Of myths, overarching generalizations, and grains of truth

Hi-

The subject line explains my thoughts on the Ernest Fenollosa article, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” (Prose Keys to Modern Poetry, p. 136-155). Namely, there are overarching generalizations that border on myth. I’m more generous on said generalizations than Alvin Cohen, who rather bluntly (although not without reason) wrote that the “every character is a picture” idea is a myth. Yet these generalizations also contain some grains of truth.

To take one simple example, let’s go back to “every character is a picture.” In absolute terms, that’s true for a few to some characters.

However, the “grain of truth” in this context is that a radical, which serves as the “root” set of strokes in a character and thus allows you to look up a character, can be and sometimes is indicative of something in the world. In other words, a few to some radicals are, in a way, pictures.

Also, each character is based on and contains a radical (in a few to some cases, the radical is the character). The radical contributes to the character’s meaning.

Let’s take some examples. You probably already know that the character for “wood” is:

木 (mu4)

As you can see, this character looks like a tree. Incidentally, this character is also the root for the character for tree, which is:

樹/树 (shu4)

Given that a tree consists of wood, the connection here is easy to make.

Likewise, characters that refer to “forest,” “underbrush,” “wilderness,” etc., are:

森林 (sen1lin2)

As you can see, both characters are based on the same radical. They also represent multiple trees, which a forest basically consists of.

Now for another example. The character for “person” is:

人 (ren2) Just two strokes, but they represent the legs of a person – kind of like a stick figure.

As you may have already learned, this character is the radical for pronouns like “you” (masculine):

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你 (ni3)

Likewise, the pronoun for “he” or “him” is:

他 (ta1)

The characters for both pronouns are based on the radical for person, which is drawn differently but still has the same number of strokes. It’s located to the right side of each character, appearing as a slanted line that’s joined in the center by a vertical line. Given that the pronouns refer to other people (“second-person” and “third-person”), you can see the connection here as well.

I have three more examples left before I move on, so bear with me……

The character for “water,” as you know, is:

水 (shui3)

It’s also the radical for many characters that relate to water, such as the character for “river” or “stream”:

河 (he2)

Likewise, the character for “lake”:

湖 (hu2)

The character for “water”,” also the root for the two characters I just listed, is located to the left but drawn differently. It’s drawn as three strokes or, if you will, three dashes. Two downward dashes and one upward dash. In Mandarin Chinese, this re-writing or re-drawing is called三點水/三点水/san1dian3shui3. Literally, “three drops of water.” Those three dashes basically represent water currents.

Finally, the characters for “fish” and “bird,” respectively, are:

魚/ 鱼 (yue2) and 鳥/鸟 (niao3)

These characters are also radicals for many characters that involve fish and birds (e.g., specific species and breeds, “standard” physical features of fish and birds, etc.).

Now, moving on to Fenollosa’s remarks on Chinese grammar. He draws far too wide a brush by writing, “The Chinese language naturally knows no grammar” (p 145). To state the obvious, any

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language has a set of grammatical rules. But, of course, context matters. Fenollosa introduces examples on pages 139, 140, and 154 which point to the direct, blunt, and concise qualities of written Chinese, whether in the vernacular, the classical, or the so-called “four-ideogram phrases,” which are essentially Chinese slang and/or proverbs in condensed form. These qualities basically allow a Chinese writer/speaker to grasp and elucidate the essentials of a given situation that s/he is describing.

The Denma Translation Group notes said qualities in its explanation (“About the Translation,” p. 225-229) of its own translation of 孫子兵法/孙子兵法/Sūnzĭ bīngfǎ, or Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (this translation first appeared in 2001/2002 and became reprinted in 2009: http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-War-Translation-Commentary/dp/1590307283 ). The group writes, aptly, “Classical Chinese reads more slowly than the vernacular-based languages of the modern world. It has a blocky, measured rhythm, partway between our conceptions of poetry and prose” (p. 225). Given that this group did a translation of The Art of War backed up with extensive commentary (section by section as well as conceptually), it only mentions the grammatical “nature” of classical Chinese (文言文/wen2yan2wen2). However, the vernacular Chinese (白話/白话/bai2hua4) also has a similar “quality.”

