Comparing Chinese and Western literature:
An interview with Professor Zhang Longxi
Professor Zhang Longxi is a senior scholar working on mutual understanding of the East and the West across the differences of languages and cultures in literature, history, and philosophy. He has an MA from Peking University and a Ph. D. from Harvard and had taught at Peking, Harvard, the University of California, Riverside, and is currently a Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation at the City University of Hong Kong. He is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and also of Academia Europaea. He was elected President of the International Comparative Literature Association for 2016-19. He has published more than 20 books and numerous articles on East-West comparative studies, including most recently, From Comparison to World Literature (SUNY, 2015) and A History of Chinese Literature (Routledge, 2023).
Q1. Please introduce yourself and your academic and personal interests.
I am a scholar with a wide range of interests in the arts and literature. I have always worked on comparative studies and tried to promote cross-cultural understanding between China and the West. I come from Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China, a city with a history dating back before even the establishment of the first Chinese Empire of Qin in 221 BC, but I have lived in the US for a long time, in Hong Kong more than 20 years, and have traveled in many different countries. I am always fascinated by the literary and artistic creations of different peoples and appreciate the expression of rich cultural values across time and space. That is what I do, and I love what I do. I consider myself very fortunate because my academic or professional and personal interests are integrated into one in my life. My work is scholarly, but I feel strongly that the promotion of cross-cultural understanding between China and the West is directly relevant to the world we are living in, which is under the threat of so much misunderstanding, mutual distrust and suspicion, leading to so much tension, conflict, and even wars.
Q2. How did you get interested in comparative literature and what have you personally found rewarding or surprising after spending so much time studying both Chinese and Western literatures?
Intellectual curiosity about other cultures and a strong interest in foreign languages played an important role in getting me interested in comparative literature. It is always gratifying when you discover some affinities where least expected in works of different literatures and cultures. For example, at the beginning of his treatise On Christian Doctrine, St. Augustine makes the disclaimer that he should not be held responsible for the lack of understanding on the part of those who are so dumb that they would never be able to understand the true meaning of the Holy Scriptures, however hard he tries to enlighten them. Just like he was pointing to the moon or some stars with his finger, says Augustine, but “they did not have keen enough sight even to see my finger, they should not on that account become angry with me.” Neither should those who “can see my finger but not the heavenly bodies which it was intended to point out.” This metaphorical use of the finger and the moon in Augustine is surprising because the same images often appear in Buddhist scriptures, too.
In an important Mahayana Buddhist scripture, the Lankāvatāra sutra, for example, a man is ridiculed for foolishly looking at the finger, but not the moon the finger points to. In the Sūrangama sutra, Buddha blames Ānanda for not understanding Buddha’s meaning, just like those who “look at the finger and mistake it for the moon.” The coincidence is astonishing, but the metaphors in Augustine and the Buddhist texts do share the same purpose of emphasizing the religious and spiritual meaning beyond the material forms in which the meaning is expressed. Just like the Chinese Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi says, “words exist for the meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, forget the words.” Apparently, that is something difficult to do, so Zhuangzi wonders, “Where can I find a man who will forget words so that I can have a word with him?” The great Chinese poet Tao Yuanming (365-427) famously wrote about nature that “There is true meaning in all of these, / But when I try to explain, I forget my words.” T. S. Eliot regards poetry as “a raid on the inarticulate”; and the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke puts it beautifully: “Schweigen. Wer inniger schwieg, / rührt an die Wurzeln der Rede” (Be silent. Who keeps silent inside / touches the roots of speech).” Philosophers, mystics, and poets all complain that language is inadequate, but they all have to complain in language. This is what I call an “ironic pattern.”
Unexpected affinities like these are plenty, and they are waiting to be discovered by diligent readers. Reading across cultures becomes an exciting experience of discoveries and pleasant surprises. The more we read, the more we understand, and the less likely we’ll hold on to our parochial and narrow-minded views. Reading makes one a better-educated person or simply a better person.
