East Asia @ MLA; The Crescent; Freshman Seminars

Back on earth for the next few days.

I. East Asia @ MLA

I first went to Washington DC for the MLA conference, where I gave my paper on Buson and Chinese poetry--the one that I've been thinking about here on the blog. Its official title was "Haikai and Kanshi: Buson's Haishi." I think it went well--we had a nice discussion afterwards. The powerpoint slide show didn't work out, but that's the way of powerpoint. It didn't matter a whole lot. There was a respectable audience, considering it was the Modern Language Association, and we were talking about stuff in classical Japanese. My appreciation goes out to Laurel Rodd and Faye Kleeman for their hard work in establishing a presence for East Asia at the MLA. The way things are now, MLA should really be called something like Modern Languages of the West Association; impressively polyglot as it appears (and it is fun to walk around at the conference listening to all the heteroglossia happening) it's really only focused on part of the world.

On the other hand, given that the people there were pretty much all specialists in modern literature, most of them were interesting to look at. I don't know why it is, but modern literature folks tend to have a much better fashion sense than the usual run of academics (my own disastrous wardrobe does nothing to raise the bar, I admit). While there was a certain amount of dress diversity at the conference and a few real shockers, for the most part these people had taken time out from their dangerous left-wing intellectualizing to shop for outfits. It was very impressive.

II. The Crescent

From DC I went home on Amtrak, on the train called The Crescent which travels from New York to New Orleans. I love Amtrak and wish it were better looked after by the people who are in a position to look after it. The journey took 10 hours--considerably longer than a flight would have--so it's not something I can ordinarily do. Being of a rather sensitive and misanthropic nature, I would have preferred the solitary confinement of one of the little sleeper cabins, but they were sold out by the time I made my reservation so I took my chances in an open carriage. There are drawbacks to this--other passengers will insist on carrying on with their lives and personalities, even in public--but I was ready for them, and I enjoyed my journey.

I was sorry not to have a window by my seat. However, it was dark for most of the trip, and by the time the sun rose we were already in familiar territory, so it wasn't that big a deal.

Trains are absolutely magical and soothing. I love the sounds they make, gliding over the rails, rocking gently, creaking now and then. I love the sound of the whistle, of passing trains moving in the opposite direction. I love the anxious expectancy when the train comes to a stop, whether in a station or not. Most of all I was pleased to have the opportunity to be quiet and think. You get a lot of thinking time on a train. I highly recommend it.

III. Freshman Seminars

I saw news about Freshman Seminars on Yahoo today. It says that oddball freshman seminars are a real hit these days (well, read it for yourself!). I was encouraged by this, because I'm teaching a freshman seminar next semester that some might think oddball (I don't--it's basically Great Books of China and Japan). Wishing myself luck with it.

posted by C A Crowley @ 8:10 PM

Island of Light; More Buson + Chinese Poetry

Island of Light

It's Christmas Eve.

Writing to you from a quiet, shining place surrounded by a distant sea. The clouds are very thin today, faintly moving across pale icy blue. Bare branches of trees reach out to the sky absently, holding their lives still in winter sleep.

....

More Buson + Chinese Poetry

What was the relationship between haikai and kanshi?

The Japanese wrote poetry in Chinese for centuries, more or less. The form experienced a revival in the 17th century as part of the emergence of cultural discourse related to the figure of the bunjin or literatus. One of the people most famously associated with this development was the scholar, teacher, and poet Ogyû Sorai (1666-1728), whose teachings emphasized the actual production of Chinese poetry in addition to reading and interpreting the work of classical Chinese poets.

This was contemporaneous with the development of haikai. In some ways haikai might seem unrelated to kanshi, because it was written in Japanese and its metrical structure was very different from those in Chinese poetry. But haikai did have many things in common with kanshi, most importantly perhaps the fact that many of the people who wrote haikai also wrote kanshi, and emulated the bunjin lifestyle.

