Remarks by Witter Bynner | V2Melody Quotations

“I have hoped rather to accent in these T'ang masterpieces the human and universal qualities by which they have endured.”

Stating his aim of preserving the enduring human qualities of the poems in translation · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

“Whenever possible, I have avoided phraseology which, natural and familiar in Chinese, would be exotic or quaint in English.”

Explaining his preference for natural English rather than artificial exoticism · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

“At the risk of criticism, I have made certain reasonable compromises.”

Frankly acknowledging the practical choices required when translating across cultures · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

“Because of the absence of tenses, of personal pronouns and of connectives generally, the translator of Chinese poetry, like the Chinese reader himself, has considerable leeway as to interpretation.”

Recognising the interpretative freedom and responsibility involved in translating Chinese verse · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

“The head of a man and the heart of a child working together as in the Chinese have made possible with one race and may make possible with any race, even in the thick of the most intricate culture, the continuance of the purest poetry.”

Arguing that maturity of mind and openness of feeling can preserve poetry within complex cultures · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

“The cynics are wrong who see in our future no place for an art which belongs, they say, to the childhood of the race.”

Defending poetry against predictions that modernity would make it obsolete · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

“It is not necessary that culture bring about the death of poetry, as it did in the Rome of Virgil.”

Rejecting the idea that sophisticated civilisation must inevitably weaken poetry · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

“That passionate patience which is the core of life.”

Condensing Bynner's ideal of attentive, enduring engagement with existence · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

“They bring the true, the beautiful, the everlasting, into simple, easy touch with the human, the homely, and the immediate.”

Praising poetry that connects enduring truths with ordinary human experience · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

“They are the heart of an intimate letter.”

Characterising the finest poems as direct, personal acts of communication · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

“If we will be honest with ourselves and with our appreciation of what is lastingly important, we shall find these very same poems to be momentous details in the immense patience of beauty.”

Finding lasting significance in poems whose effects are quiet rather than spectacular · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

“For our taste, used as we are to the operatic in poetry, the substance of Chinese poems seems often mild or even trivial.”

Contrasting Western dramatic expectations with the restraint of Chinese verse · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

Art
Poetry

“They prove that the simplest common sense, the most salutary, and the most nearly universal, is the sense of the beauty of nature, quickened and yet sobered by the wistful warmth of human friendship.”

Joining nature, beauty and friendship as fundamental sources of humane perception · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

“They perform the miracle of identifying the wonder of beauty with common sense.”

Celebrating poetry in which beauty and ordinary perception become inseparable · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

“Wordsworth, of our poets, comes closest to the Chinese; but their poetry cleaves even nearer to nature than his.”

Comparing Chinese poetic directness with Wordsworth's celebrated intimacy with nature · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

“The metaphor must be concurrent with the action or flow of the poem; not merely superinduced, but an integral part of both the scene and the emotion.”

Defining metaphor as an organic element of experience rather than decoration · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

Art
Poetry

“If a metaphor is used, it is a metaphor directly relating to the theme, not something borrowed from the ends of the earth.”

Arguing that figurative language should arise organically from a poem's subject · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

Art
Poetry

“Even in phraseology they seldom talk about one thing in terms of another, but are able enough and sure enough as artists to make the ultimately exact terms become the beautiful terms.”

Valuing precision itself as a source of poetic beauty · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

“The great Chinese poets accept the world exactly as they find it in all its terms, and with profound simplicity find therein sufficient solace.”

Finding consolation in poetry that accepts reality without embellishment · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

“Chinese poetry rarely trespasses beyond the bounds of actuality.”

Admiring a poetic tradition grounded closely in observed experience · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

Poetry
Truth

“The Chinese poet seldom lets any portion of what he is saying unbalance the entirety.”

Praising formal and emotional balance within Chinese poetry · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

Art
Poetry

“In the poetry of the west we are accustomed to let our appreciative minds accept with joy this or that passage in a poem.”

Observing the Western tendency to prize striking passages rather than complete poetic balance · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

“The discovery which has largely undone my previous convictions as to the way of writing poetry has rather to do with use of substance than with turns of expression.”

Explaining how Chinese poetry changed his priorities from ornament towards substance · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

“There is no question that but for this bravery, this heat on behalf of man's better nature, there would not be in the hearts of the poets so fine a crucible for their more personal alchemies.”

Suggesting that moral courage enriches the inner resources from which poetry grows · Essay, Poetry and Culture, introduction to The Jade Mountain (1929)

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