Q3. What role does literature play in Chinese society and in the West? What is “good” literature in your view, and do you have a different set of criteria when assessing Chinese and Western works?
Wen 文, roughly equivalent with what we call literature and, in a broader sense, culture, is so crucial for the Chinese tradition that it is impossible, I would argue, to think of China without wen or culture. The Chinese always put learning and education on top of their priorities, and literature, particularly poetry, is regarded as representing the highest achievement of a refined cultural tradition. The desire to express emotions and thoughts in beautiful language is a universal human need, so literature has always been an important part of any cultural tradition, East or West. In China, Cao Pi (187 – 226) declares that “literary writing is the great enterprise of governing a state and the wonderful means to reach immortality. One’s life has its limit in time, and glorious prosperity can only be enjoyed by oneself; both of these must end at a certain point and cannot last forever like literary writings.” He may have put too heavy a weight on literature in the first sentence, but the rest is absolutely true: literary writing as a manifestation of cultural and spiritual values lives forever and endows its author with immortality. Literature has the power of cultural influence, i.e., soft power or cultural capitals.
In the 19th century at the height of the British Empire, Thomas Carlyle said concerning the choice between the Indian Empire and Shakespeare, “Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakespeare does not go, he lasts forever with us; we cannot give up our Shakespeare!” This has proven to be a true prophesy! The Indian Empire is gone and, for that matter, the British Empire is no longer the same as when Carlyle wrote those words in Victorian England, but Shakespeare remains arguably the best-known poet in world literature. It is now high time that great poets and writers in Chinese and other non-Western literatures became well known beyond their original linguistic and cultural environment to be part of world literature.
What I see as “good” literature, the classics in both Chinese and Western literatures, are works that give expression to the most valuable and memorable of human experiences, not only happy ones but also, perhaps even more significantly, painful or tragic ones. They are manifestations of human emotions, desires, ideals, and visions. A great work of literature is a joy to read, but it is more than just pleasant and enjoyable, it is thought-provoking and profound with meanings that reveal the human condition in the larger social, historical, religious, and philosophical contexts. The form of expression is specific to a language and a culture, but all great works of literature display the same qualities and values of what I see as “good” literature, therefore I don’t think the criteria should be different in making aesthetic judgment of different works from Chinese or Western literary traditions.
Q4. Has State guidance and control ever succeeded in facilitating classic works of literature in China or the West?
In neither China nor the West has the State ever succeeded in establishing or destroying a literary classic, however much the power to be wished that could be true. The most the power could do is severe suppression and tight control of all expressions of feelings and ideas, and then there will be no literature, only spiritual lethargy, but such total suppression cannot last long and never works. In China, the First Emperor of Qin tried to burn books and bury scholars alive, but he failed miserably. The Qin dynasty was short-lived, and the First Emperor became a stereotype of a much hated and despised tyrant in Chinese history. State or political power may last for a period of time, but literary canon lasts forever. A poet may have not much in his life, but his works and his name will be eternal, just as these popular lines say about Homer: “Seven cities contend for Homer dead, / Through whose streets the living Homer begged his bread.” We love to read Du Fu and Li Bo not because we fear the Tang emperors or the authority of a government or even a teacher, we simply love them for the splendor of poetry they created. Love is voluntary and cannot be imposed on by external forces.
The tyrant seems incapable of understanding the simple fact that books as writings on wooden or bamboo slips or on paper can be burned, but the ideas in the books are immaterial and spiritual, which cannot be destroyed by fire. A classic or a canonical work is a work that is read and appreciated by generations of readers living under different social, historical, political and cultural conditions, who find the work still meaningful and relevant to their own condition. Therefore, it is only time that can make or break a literary canon.
Q5. Human nature is always an important question in all cultures. How is it portrayed in Chinese and Western literature, and would a reader immersed solely in one culture’s literature draw very different conclusions about fundamental human nature?
