A new anthology by Stephen Owen retranslates the Chinese classics

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

Weighing in at almost four pounds and thicker than all but the largest big-city phone directories, An Anthology of Chinese Literature (W.W. Norton & Co., 1996) is the kind of book that contains not just a series of readings but a world.

Its more than 1,200 pages offer a generous sampling of Chinese literature in translation, ranging from the 2,500-year-old compendium known as the Classic of Poetry to 19th- and early-20th- century works that directly precede the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1911.

Considering the book's size and the hundreds of poems, stories, plays, and essays it contains (generously furnished with notes and critical introductions), one might expect the volume to be the work of a team of scholars grinding away at their task for a decade or more.

In fact, the anthology was produced almost entirely by one man -- Stephen Owen, the Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature and professor of Chinese. Owen edited the book and translated all but a few of the selections, and he accomplished the bulk of the work during four summers of concentrated labor.

"It was an epic endeavor, and one I don't think I'll ever do again," he said. "What made it even more difficult is the fact that I'm the type of person who can't leave a text alone. Every time I look at it, I change a word here or there."

Owen, 50, was born in St. Louis and spent his early years in Arkansas, not far from where his contemporary Bill Clinton grew up. But his interest in Chinese literature was not awakened until he moved to Baltimore at the age of 14 and began to explore the Baltimore City Library.

"I became enamored of books of poetry and especially of Chinese poetry in translation, and I have been ever since. I wrote poetry when I was younger, but then I discovered that I was better at writing prose, particularly literary criticism."

He earned his bachelor's and doctoral degrees from Yale and taught there until 1982, when he accepted a position at Harvard.

An expert on the T 'ang Dynasty (618-906 A.D., the age of the great lyric poets, Wang Wei and Du Fu), Owen has extended his scholarly reach not only to other periods of Chinese literature, but to other cultures as well. Possessing a working knowledge of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Turkish, he is capable of comparing poetry across languages and centuries, which is what he has done in earlier books like Mi-Lou: Poetry and the Labyrinth of Desire (Harvard University Press, 1989) and Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Harvard University Press, 1986), both widely praised for their insight, learning, and graceful style.

Peter Bol, professor of Chinese history, said that Owen "in terms of his career and level of accomplishment is in a class by himself. Certainly he's the most important person in the study of Chinese literature in the West."

Helen Vendler, the Kingsley Porter University Professor, known for her criticism of 20th-century poetry, called Owen "a person of indefatigable mental energy and deep poetic sensibility. In his translations, he neither betrays what is original in the poem nor imposes anything foreign on it. He conveys the warmth and personality of the poem as well as its literal meaning."

An Anthology of Chinese Literature contains ample evidence of Owen's talents both as a translator and a critic. One of his most significant achievements is to break out of what he calls "the Chinese translation language" that has come to dominate English versions of the Chinese classics.

"The trouble with so many translations of Chinese poetry is that the poets all sound alike, whereas to a Chinese reader they all sound different. It has to do with the fact that many translators were fascinated with the Chineseness of Chinese literature, the fact that it came from a strange and faraway place."

Owen's deep knowledge of the texts' cultural and critical background has led him to jettison many of the conventions observed by earlier translators.

"For example, it's become customary to translate the liquor that is drunk in T 'ang poems as wine, when actually it was closer to beer. These people aren't drinking saki out of delicate little porcelain cups. They're drinking beer out of enormous flagons. The T 'ang world is not delicate and refined. It's a violent, raucous, and lively world. So in my translations I've tried to reinstate that sense of vigor and wildness."

In addition to the lusty T 'ang, Owen has brought us many other worlds as well, each with its own voice and sensibility, from the remote, archaic Zhou Dynasty, China's first literary era, to the sophisticated world of the Qing (1644-1911), the dynasty that produced one of the great dramas of Chinese literature, Peach Blossom Fan by Kong Shang-ren, as well as its greatest novel, The Story of a Stone by Cao Xue-qin, representing the culture of 18th-century China just before it was changed forever by contact with the West.

Owen believes that in some ways, translating almost the entire anthology himself has allowed him to achieve a continuity that would not be possible under ordinary circumstances.

"The nice thing about doing the whole thing is that you can translate texts against one another. You can develop voices for different authors, and if a poet in the 17th century quotes an earlier poet, you can go back to that translation and quote that same voice."

On the subject of how much is lost in translation, Owen tends to be an optimist, seeing the poetic glass as half full rather than half empty.

"Of course you do lose things, but a lot survives. The question is, if you don't learn classical Greek, should you never read Homer?"

He also believes that in today's multicultural world, translation is more important than ever.

"Over the last 400 years our knowledge of literature has been mediated by translation. The Nobel Prize is, in fact, a prize for literature in translation. You don't suppose the judges read every work in the original, do you?"

Owen hopes that the new anthology will help to make the great works of Chinese literature more familiar to students and to readers in general. He believes that opponents of multiculturalism who would guard the Western literary canon against adulteration by foreign influences do not understand the dynamics of cultural influence.

"One of our purposes is to make Chinese literature part of American culture. The idea that there is such a thing as European literature and that it exists in isolation is historically short-sighted," he said.

Rome, he points out, was once suspicious of Greek learning, but later accepted it. Christianity was once rejected as an insidious "Eastern" influence, but eventually became central to European culture. And for many years critics debated whether anything worthwhile could be written in the debased vernacular languages of French, Italian, German, and English.

"The assimilation process may be difficult at first, but it's always worth it," he said. "I think cultures are very flexible, and America especially seems to have a genius for assimilating foreign influences."

Now that the Anthology is finished, Owen is considering an even larger project, a series of dual language translations of Chinese classics, something like the Loeb series of Greek and Latin literature.

"It would be for interested people who know a little Chinese," he said. "There are a lot more people who know a little Chinese today than there used to be."