The large charcoal drawing, Parrot Lost in Translation, was just completed as a center panel for my triptych on the theme of bondage. The drawing bookmarks two poems that I had studied from different eras and written by poets who were the products of very different cultures. The first one is a fragment of the poem, Speke Parrot, by the sixteenth century British poet and tutor to King Henry VIII, John Skelton. The second poem, The Red Parrot, is by the Tang poet, Bai Juyi.
Completing this drawing forced me to revisit old history and rusty skills. As a young woman, I studied calligraphy as part of my graphic design courses and once made a calligraphy piece in ink based upon Skelton’s satirical poem Speke Parrot. I searched for this decades old piece and found it still intact in a dusty folio. In my new drawing, however, I reproduced it not in ink, but in charcoal, substituting a different initial for the one in the original piece of calligraphy. This proved to be a painstakingly slow task. Plodding work does have its benefits, though. While delineating these letters in dark charcoal, my mind was free to recall another poem that I had learned as a graduate student in China, Bai juyi’s Red Parrot. I could still recite the poem and write most of it in Chinese, but could not quite recall some of the characters. A search online revealed only the Arthur Whaley English translation, which drove me to even more consternation because this was such a loose translation that the essential meaning was probably lost.
My Chinese keyboard was lost when transferring to a new computer, so unfortunately I could not search online the way I needed to. But my Chinese friends and colleagues came to the rescue, when I simply sent them my written notes of what I remembered of the poem in Chinese. Most of my friends remembered instantly and supplied me with the missing characters or linked to an original language posting.
Just as I thought, the Whaley translation differed from the original in some key points. The Whaley translation of Bai Juyi’s poem goes like this:
The Red Cockatoo
Sent as a present from Annam -
A red cockatoo
Coloured like a peach-tree blossom,
Speaking with the speech of men.
And they did to it what is always done
To the learned and eloquent.
They took a cage with stout bars
And shut it up inside
Thus lies the problem. In the original Chinese version, there was no cockatoo, but a parrot. There was no present or gift. There was no directly referenced anthropomorphous "learned" and "eloquent" creature. And there were no mysterious authorities taking said creature and locking it into a cage with stout bars. The two center lines "Coloured like a peach-tree blossom. Speaking with the speech of men," is truer to the original.
As a substitute for my lack of a Chinese keyboard, I can just post the calligraphy here, I suppose, and present it without the early twentieth century gloss. I am not exactly an expert in classical Tang Dynasty poetry, so there may be some subtleties that I am missing. But here is what the poem plainly says. I’m putting "it’s in parentheses because there is no gender in the original:An nan, near and far
(There is) a red parrot
(It’s) color like a peach blossom
(It’s) words like a person
(It’s) thesis (or written articles)
compiled excellently
When will it exit
(It’s) cage obtain a (free) life?
Perhaps then, there is an alternative reading of the poem from what English speakers are allowed to access. This is not something that I can prove without research, but could it be that when Whaley was translating The Red Parrot, he was actually thinking of Skelton? Skelton’s parrot was a gift, and was certainly taken out of and put back into a cage. Skelton’s parrot was also ostensibly a parody about Cardinal Woolsey.
Although The Red Parrot does not explicitly state that Parrot is, in fact, a learned person, it might be safe to conjecture that Bai Juyi, like Skelton, meant the parrot to represent a particular person, or a particular type of person. What parrot writes articles?
It is those last two lines, however, that are ambiguous. We don’t really know if Parrot is being willfully restrained in a cage, or if he wishes to stay there. Could it possibly be the latter? I suspect that this is possible because historians tell us that Bai Juyi wrote in a vernacular style that was accessible to ordinary people. Might he have been satirizing the practice of his contemporary poets to over-intellectualize their poetry? Was he criticizing constraint over freedom? Style over substance? Obfuscation over clarity? Furthermore, it begs the question as to whether or not Bai Juyi was considered a potent critic of government not because of his intellectual acumen, but because his criticism was leveled in terms which everyone could understand.