One conspicuous instance of the close relationship between kanshi and haikai was the emergence of the kanshibunchô, of the middle of the 17th century, a literary, elevated style that drew on kanshi for its models. This was most closely associated with the Danrin school of haikai, but its most well-known proponent was Matsuo Bashô himself, who composed in this style during his early years. The following Bashô hokku is a good example. It opens with a headnote in Chinese, a quote from the Tang poet Li Bo (701-762), "In times of sorrow, one learns reverence for wine. In times of poverty, one realizes the sacredness of pennies:"

under the blossoms, the floating world
my sake is white
my rice is black

hana ni ukiyo waga sake shiroku meshi kuroshi


The speaker is poor, as his sake is milky with lees and his rice has not been adequately milled. The awareness of his poverty causes him to have a keener appreciation of cherry blossoms as emblematic of the sadness of life even as he sits down to his meal. While the sentiment of the verse is not unusual in Japanese poetry, its language is quite striking. Even without the Chinese headnote, its parallel structure (white sake, black rice) recalls kanshi. It is also far more blunt and intellectual than the oblique, highly nuanced verse at which Bashô excelled in his later years: the meaning of the poem is expressed with little ambiguity, and it offers the reader the challenge of figuring out the source of headnote and the delight of the poet's cleverness in reworking it into this context.

posted by C A Crowley @ 7:12 AM

Into the Light

Weblog Yahantei takes to the air for the next ten days, crossing clouds toward the sunrise beyond the cold grey sea. We hope to make updates, possibly with pictures, but we don't know whether that will be possible.

We wish everyone a peaceful and safe winter holiday.

Listen to BBC Radio 4's Tsunami Memorial broadcast either live on the radio on December 17, from 8-9 pm (BST) or later through the Radio 4 website.

posted by C A Crowley @ 12:30 PM

Buson and Chinese Poetry IV

Been reading through Eri Yasuhara's dissertation on Buson's haishi, called Buson and Haishi: A Study of Free-form Haikai Poetry in 18th Century Japan (1982). If you're interested in haiku, and have read most of the easily available books out there but want to learn a bit more, I really recommend it. College or university libraries can get dissertations with no problem, but if you are not affiliated with such a library, ask your public library's reference desk for some help. Dr. Yasuhara's writing is really wonderful for its sheer clarity, and she covers a huge amount of information that isn't available anywhere else in English. I just loved reading it, even though it was on microfilm and I seldom use microfilm.

Title of my talk:

"Haikai and Kanshi: Yosa Buson's Haishi" (I know that's pretty unspectacular, but I hope it is at least serviceable)

Here's how my talk starts:

Yosa Buson (1716-1783) was famous for both his painting and his poetry. In a period of Japanese history when the impact of Chinese discouse was prarticularly strong, Buson presents an especially interesting subject for study. The genre of painting with which he is most commonly associated is nanga (literally, "southern" painting), a Japanese form of Chinese literati landscape painting. Whie he did not write kanshi (Japanese poetry in Chinese), his haikai verse is often compared to Chinese poetry; indeed, no less an observer than Ueda Akinari described Buson's verse as "kanagaki no shi", Chinese shi poetry written in Japanese.

While the majority of Buson's poetic output took the form of conventional haikai--he composed about 2,800 hokku (17-syllable verses) and participated in some 120 linked verse sequences, he also wrote three verses that were highly unconventional and exceptional--Hokuju Rôsen o itamu [Mourning for the Sage Hokuju] (1745? published 179?), Shunpû batei no kyoku [Song of the Spring Wind on the Kema Embankment] (1777), and Denga ka [Yodo River Songs] (1777). While haikai was typically short and kept to the 5-7-5 or 7-7 syllable structures that had formed the foundations of Japanese poetry for centuries, these three verses follow entirely different and largely unprecedented formats: they mix phrases of standard Japanese poetic vocabulary with relatively straightforward literary Chinese, and these are combined with hybrid passages that bring together elements of both.