Let’s return to Fenollosa’s own examples. For example, “man sees horse” in p. 140. This is probably the easiest and most straightforward example that we can work with. Let’s reproduce the sentence:

人見馬/ 人见马 (ren2jian4ma3)

As Fenollosa writes, the translation is pretty straightforward. The literal translation is essentially correct: “Man sees horse.” There’s a direct correspondence between each Chinese character and English word. But in “actual” or “fluid” English, “Man sees horse,” is not enough. In and of itself, “Man sees horse” reads like a fragment that merely represents an idea, in this case a person seeing a horse. Obviously, in “proper” English, a better presentation of that translation would be “A man sees a horse,” “The man sees a horse,” “A person sees a horse,” or “People see horses.” Yet in the original Chinese, to write “Man sees horse” (in characters, of course) is neither grammatically awkward nor grammatically erroneous. Character by character, word by word, you get the basic idea without “extra” yet “necessary” wording (“necessary” in English, that is) such as “a” or “the.”

As Pierre Ryckmans, better known as Simon Leys, notes, “[Ezra] Pound correctly observed that a Chinese poem is not articulated upon a continuous, discursive thread, but that it flashes a discontinuous series of images (not unlike the successive frames of a film)” (The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics, p. 12). Likewise, Leys adds, “The pictorial resources of classical Chinese free the poet from all such verbose detours and from the need to express logical connections; he does not explain, he does not narrate – he makes us see and feel directly. What he presents the reader with is not a statement but an actual experience” (The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics, p. 13). Both quotes come from the

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section “Painting and Poetry,” pages 8-15, in “Poetry and Painting: Aspects of Chinese Classical Esthetics” in Ryckmans/Leys’s The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics (1986/1987). Of course, he was writing about classical Chinese literature such as poetry, but his essential point just as well applies to a simple sentence about a person seeing a horse, which Fenollosa uses as an example.

Fenollosa should have written, instead, that there is grammatical flexibility within Chinese. He more or less alludes to it throughout the article. You see that flexibility when Fenollosa writes, “The fact is that almost every written Chinese word is properly just such an underlying word, and yet it is not abstract. It is not exclusive of parts of speech, but comprehensive; not something which is neither a noun, verb, or adjective, but something which is all of them at once and at all times” (p. 146). Let’s take two examples. Here’s the first - the character for “sickness,” “disease,” or “illness” is:

病 (bing4)

Clearly, it’s a noun. But it becomes part of an adjective when you refer to a sick person, in which you write:

有病的 人 (you3bing4de5ren2)

Literally, the phrase says “with sickness (of) person.” Of course, in “proper” English, it means “sick person” or “ill person.”

Now here’s a second example. The Chinese term for “socialism” is:

社會主義 / 社会主义 (she4hui4zhu3yi4)

It’s also a noun. But with the character 的 (which, depending on the context, you can translate as “of.” It basically refers to characteristic and/or possession, very generally speaking), it becomes an adjective when we write “socialist country”:

社會主義的國 家/社会主义 的国家(she4hui4zhu3yi4de5guo2jia1)

Literally, it reads in English translation as “socialism (of) country.” In “fluid” English, it’s “socialist country.”

Long story short, although Fenollosa makes sweeping generalizations that an actual Sinologist can, for good reason, dismiss as myths, grains of truth still exist which are helpful for any student of Mandarin Chinese.

References:

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Fenollosa, Ernest, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” (p. 136-155), in Karl Shapiro, Prose Keys to Modern Poetry, Joanna Cotler Books, December 1962. Link: http://www.amazon.com/Prose-Keys-Modern-Poetry-Shapiro/dp/0060459506/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1434315719&sr=8-1&keywords=prose+keys+to+modern+poetry

Leys, Simon. The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1986, 1987. Link: http://www.amazon.com/Burning-Forest-Chinese-Culture-Politics/dp/0805003509/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1434315839&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Burning+Forest%3A+Essays+on+Chinese+Culture+and+Politics

Sun Tzu and the Denma Translation Group (tr.). The Art of War: Translation, Essays & Commentary. Boston & London: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 2001, 2002, 2009. Link: http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-War-Translation-Commentary/dp/1590307283

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