly sent to Tashkent.

Shchutsky goes to visit his beloved. She lives in a tiny adobe house, through the porch of which a pear tree has sprouted. They are endless, including poetry; day after day, the poetess composes the poetic cycle "The House Under the Pear Tree". It is difficult to say to what extent Shchiyutsky, as we know, also an outstanding poet, participated in the creation of these poems, but there is no doubt that we have one of the most striking examples of the "germination" of Chinese imagery, intonation, stanza, symbolism in Russian poetry. I hope you hear it all for yourself.

On the table a blue-green bouquet

Peacock feather...

Maybe I'll stay for many, many years

Here in the desert...

If you stepped on frost,

So, close and strong ice ...

“If you stepped on frost,

This means that strong ice is also close ... ”- this is an expression from the ancient Chinese“ Book of Changes ”, as you remember, translated by Shchutsky. At that time, he was just beginning his studies of this monument and, probably, shared his observations with his girlfriend. In general, this old proverb was very much in tune with the then moods of the intelligentsia: the signs of cold weather in public life were quite clearly distinguished, and the coming glaciation was seen without much difficulty; I had no illusions: what should come will come!

Another poem:

"Behind the houses, in a back alley,

So the branches of willows are bent,

Like a wave frozen on the crest,

Like carvings on my jewelry box...

My walks are lonely

Silently took a departing friend

Willow branch from remembering hands.

According to the tradition of the Chinese, to a person leaving - and they often left, especially Chinese officials (the fight against corruption did not begin yesterday) - at the city gates, saying goodbye, they broke hanging willow branches and handed them to the traveler as a memory of their native land. As you can see, Chinese motifs are quite alive in these verses and do not seem alien at all.

Now let's go back from student to teacher and talk about translation again.

Chinese poetry, as already mentioned, was translated by Vasily Mikhailovich Alekseev himself. It must be said that his poems have some incredible, mysterious property. You look at them like an x-ray of a Chinese poem. This is a mysterious thing, because the "backbone" of the Chinese poem comes through. At the same time, these are Russian poems, where the words are arranged in the right order and they are wonderfully chosen.

Alekseev is so high that he is neither cold nor hot from my words, so I risk saying some evaluative words.

Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov said that only Gnedich translated the Iliad not into “general cultural” Russian, but into a language specially designed precisely and only for the transposition of this single work.

If you don't remember, read it again - you can't speak or write in this language. It was invented so that you and I would feel the truly divine, unearthly origin of the great poem.

Alekseev acted in approximately the same way, shifting his Sykun Tu. This is exactly how his translations were assessed by the most insightful contemporaries. It was said that he discovered the "Chinese Khlebnikov" - which in contemporary Russian poetry could be compared in quirkiness with the language of Khlebnikov's original poems.

I will read you a few lines of Alekseev and I will start not with Sykun Tu, but with the poem that we have already talked about, “Lamentations on the Jasper Steps” by Li Bo.

Jasper platform gives birth to white dew...

The night is long: they have mastered a fleur stocking.

I'll leave, I'll lower the water-crystal curtain:

In a transparent pattern, I will look at the autumn month.

Many modern readers believe that this is a slightly "rhythmic" interlinear. Don't know. Even in the syntax, in the choice of words, I see a bizarre Russian-Chinese amalgam; This translation will never become a “fact of Russian poetry”, but to the reader who wants to know not “what” the poems are about, but “how” they are arranged, this arrangement will tell a lot.

I will return to Vasily Mikhailovich's translations, in particular, to his Sykun Tu, but now I would like to talk again about the work of his students - researchers and transcribers of Chinese poetry.

Boris Alexandrovich Vasiliev, who was already mentioned, translated quite a lot, published much less, almost everything in the 1935 collection Vostok; the collection later, when the vast majority of its authors were, as they put it then, “withdrawn”, was withdrawn from libraries, part of the circulation was put under the knife, so that Vasiliev as a translator was practically unknown for many years. I suggest you listen and appreciate one of his translations.

First the subscript:

One path of the setting sun spreads over the water,

Half of the river is azure-azure,

Half of the river is red.

Who does not love the ninth moon (i.e. the ninth lunar month) the initial third night?

Dew, like a true pearl,

The moon is like an onion.

Now translation:

Spreads the road from the glare of fire

The setting sun over the river.

