Willis Barnstone is a polymath author of more than 70 books ¡ª a poet, translator and scholar of Gnosticism and the New Testament. But the 87-year-old also has had a long and colorful relationship with China, translating Mao Zedong¡¯s poetry and befriending numerous Chinese artists and political leaders in the 1980s.
Recently he was in Beijing to speak at the Bookworm Literary Festival. In an interview, he discussed his love of classical Chinese poetry, a telegram he sent to Zhou Enlai and taking Allen Ginsberg to a Taoist temple.
What got you interested in Mao¡¯s poetry?
I¡¯ve always been interested in poetry, and I make no distinction of language or time. I¡¯ve translated Sappho and, with the help of a professor at Yale, Sumerian poetry. But I was equally interested in Chinese poetry. It¡¯s image poetry. Even bad translations work, because pictures translate better than sound. I asked people who were the great contemporary poets, and they said none. It turns out that Mao was the only poet. The only permitted poet!
You translated Mao before you went to China.
I did it before Nixon went to China [in 1972]. I felt that Mao was an excellent poet behind the gibberish translation. It was the worst kind of Chinglish. If you are a writer, you can see the writing behind even a bad version. Most of his poems have a political element, but he never forgets to bring the classical gods in.
So I translated it with the help of a colleague. I sent it in and received a letter saying, ¡°We¡¯re glad to have it and will get back to you.¡± It sat there for nine months until word came out that Nixon was going to China. In 11 pre-computer days, Harper & Row put it out in a magnificent edition. It became Book-of-the-Month, a New York Times feature review, the whole works.
Then Nixon did fly to Beijing for a summit with Mao, Zhou and Henry Kissinger. Nixon recited two of Mao¡¯s poems in my translation.
And soon after that you were invited to China.
I wrote a telegram to ¡°Zhou Enlai, Beijing, China¡± saying I am the translator of Mao¡¯s poems and would like to visit China. Next morning I got an answer: ¡°Go to Ontario, Canada. Pick up visa.¡± They gave me two weeks, but I extended it to four.
I met all the Albanians in the world because they were half the population of China at the time, it seemed. I looked out the window and there were a thousand Albanians marching. The great Albanian Army marching! In Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou!
And you saw a lot of Mao¡¯s poetry.
The only poet allowed was Mao, and his poetry was everywhere. If you went to a restaurant, or walked down a street, walls were filled with his poems. If you bought a postage stamp, it had a microscopic reproduction of a Mao poem.
Mao was omnipresent. He condemned medieval religions, but in poems and statues he was the new emperor god.
You did get to meet a writer you liked.
I told them I wanted to meet Yeh Chun-chan, a very refined gentleman. He had published with my publisher at the time, Harper & Row, was Cambridge-educated and had translated into Chinese the works of Hans Christian Andersen. I went to the Foreign Languages Press to meet him. We talked and talked.
And then he went back to jail!
Yes! He had just served three years in jail, having been denounced by Red Guards. They let him out only for few hours to see me, and then he had another couple of years in jail. Of course, at the time, I didn¡¯t know that. I only found out when I returned to China in the 1980s.
What did the city feel like back then in 1972?
The strange thing is, poverty preserves beauty. Now China is richer, but the old city has been destroyed. Even during the Cultural Revolution, the hutongs were there. When all were asleep, I would sneak out from the Nationalities Hotel and get lost. It was beautiful to be adrift in the magic of all the palaces that still existed. I would take a bus or streetcar and get lost and wander back. People didn¡¯t mind. They would clap when they saw me and then back away cautiously.
You ended your stay by going down to Guangzhou.
On the last day I played Ping-Pong. I¡¯m an average bad Ping-Pong player, and they put me up against the champion of the corrugated-metal garbage-pail syndicate. How could I face the champion?! So I played, and I think I got three points before he got 21. But every time I got a point, there was a burst of applause. There were 30,000 people, and they were screaming their heads off. I never felt so vain in my life. I won a point against the champion!
And he was letting you have the points.
Of course! He was doing his best to throw me the points, but I was so bad I couldn¡¯t take advantage of them. Things were always surreal in those days.
And then you went back in 1984.
Yes, I had a Fulbright teaching fellowship. I was supposed to go the year before. But at the last minute, they wouldn¡¯t issue the visa. I had asked for leave and had rented my house in Indiana. They wouldn¡¯t say why. Then in the autumn they said apply again. I said, no way, but they said it¡¯s been approved, just do it. So I reapplied, and it was approved.
When I got here, the vice president of the Foreign Studies University told me, ¡°Willis, do you remember when you were going to come to China, but we didn¡¯t give you a visa?¡± I said, ¡°Yeah, I was really upset.¡± They said, ¡°We were afraid you were a Maoist. The last thing we wanted was a Maoist!¡±
How did it feel then compared to the 1970s?