How are we to read Buson's haishi? What sorts of insights can they offer into not only the development of Japanese poetry in this period, but into the way that Japanese artists and intellectuals like Buson understood the relationship between Japan and China? I will argue that Buson's haishi offer a glimpse into a way of conceptualizing China that emerged during the eighteenth century--of China as home, rather than Other, a site of nostalgia and longing for an imaginary past.

Concepts of landscape and human beings' place in it were fundamental to haikai. The genre's greatest proponent, Matsuo Bashô, was quoted as saying "One cannot have confidence in the fûryû (poetic sensibility) of those who do not know some part of the Tôkaidô [Great eastern highway] (Honchô monzen). His most famous works are poeticized accounts of journeys, like Nozarashi kikô [Record of a weather-beaten skeleton] and Oku no hosomichi [Narrow road to the interior]. That Bashô was able to make such a close identification beween travel and haikai was facilitiated by the improvements in travel-related infrastructure (bad phrasing I know) that were made during the reign of the Tokugawa shogunate. Once extremely dangerous and restricted, travel in the 17th and 18th century began to take on a different character, and was accessible to a different class of person. Travel especially for the purpose of pilgrimage--often more like modern tourism than expressions of religious devotion--came within the reach of increasing numbers of commoners. Historian Peter Nosco has argued that these changes led to a new way of conceptualizing Japan, a change in attitude that people--that is to say, commoners--had in their ideas of Japan as a nation. He argues that a new "spatial orientation" began to become more general in Japan. a view of the country that "transcended the boundaries of village, kuni (province) and sub-region as a whole.

Nosco argues that this is connected to another change in this period—a concept of Japan as a place that was part of an international order. It is common to characterize the spatial orientation of Japan as one of "center and periphery," with two focii—a cultural one in Kyoto and a political one in Edo, beyond which radiated circles of kuni and regions. Beyond this, however, "periphery" in the early modern period extended to include Ezo, the Ryûkyû Islands, Korea, and beyond them, China. Even the most distant area included in that periphery, China, was space that has lost its foreignness; it was an idealized place, one that the Japanese only imagined through texts and paintings. As Nosco writes, "China began to function less as someplace 'real' and more at the level of metaphor, as an expression of that which was deemed to be mature, wise, rational, and grandiose—a perfect Other against which a new sense of Japaneseness could be constructed."

posted by C A Crowley @ 12:00 AM

Buson and Chinese Poetry III

Some more thinking about Buson and Chinese poetry. I'm giving a paper at the upcoming MLA conference about the topic, and these are some of the things I'm thinking about.

I'm going to be talking not about Buson's hokku (i.e. 5-7-5 syllable poems, what is normally called haiku today). Rather, I'm going to concentrate on his haishi, free-form verse in a haikai style.
I'm still working out the details yet, and I will try to write them out on the blog as I do. For the moment, here's what I know:

A. Buson wrote three haishi.

1. Mourning for the Sage Hokuju
2. Song of the Spring Wind on the Kema Embankment
3. Yodo River Songs

B. All of these focus on longing and loss; nostalgia, for a better word. (1) is an elegy for an older friend/patron who died when Buson was in his late 20s. It's not clear when he wrote it--perhaps at the time, perhaps years later. (2) and (3) are especially interesting insofar as he takes a female point of view to write them. In (2) he describes meeting a servant-girl who is on the way home for her one holiday a year; moved by her charm, he composes a poem series as if was speaking in her voice. (3) is a dialogue between a courtesan and her client; the courtesan urges her client/lover to stay with her, the client/lover demurs, the courtesan speaks of her sadness.

I say (2) and (3) are "especially interesting" but in fact all three are equally interesting--and extraordinarily powerful, too. They have a haikai-esque quality to them, that's certain, but they also owe a great deal in their form and their evocativeness to Chinese poetry.

It's my job to somehow make sense of this.