The floor of the river is like the azure of a bygone day,

Half - red, like a ray of fire.

How I love the third day of the ninth moon

At the evening hour, when in the middle of silence

Like pearls, dew suddenly lights up

And in the sky - the moon, like a curved bow.

If you were able to compare the translation with the interlinear by ear, you noticed that there are quite a few words missing in the original, almost half. And, of course, intonation - sublime, even pretentious - hardly corresponds to the spirit of Chinese poetry, “insipid”, as the Chinese themselves defined it. For comparison, I will read you another translation of this poem, made decades after Vasiliev by the last student of Alekseev, Lev Zalmanovich Eidlin (1910-1985):

Walkway one setting sun

Stretched into the depths of the water ..

Half of the azure-azure river,

The river is half red.

I feel tender passion for the third night

The beginning of the ninth moon.

Dew, like a pure pearl of grain,

The moon is like a curved bow.

Eidlin is the greatest connoisseur of Chinese poetry, a major translator of it. Even the Chinese admired his ability to read and understand ancient poems (and you rarely get a kind word from them about foreign Sinologists). I hope you heard the crispness, the clarity of the Eidlin transcription, an almost verbatim match with the original.

To tell the truth, he, like Vasiliev, allowed an hardly justified grammaticalization of the fifth line of the translation, introducing the pronoun “I” - in Chinese poetry, personal pronouns, as a rule, are absent and ours is no exception. In general, this line is clearly not set: "I feel a tender passion for the third night" - everything is here - from intonation to the choice of words "contrary" - and the original, and Eidlin's translation principles, and even his restrained closed character. God knows what happened, translation is almost a mystical thing.

Now I would like to tell you about one interesting episode connected with the existence of Chinese poetry in Russian poetry. There was such a poet - Bobrov. It cannot be said that it is completely forgotten, but not one of those whose name is well known. He lived a long life, in his youth he was a member of the Centrifuge political community, before that he had joined the Futurists; then he took up translations, did mathematical work (he was a mathematician by education), wrote a lot on the theory of verse.

In 1916, Alekseev's book fell into his hands, Bobrov was completely shocked by the translations from Sykun Tu. He tried to translate from these translations as if from interlinear, and tried to write, as he called, "fantasies" on Chinese topics. Sent a very timid letter to Alekseev, Sykun Tu admired him, asked him to evaluate his own experiments. Alekseev, not spoiled by the attention of his colleagues, treated Bobrov's attempts extremely kindly, encouraging him to continue mastering Chinese imagery.

Their correspondence lasted more than one year - Bobrov managed to spend 8 years in exile, everyone forgot him, except for Pasternak, who regularly sent money to Bobrov, thanks to which he survived. He returned, not surprisingly, a completely different person, to an essentially different country and a completely changed translation environment: during this time, views on translation have changed dramatically.

All the guidelines of the Gorky World Literature were rejected, the so-called "Soviet realistic translation" prevailed. If translators from world literature, scientists, high connoisseurs of different cultural traditions, sought to make the reader feel the difference between Arabic, English, French, Spanish, Chinese and other poetry, now the main thing was the comprehensibility of the translation to the general reader. Bobrov - it is not for us to judge him - quickly became imbued with new trends (and he hardly had a choice).

One way or another, he was eager to create from Chinese poetry, to which he was committed, such texts that would be understandable to the proletariat. He wrote an extremely arrogant article as a preface to his translations, where he dragged everyone in - both Europeans and someone else, trying, completely without knowing the matter, to explain the essence of Chinese poetry. And then he did not hesitate to write a long letter to Alekseev, saying in plain text that he was outdated, did not understand translation well, and was poorly versed in Chinese poetry, lagged behind. But with all this, he condescendingly invited the scientist to participate in the book of Chinese translations he conceived on new, “progressive” grounds.

The shocked Alekseev tried to explain to his colleague, refusing the flattering offer, that he was “a Russian scientist, not an insolent one”; he did not heed and even pretended not to understand what it was about. However, he stopped insisting.

Bobrov, of course, had talent and had an ear. Here is one of his transcriptions, so that you feel that this is not an empty bag:

The wind of living inspiration floats,

I will not touch the signs.

You don't touch me, words,

My unquenchable sadness.