It was so much more open. Yet when I went downtown, I saw the trucks with prisoners with boards around their chests. They were about to be executed. The boards listed their crimes: prostitute, thief, whatever it was. They got one bullet in the head, and the family paid one yuan for the cost of the bullet.
Those were still not the happiest of days, but people spoke, and things were improving. Women started to wear earrings and better clothes. Things were improving. If it had not been for the tragedy of Tiananmen ¡ª maybe if Gorbachev hadn¡¯t come to China, which gave the protesters the excuse to stay longer ¡ª China would be a fully democratic country now. Everything was in the works. All the right people were moving into the right positions. Including the novelist Wang Meng, who was minister of culture.
You got to know a lot of those people.
Yes, I talked to Wang Meng often. I¡¯d go to his place, and he¡¯d come to mine. I was staying at the Friendship Hotel. My son Tony and I knew all the poets in China. They came in through the window.
The window?
We lived in the Friendship Hotel, near the wall. It was so close we could hear people spitting in the streets at dawn. The wall wasn¡¯t that high and so people just came over the wall and through our window. That way they didn¡¯t have to register at the front desk and be reported to their work unit.
It was Gertrude Stein¡¯s salon en Chine. I¡¯m exaggerating, but for us it was paradise.
Later your son published some of those poets in the United States.
Yes, with Wesleyan University Press. They were the Misty Poets ¡ª many of the major post-Mao poets. We knew many of them back in the 1980s. The window jumpers.
I was in China at the same time, and I recall, like you, riding to the Summer Palace. In fact, you wrote a poem about it in your book ¡°5 A.M. in Beijing: Poems of China¡±:
My bike clanks in the dusk, rattling like sudden summer
hail
in the corridors of the Summer Palace.
Those were hilarious, happy days.
You made Beijing feel romantic. In ¡°5 A.M. in Beijing,¡± you wrote a poem about walking down Wangfujing thinking of your love, and the other places in China where you had been:
No more. I won¡¯t look in the Foreign Experts Dining Hall
for you choosing vegetables for us,
I won¡¯t expect us to walk near the perfumed palace
of the late emperors of Chengde.
You see I never construe you, you¡¯re never alive
like the cock
fulminating through dawn,
We¡¯re never together four days on northwest trains
where tribesmen pull turnips from the violet fields.
During your stay in 1984-85, Allen Ginsberg came.
Yes, he came on a visit with leading American authors. He gave a talk about [fellatio]. That was the end of his tour! Everyone was stone-faced. But being Allen Ginsberg and finding marvels in China, and boyfriends, he stayed on until Christmas.
What happened at the White Cloud Temple?
I went there with Allen. We walked in there, and the abbot was wise, as Taoists should be, and generous. We were interested in everything, and although I¡¯m not religious, religion is something I know well, so we had a lot to talk about. We were walking around, and we saw a room. Allen said, ¡°What¡¯s in this room?¡± and the abbot said, ¡°Look inside.¡± Allen opened the door, and there was a young man wearing a loincloth, but otherwise completely naked. He was in a posture where his hands touched his feet, like a circle, but his eyes were open. Allen said, ¡°Oh, oh, I¡¯m sorry, I didn¡¯t mean to disturb him.¡± And the abbot said, ¡°Don¡¯t worry. No one will disturb him for 24 hours.¡± Allen said he had been in India for three years, but this is the real thing
When was the third time you came?
It was nine years ago. My wife, Sarah Handler, a Chinese art historian, wrote a book on Chinese furniture and architecture. We traveled around Anhui Province, looking at old villages.
What¡¯s your impression of China now?
I don¡¯t know. I know people like you are happy to be here, and I¡¯m exhilarated. And if I were here longer, I would be even more exhilarated, and I would find things to write about.
You¡¯re still translating Chinese poetry. What¡¯s the continuing fascination with Wang Wei, the eighth-century poet?
There are certain clich¨¦s about his poetry, such as that poetry is dancing in chains, which recalls the Greek ¡°chorus,¡± meaning ¡°dance.¡± Poetry is dance. Wang Wei is dancing in a monosyllabic way. Chinese is tight and visual. If you think of Robert Frost, ¡°Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening¡± ¡ª ¡°Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though¡± ¡ª the only bisyllabic word is ¡°village.¡±
Chinese is a concise language like Frost¡¯s. Now they¡¯ve put characters together to form polysyllabic words, but in the classical era they rarely did that. The total vocabulary of Wang Wei is small. I was able to learn every character and ultimately publish a book with my son Tony. Each of his key characters repeat over and over again. It¡¯s like reading the Hebrew Bible, Genesis, which is very easy to do. If you read the first page you can read the second page.
Wang Wei isn¡¯t repetitious, but by changing the syntax of common words he infinitely enriches their meaning. His poems are of retreating into the mountains, from city obligations, of recovering after the death of his wife, which he never really did, and of his love of nature. He is one with the great pastoral poets of Greece.
When you came in 1972 were you disappointed?
Oh, no. How could one be disappointed about coming to China? You would be soulless, like the dark side of the moon.
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