More to follow.

posted by C A Crowley @ 2:43 PM

Buson and Chinese Poetry II; Housebling

1. Buson and Chinese Poetry II

Still thinking about Buson and Chinese poetry. I'm reading a book now called Kanshi to haiku by YOSHIKAWA Hatsuki, which is no help at all for the paper I'm trying to write. (Its unhelpfulness is not because of any deficiencies in the book itself--it's a fine book.) But here's a Buson verse and the Chinese poem to which it alludes, for what it's worth:

spring rains
beneath the bridges
at Shijô and Gojô

shunsui ya Shijô Gojô no hashi no shita

Shijô and Gojô are streets in Kyoto. Some pictures of Kyoto's Kamogawa river and its bridges today are here.

The poem is by early Tang poet LIU Tingzhi (651-679). For the full text of the poem and information about the poet go here. It's in Japanese, but there's some nice pictures.

Beneath the bridge, spring waters flow,
Across the bridge, splendid youths pass.
Horses' neighing carries beyond the blue clouds.
People's shadows shimmer within the green waves.
Polished by the waves, jewels become as sand,
Wrapped in blue clouds, brocade turns into mist.
Charming willows are trees that wound the heart.
Charming peach and pear trees have blossoms that touch your soul.

(It goes on another 20 or so lines but maybe I'd best end the butchery here. At least it gives you an idea of how different Chinese poetry is from haiku. Corrections from anybody out there who is better informed about Tang poetry are welcome. )

Visit 300 Tang Poems for some great Tang poems: Chinese + nice English translations.

2. House Bling

This blog links you to pictures of houses in the UK that have been garishly decorated for the winter holidays.

The spirit of haiku is to rejoice in the changes of the seasons, including annual celebrations. While English speakers commonly associate haiku with restraint and Zen-like austerity, plenty of haiku was tasteless, too, back in the day. So I can't help but think that housebling is no less haiku than highly sensitive evocations of snow and shigure (intermittent rains).

The nights are even longer now. The bling reminds us.

posted by C A Crowley @ 6:01 PM

Rui Magone on the Chinese Examination System

Professor Rui Magone of the Free University of Berlin came to give a talk at Emory on Tuesday. The title of his talk was "Poetic Justice: Literature in the Civil Examinations of Imperial China." It was a really interesting overview of an incredibly complicated and long-lived institution that shaped Chinese social, political, and cultural life for centuries.

Pre-modern China was governed by an enormous bureaucracy, and in order to become a bureaucrat you had to make it through a torturous hierarchy of examinations. The people with the least ambitions were content with passing local exams; really toughminded and dedicated ones with resources at their disposal could work their way up through regional all the way to the imperial metropolitan exams.

The main focus of the examinations was literature: the Confucian classics, mainly poetry, history, and ethics. For the most part, "practical" knowledge--i.e., knowledge about the actual business of running the government--was not addressed.

This was the focus of Dr. Magone's talk; or as he put it, "the question of why belles-lettres instead of scientific knowledge, dominated the examination discourse of imperial China;" as well as "the paradigm according to which the civil examinations were responsible for the ultimate collapse of the Chinese empire."

The talk was particularly interesting because Dr. Magone told us lots of details about what it was like to actually be a candidate for these examinations. He showed pictures of the kinds of little "cells" that candidates had to sit inside to take the exams; he explained the elaborate procedures for attempting to ensure fairness (the stakes were extremely high for candidates, and cheating and corruption were rampant). He showed us pictures of the actual exam papers, and explained how candidates composed their answers. One person he talked about took the same exam about 10 times, and didn't pass until he was 42.

Keep an eye out for Dr. Magone's book on this subject--he's an excellent speaker, so I imagine he must be a terrific writer too.

Dr. Magone's web page (in German) is here. Also, here is a link to his courses (most of it in German too, but there are pictures), which sound absolutely amazing. He does things like have his students dress up in costumes and go to the local Chinese garden to read classical Chinese literature out loud. In his class "Tour de Chine," he focuses on a different province every time, taking you on a tour through both the geography and history of China at the same time. Wow. I'd love to be a student in a class like that.

It's Kara's birthday today! Weblog Yahantei wishes her a great year!

posted by C A Crowley @ 11:56 PM