Truth rules in empty clouds

A moment - and I will arise with you,

Full to the brim. Like a lotus I

Curled up in the wind - I hide.

Air dust dances through the void,

Droplets of darkness - sea mist:

Myriads crowd, soar, glide -

And a single world will form a wave.

This is his version of Sykun Tu's poem, in which one of the main postulates of the Chinese poetic tradition is carried out - all the meanings behind the words. “Without putting a single sign, I can exhaust the breath-fluidity,” the poet claims. And Bobrov’s deep thought (he is a little more clearly expressed in Alekseyev’s paraphrase: “A poet, without denoting it with a single word, can fully express the whole living current of his inspiration”) is expressed tritely and indistinctly: “The wind of living inspiration floats, I will not touch the signs I". It seems that he simply did not understand what the Chinese said. Or did not believe Alekseev. After all, he had other authorities.

On this instructive case it would be possible to end our story. But still, there is something else that needs to be said.

After the war, when the “great friendship” with China began, transfers began to flow in full flow. In 1957, the four-volume Classical Chinese Poetry was published. Today, before the lecture, I looked at the table of contents: more than 90% of translators are literary day laborers, laborers of translation. Well, the quality of work is the same. And where did the masters come from in the right amount - thousands of the most difficult lines needed to be translated almost instantly, four volumes were published in one year, the executive editor N.T. Fedorenko served in China on the diplomatic side, no one looked after the translators, and they translated - and God knows what.

However, this edition is rather a sign of the times than a stage in translation evolution.

It should not be forgotten that during the war he defended his dissertation, in which a translation of about 260 poems by Bo Ju-yi, already mentioned by L.Z. Eidlin, and he was the only Russian Sinologist known to me, translated so accurately that he risked including his literary translations in scientific works, considering them, quite rightly, to be so “quotable” that the usual philological translations were no longer needed. Eidlin continued to work until the mid-80s. True, he translated very little.

Usually in scientific papers, interlineators are still used. He is the only one in the dissertation and later ... The only thing that he translated was extremely little. And, in general, of all Bo Jui's quatrains, he translated one quarter. Then he published a book of translations, which was his doctoral dissertation, about the poet Tao Yan Ming, of whom only 170 poems remain. I talked quite a lot with Eidlin, but I did not dare to ask, he did not translate all 170 poems either. Someone can stop misunderstanding of the text. Eidlin understood everything masterfully. Here is some poetic oddity.

I will name a few more names, these are my colleagues with whom I communicated and lived nearby in translation. It was a close and benevolent community, I am extremely grateful to them. Most of them, unfortunately, have passed away.

I will mention the Moscow translator Leonid Cherkassky, who left for Israel in the early 1990s and died there more than ten years later. He translated the great Chinese poet Cao Zhi, studied a lot of new Chinese poetry, and was almost the only one who translated poets of the 20th century in our country.

Lev Menshikov, an outstanding world-class Sinologist from St. Petersburg, who translated all his life, but modestly never published. We ended up together in 1989 in China, and both for the first time, although he was much older. On the train, he told me: “If I die in this China (he was afraid of the climate there), then please print my translated poems.” Thank God, he lived for years and years, saw a collection of his translations, to the publication of which I was fortunate enough to have a hand. He translated wonderfully, very accurately, and with all the accuracy - into rhyme, it was his idea-fix that needs to be translated into rhyme.

Another figure very significant in translation is Boris Vakhtin. A talented playwright, prose writer, professional sinologist, he published two collections of Chinese folk songs in his translation. Due to a combination of many, not always plausible circumstances, his translations became the object of condescending criticism in an article by L.Z. Eidlin "Ideas and Facts". This article was directed against the well-known Japanist N.I. Konrad, whose younger friend was B. Vakhtin, and aimed at Konrad's favorite idea of ​​the Eastern Renaissance. Bakhtin shared the idea, but actually it had nothing to do with his translations, except that the preface to the second book was composed by Konrad and promoted "Renaissance" thoughts in it. It seemed to Eidlin not enough to sniff (in my opinion, to a large extent to the point) the author of Konrad's idea; he undertook the irreverent task of proving that Vakhtin could not read Chinese poetry.

It was somehow not accepted in the sinologists corporation to write devastating reviews even on very weak translations, at worst, they wrote a private letter, noting oversights and failures.

And mistakes in our craft happen to everyone. By the way, Eidlin's teacher Alekseev noted many cases of incorrect translation in Eidlin himself, who was not yet a master at that time. But what can I say: I happened to prepare for publication a book of unpublished translations of Alekseev, and there were many mistakes! The Chinese said that "the mast was upright" - Alekseev writes that "the mast was lying." Why? Don't know! Have you looked and thought? True, I dealt, in essence, with draft translations.

And B. Vakhtin was a good translator. He died suddenly at the age of 50. Only two books of translations remained after him.

And - who has moved away from translating classical poetry in recent years, unfortunately - my classmate and fellow student at the institute, a contemporary whom we knew as Lenya Bodylkina, and he, turning to writing, took the pseudonym Bezhin and under this pseudonym became a famous prose writer . In translation from Chinese, he left a noticeable mark.

Of the non-Sinologists, it is necessary to mention, of course, Alexander Gitovich, who made an era in our craft, who in the 50s mysteriously ended up as a correspondent in warring Korea, where he was impressed not so much by the war (although he wrote a few things that did not need to be written), but by nature Korea - indeed, impressively beautiful, in those years completely untouched by civilization. Then, somehow, “by adjacency,” he switched to China - perhaps this was due to the fact that Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, who was his neighbor in Komarov, began to translate Chinese from interlinear to earn money, and he followed. And translated a lot.

For their time, these translations were comparable to Marshak's translations in terms of fame and influence on people who were interested in China. They are also comparable in their approach to the material - now it has become almost a good tone to prove that Marshak did not understand Shakespeare. He understood, but at this time, when translation became not an intensive, but an extensive matter, when it was necessary to involve as many people as possible in reading world classics, Marshak's translations (were) explanatory. Gitovich's translations were about the same explanatory. A wonderful sinologist Boris Mikhailovich Pankratov, a former Russian intelligence officer in China, worked with him. He knew the language grandiosely - he turned into a monk and into whom he just did not turn.

And, probably, one of the few main people in my life is Arkady Akimovich Steinberg, an artist, an outstanding poet, a translator who translated Milton's Paradise Lost into Russian verse. From his youth, having read Wang Wei's treatise "On Painting" translated by Alekseev, he dreamed of translating Wang Wei's poems.

In the early 70s, after completing Milton, he asked me to do interlinear. I didn't know a damn thing, I didn't even know what it was. And Chinese poetry, barely graduating from the University, read rather weakly. In general, I gave him this ... He was a very courteous, polite person, he did not condemn me in any way. On the other hand, I found him an excellent scientific expert, V. Sukhorukov, who worked with Steinberg on Wang Wei. Their joint (Steinberg insisted on this) book turned out to be a wonderful miracle.

In order, so to speak, to loop the plot with the jasper porch and acquaint you with the handwriting of the master, I will give the Steinberg translation of Li Po's poem already known to you:

On the porch of jade

white frost lay in bulk.

Wet in the long night

lace patterned stockings.

At home, the canopy is transparent

lowered, sat down by the window;

Through the crystal drops

looks at the autumn moon.

As you can see, Steinberg translated masterfully. In his translations, Chinese poets are truly remarkable, if you have not read it, read it, enjoy it. But, as almost always happens in translation, “if you pull out your nose, the tail will get stuck”: because of this high skill, the Chinese verses in Steinberg’s translations acquire some kind of decisive certainty, which, perhaps, is not in the original, built on reticence, omissions.

I hope I didn’t miss any of the major translators, if I missed it, I’m sorry.

Now about why, from my point of view, all their works turned out to be, by and large, a failure. I have already mentioned one of the reasons by mentioning Gasparov's remark about Gnedich's translation of the Iliad. A special language is no less necessary for translating ancient Chinese verses than for translating the Iliad.

Why is it needed? Not even because the poems are written in Chinese, and the Chinese language is radically different from Russian. All the poetry that we call "Chinese classics" is poetry of a medieval type. This is the Middle Ages with which Europe parted in the Renaissance, not immediately, but parted. And China continued to exist in this medieval culture until 1911; the idea of ​​transferring this poetry, which is alien in word and spirit, to everyday modern Russian language seems to me stillborn, and individual successes - they, of course, happened - do not change things.

I will also note one particular, perhaps not the most important. Any, the most modest poet of modern times, the most inconspicuous, comes into literature in order to say something new that no one has said before him. The medieval Chinese poet lives with a fundamentally different attitude. He looks, as it were, back into tradition, knowing that everything has already been in it. And his task is to make this “already former” intelligible for his contemporaries by the maximum effort of his spiritual forces. Hence the apparent monotony of Chinese verses, hence their imaginary simplicity. After all, almost everything important is hidden in the depths, it is behind the line. And we, translating and reading translations, are content with obvious and not at all the main meanings; the main thing inevitably eludes us.

The whole centuries-old movement of Chinese poetry is a relentless choice of a model in the past, in order to, by imitating, somehow change this past and update it for today. And, of course, this is a language that very early ceased to be understandable by ear. This is a "dead language", which had its own grammar, vocabulary, and specifics. The entire poetic tradition in China has been created in this long silent language. So, without creating a special - I don’t know which one, I don’t dare to fantasize - a language in the translation of old Chinese poems is indispensable. In a word, Gnedich is required.

In conclusion, I will read you a poem translated by Lev Zalmovich Eidlin. Perhaps this is just one of the happy exceptions in the series of our professional failures.

I remember, in my youth, when I did not know what bitterness was,

I used to like to climb the tower.

I used to like to climb the tower

And compose poems in which he sang to himself about imaginary sorrows ...

Now, when I know to the end what bitterness is,

I would like to talk about them, but I am silent about them.

I would like to talk about them, but I am silent about them,

And about that I say how pleasant the day is, how beautiful autumn is!

Unfortunately, I didn't have time to say a lot of important things. But thanks for your attention.

Lecture discussion

Boris Dolgin: Thank you very much, Ilya Sergeevich. And I have a lot of questions and, I'm sure, the audience. Before questions, I would like to say a few words about the fact that our today's lecturer is actually related to the topic in very different ways. This was partly clear from the story, but perhaps not completely.

I introduced him in his current position, but did not say that Ilya Sergeevich worked in the eastern editorial office of the Nauka publishing house and was an editor for many years. Secondly, I did not say that Ilya Sergeevich created and published collections of translations of Chinese poetry; many books were published in his own translations.

Thus, there are several points of view and, of course, it is very interesting when they are all combined in one person: from the author through the person who works with this as an editor, collector, to a researcher and translator. But I will start with my question, then I will alternate. When you spoke about the anthology of 1914, did you say that from the present moment, perhaps, one can look at this translation not so pessimistically?

Ilya Smirnov Yes, sorry, I had this ring composition in my head, but I got tired and missed the necessary conclusion. I had to discuss the situation with Chinese translations with Gasparov. Many of his thoughts seemed to me very curious, and his practice of experimental translations seemed even more interesting. He published them as a separate book. In short, the essence of the Gaspard experiment is as follows. he translates the poem, and then says: “Look, there are a lot of superfluous words here, they give nothing to either the mind or the heart, they are empty.” And - oops! - squeezed out all these unnecessary words.

Sometimes the reverse move was used: Gasparov took a short poem, which, for one reason or another, remained incomprehensible in translation and included the necessary explanations directly into the text. In other words, I did approximately what Yegoriev and Markov, who were scolded so many times, did, with a story about which I began today's lecture. They did it poorly, clumsily, they did not understand Chinese well, and, finally, they were simply not talented. But, if a person comes who has determination, talent, knowledge, perhaps some sense will grow from this.

I tried to do something similar, but I had a different move. I asked myself the question: what are we missing in Chinese translations? Answer: We are out of context. A Chinese connoisseur remembers millions of lines by heart, while reading Chinese verses, a million associations immediately unwind in him, and a small quatrain grows into a mental poetic “lump”.

And I began to write commentaries on the Chinese verse. Not so formal: such and such lived then, this city is located there, but trying to include these comments in the artistic fabric, as far as possible. Most importantly, if there were translations in Russian of at least part of the poems to which this poem referred the Chinese reader, I cited these translations. If there were none, I tried to translate at least some of the poems myself, to expand the context.

I confess that this is not an easy job and I did not have enough gunpowder for a long time. I hope someone will continue to do something similar or turn to Gasparov's idea.

Boris Dolgin: Thank you. Please questions.

Question: Ilya Sergeevich, you mentioned that a tradition has recently arisen of translating twenty Chinese characters into twenty words. When did it happen?

Ilya Smirnov: Not recently at all. Or I misspoke, or you misheard. This was introduced by Alekseev. Before that, there were no rules, as in "The Pipe of China", where, as you remember, twenty hieroglyphs turned into two hundred Russian words. Such was the all-European manner - so translated, for example, the Frenchwoman Judith Gauthier. Alekseev was disgusted by this method, and he came up with the idea and began to translate in such a way that every meaningful Chinese word “responds” to a meaningful Russian word.

Question: Are they trying to keep the rhyme or not?

Boris Dolgin: Yes, about the discussion of rhyming and non-rhyming.

Ilya Smirnov: There is a complicated story here. All Chinese poetry begins with the "Book of Songs", which includes texts from the 11th century BC to the 6th century BC, a colossal length, they are all rhymed. But the evolution of the Chinese language led to the fact that quite early rhymes were no longer perceived as rhymes, phonetics changed. And for the current Chinese reader, classical poetry is practically devoid of rhyme.

In addition, rhyming in Chinese is relatively easy.

And Russian rhyme, as you know, requires a lot of effort. Therefore, one has to choose: rhyme - and then monstrous semantic losses, or the rejection of rhyme for the sake of fullness of meaning, overtones and nuances.

At different periods I translated either into rhyme or not, with exact rhyme and with assonance, but I never found a single recipe for myself. Eidlin never rhymed, but Menshikov always did.

Question: I also wanted to clarify about the rhyme. But I have a general question. Languages ​​- Chinese, Japanese, Korean - do they have a common basis?

Ilya Smirnov: Japanese and Korean have nothing in common with Chinese, except for writing, and in Korea they have not used hieroglyphs for a long time. Japanese and Korean belong to the Altaic languages, Chinese - to the Sino-Tibetan.

Boris Dolgin: We had a lecture by Georgy Starostin on how language kinship is studied. You can watch the recording or transcript.

Question: I wanted to ask about tones in Chinese poetry. More?

Ilya Smirnov: Every Chinese word is pronounced with a certain tone.

Question (continued): Yes, I know it. But what did this give poetry, poetry?

Ilya Smirnov: The alternation of tones, which was set by special rules, gave the line a special melody; in the next line, the melodic pattern changed. Thus, the whole poem acquired a musical originality. It is impossible to reproduce a melodic pattern in Russian, as you understand. Two features of the Chinese poem are irretrievably lost for us - melody and hieroglyphic picturesqueness.

Boris Dolgin: Thank you. Why was Chinese poetry so unlucky in the 1950s? I mean that in the 1950s people began to actively translate not only poetry. Novels and short stories seem to be more fortunate. What's happened?

Ilya Smirnov: Hard to tell. Maybe poetry is a more reverent kind of literature? There is some kind of plot in prose that makes it easier to understand. In addition, in China, fiction appeared much later than poetry and for a long time was considered disrespectful. Although, for example, the novel "The Dream in the Red Chamber" is very, very complex, full of complex symbolism, difficult to decipher and comment on.

Question: Until the 20th century, as far as I know, there was Chinese spoken and Chinese, in which poetry was written. In the 20th century, poetry began to be written in spoken language. Have you looked at translations of poetry from "colloquial Chinese" into Russian, is there something better or worse?

Ilya Smirnov: In any language, written and spoken languages ​​coexist throughout its development. In Chinese, whose history dates back more than one thousand years, the picture is much more complicated. In different eras, the ratio of "spoken language - written language" looked very different. Without delving into this difficult topic, I will say that, for example, the great poet of the Tang time, Bo Juyi, wrote a lot of poems in the spoken language of bai hua and, allegedly, read them to village old women, checking the accessibility of his poetry not only to connoisseurs of high classics. The latter, of course, is a legend. The language of Bo Juyi's poetry is a highly refined version of the colloquial bai hua, hardly understandable by ear even to scholarly contemporaries.

Another thing is that when the traditional exams for official positions were abolished at the beginning of the 20th century, there was no longer any need to learn classical written wenyan and the entire gigantic body of texts written in it, at least for those who were going to make a public career. The state language was assigned to be spoken, which quickly disintegrated into the proper spoken and into the language of written texts. But aren't we? Do we speak the way we write?

Today's poetry is somewhat more complex than the classics. If that one was saturated with allusions, quotations and other signs of traditional verse, then the current one is imbued with the spirit and signs of a fast-paced time, which are not at all easy to catch.

I had to somehow translate the modern Chinese poet Yang Lian, who, by the way, was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize. He left China in the 1980s and lives in England. He is a wonderful poet. His poems are complex with some completely new complexity: they both have a clear echo of poetic classics (Yang Lin's favorite poet is the first ancient poet Qu Yuan known to us by name), and are truly modern - these are free verses, multilayered, saturated with new, unusual imagery. Translation of such verses is incredibly difficult.

Boris Dolgin: And no one is trying on wenyan now?

Ilya Smirnov: I can’t say for sure, but it seems that Mao Tse-tung was the last known character.

Question: You mentioned the problem with Chinese poetry - that Chinese poetry is very voluminous, based on a lot of references to other poems. And without context, it is very difficult to understand them, in order to translate them, you need to “deploy” them several times, or write huge comments on them, explaining for a long time. And I heard that now all Chinese anthologies can be found quickly. There is Albert Krisskoy, who runs a popular Chinese language blog. He had such an example: a poem in which a certain turnover occurs. Based on it, he found in an anthology three poems from different centuries. He laid them out in a row.

Boris Dolgin: Your question is, is it now easier to prepare poems for translation, given the ease of searching for contexts?

Question: Is it possible to group poems not by poet, not by age, but by context? Would it make it easier to understand if we said that the poem is related to this and in this poem?

Ilya Smirnov: The computer certainly makes things easier. You have described exactly what you can do with it. As far back as the 18th century, the Chinese created a multi-volume dictionary called "Pei wen yun fu". it was made by a whole collegium of scholars in order to make it easier for those going to the exams to select elegant expressions to rhyme from thousands and thousands of poets, starting from ancient times. When translating a Chinese poem and encountering some kind of two-syllable / two-word combination, for example, “clear moon”, you can use this dictionary to determine when and by whom this expression was used. Probably, someone will prefer a computer, but to think that a computer will solve all the difficulties of understanding and translating ancient texts, in my opinion, is a serious misconception.

Boris Dolgin: In some ideal future, if you imagine the digitized Chinese classics, perhaps this is not a fantastic task?

Ilya Smirnov: No, not fantastic.

Boris Dolgin: Perhaps one can imagine the rather automated work of a philologist who is preparing some kind of work for publication?

Ilya Smirnov: Yes, but I won’t have to live in this beautiful time. I don't know, anything is possible, but I'm sad to part with the book. Even the process itself is familiar and pleasant: I met a complex turn in the text, got up from the desk, went to the shelf, found the necessary dictionary, found the hieroglyphs ... well, and so many times a day. Probably, someone will prefer manipulations with the computer to all this tediousness.

Boris Dolgin: There was another aspect to the question: the listener asked whether it makes sense sometimes to publish poems not by authors, but by some complexes of poems that are “built” around one poem, for example, and in order to explain it, a set of those with which it is connected. True, then there is the question of what each of those is connected with ...

Ilya Smirnov: Here is the first Russian anthology that Shchutsky translated under the direction of Alekseev, I mentioned it in my lecture - it was organized not chronologically, but thematically. Some themes of Chinese poetry were singled out, six or seven, to which Alekseev wrote amazing introductory explanations, and the verses were grouped according to these themes. There are many thematic Chinese anthologies - old and new: “Poems about wine”, “Poems about tea”, “Poems about parting”. Of course, from such collections it is easier to trace the repetition of motives, the roll call of poets. It would be nice if someone could take on this job.

Boris Dolgin: But in general, the idea of ​​a hypertext, in which links between texts are built multiple times and it is impossible to say whether the text is in this section or in that one, it is in each of the sections for which it is marked up - it is probably somehow close to a multiple understanding of meanings and connections. ?

Ilya Smirnov: From the outside, we are all, of course, outside observers, it is not easy to judge. There are Chinese verses called "shan shui" - "mountains and waters." And to a profane look it seems that these are poems about the beauty of nature. Translators are especially fond of translating them not only here, because these verses are close to the heart of a foreign-language, not Chinese, reader, because this is exactly what they expect from China: so that there is a lake under the moon, a boat floats, and in it a Chinese poet with a thin long beard and something there played on some kind of lute. It's so universal, isn't it?

But these verses are not about that. And about what? Don't say right away. There are a great many landscape poems, it is hard to imagine that all of them implicitly spoke about one thing; every time the poem needs to be analyzed, to get to the deepest meaning.

But as for the corpus of poems about the abandoned concubine, in comparison with the landscape forces of a small one, I have a timid guess: apart from the earliest, around the turn of the new and old era of poems on this plot, written later, outwardly remaining within the framework of the traditional theme, become just poems about love, about love sadness and the like.

I will not now substantiate my guess, which must be checked and verified, but it seems to me that there is something meaningful here. In fact, it is not such a rarity in the world poetic tradition when a living feeling is expressed in frozen, canonized forms. For example, in the old Indian poetry there are also verses in which something completely different is hidden behind the “manifested” meaning.

Apparently, a long tradition develops such specific techniques, when the outer layer, which the layman reads, is very clear and accessible, and the meaning is hidden in the depths, and only experts can understand it.

Boris Dolgin: Thank you. But were there any attempts to publish in the form in which you are talking about the editions of Chinese classical poetry in China, classical, that is, together with the entire set of Chinese commentaries superimposed on it, comments, it does not matter, Russian or European, comments to text or comments to comments? That is, here is such a multi-layered?

Ilya Smirnov: One of the works that Alekseev left behind the impossibility of printing was an attempt to translate not poetry, but the famous monument "Lun Yu" - "Judgments and Conversations" by Confucius. What did Alekseev do? He translated a phrase from a treatise, then translated a classical commentary on it, then translated another commentary of a later time, and then he wrote his own commentary on everything. The impression is amazing.

In this manner he translated several initial chapters. very, very convincingly, but no one was going to print this, and the scientist left such a promising idea. And the modern translator, who undertook the full translation of Lun Yu, wrote in simplicity, they say, translating with the Alekseevsky method is unbearable work, and I will not try. Because the comments are almost more difficult to read than the text itself. Because the text still implies a larger number of readers. And the Chinese commentary is written not so that the text will explain to you and me, but so that the same knowledgeable smart scientist as the author of the commentary understands how smart and learned the author of the commentary is.

Boris Dolgin: Apparently the last question. Why, in your opinion, did Chinese and Japanese poetry in the domestic cultural consciousness take the place it did? Yes, there was Persian poetry somewhere, but by and large, nothing compares to Chinese and Japanese poetry in their status for the Soviet intelligentsia. And this, in part, in general continues. Why? With all that kind of failure.

Ilya Smirnov: I would like to start my speech today with the assertion that Chinese poetry has had a much lesser impact on Russian culture than the Middle Eastern poetic tradition. The entire Russian XIX century is literally full of quotations, allusions, translations, imitations, transcriptions of the best poets of the Persian-Arabic poetic tradition. China, although it is also not overseas, existed until the second half of the 19th century. as if outside of Russian verbal culture. What happened later, when Chinese literature began to be translated, I tried to briefly demonstrate to you.

It seems to me that in the 20th century after 1917, the taste for Arabic-Persian poetry, which became the poetry of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, was spoiled by mass translations of the national poetry of the Soviet republics, which did not smell of any classics, they spoiled the reputation of classical poetry. But the Middle Eastern classics were translated by wonderful poets, the same Arseniy Tarkovsky. But that influence and that admiration that was in the 19th century was not in sight.

The theme of the Caucasus as the abode of an ideally simple life, not spoiled by civilization, has completely disappeared. There, on occasion, it was possible to hide "from pash e y”, that is, from cruel power. In Soviet times, this would have never occurred to anyone.

Boris Dolgin: Is this why the Arab-Persian influence has declined?

Ilya Smirnov: But the thirst to hide from the vigilant gaze of the authorities did not go away, and it became much more difficult to physically move somewhere, so people tried to go into some kind of spiritual retreat, to avoid propaganda chatter. Someone chose ancient literature, someone was closer to Indian wisdom, and someone was attracted by the Far East, including the poetry of Japan and China, elegant, distant, devoid of obsessive didacticism.

Boris Dolgin: Thank you very much for the lecture!