The nature of human nature is indeed an interesting question debated in both China and the West, and here we see some significant differences between the two. In China, Mencius (c. 372-289 BC), generally considered the second master of the Confucian tradition, argued for an inherently good human nature, that is, human beings are basically decent and responsible, loving not only one’s own, but are compassionate towards all people under heaven. Though another important Confucian, Xunzi (c. 300-c. 230), argued that human nature is inherently bad, Mencius’s view prevailed in the Chinese tradition. In the West, it is St. Augustine who totally changed earlier interpretations of the Genesis story of the Fall of Man with the idea of “the original sin” that contaminated all human nature and made it inherently bad.
The story of Adam and Eve eating of the forbidden tree in disobedience of God and thus losing the Garden of Eden was understood by Jewish rabbis and early Christian interpreters as a story about freedom, or rather, a warning not to abuse the freedom of choice God gave to human beings. In De civitate Dei or The City of God, however, Augustine reinterpreted the story and argued that Adam and Eve are symbolically the whole of humanity, and that their disobedience is not an individual mistake, but “the original sin” that made all human beings sinners. The only way to salvation is to confess your sins and follow the church’s teachings so that your soul might have a chance to ascend to heaven after you die. The rather dark and pessimistic view of a bad human nature in Augustine forms a sharp contrast to the positive view of a good human nature in Mencius, and the different views have profound influences in the East and the West, but there are dissenting views in both traditions. In China, as we saw, Xunzi held a different view from Mencius, and in the West, the Augustinian orthodoxy gradually lost its influence since the Renaissance as modern societies become essentially secular and based on reason rather than religious faith.
As for representations of human nature in Chinese and Western literatures, there are as many ways as there are writers, but eventually they all contribute to our understanding of human nature in its complexities and multidimensions, the comic and the tragic, the noble and the despicable, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Literary expressions can be very different, but all great works of literature can be understood and appreciated by readers in different countries and cultures. Of course, if someone is immersed solely in one culture with a tunnel vision and sees everything from an extremely narrow point of view, that reader may fail to understand anything 50 miles away from home, but my suggestion to such readers is to get rid of their parochialism and out of their linguistic and cultural cocoons as soon as possible. There is a beautiful world out there. The appreciation of different literary representations of human nature and human life is a matter of education: if foreign works of literature and literary criticism become available through translation, readers will gradually learn to understand and appreciate them and thereby enrich themselves.
Q6. Are theories of literature and art attempts to explain the inexplicable? For example, what would be the point of an attempt to answer the question “what is poetry” with a definition other than “it is what it is”?
Concepts are always needed for thinking and understanding, so clear definition of terms is necessary for any discussion of any subject, including complicated subjects like literature and philosophy. The French phrase je ne sais quoi tries to capture the elusive quality of our aesthetic experience, but it is totally useless in literary or art criticism. Hermeneutics or the theory of interpretation becomes necessary for our understanding and interpretation of literature, though no theory can or should be the only approach to a work of art or literature. What is poetry, for example, has different definitions in China and the West. Aristotle defined poetry, mainly tragic drama, as the imitation of a complete action with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with emphasis put on action or what happens in a story or a play. In China, poetry is defined as the articulation in words of what is in one’s heart or mind, the poet’s “intent,” thus highlighting expression of one’s emotions and ideas. The concept of mimesis or imitation predominated Western criticism for a long time until the rise of romanticism in the 19th century, while poetry articulating the poet’s intent is a long-held concept in much of traditional Chinese criticism.
That is not to say, however, that Western literature is a narrative tradition, while Chinese literature is a lyrical one. Such sweeping generalizations would impoverish both traditions with reductionist simplifications. As a manifestation of the human condition and human responses to the environment, literature is as manifold and multidimensional as human life itself everywhere. All concepts, terms, and definitions have their usefulness, but they also have their range of applicability. Better defined concepts have clearer boundaries of their applicability and also more useful, and catch-all terms tend to be fuzzy and vague, so how to understand poetry or literature is a negotiation between the general and the specific, the abstract and the concrete, trying to reach a reasonable balance.
Q7. How does Chinese literature cover political satire and does this differ from examples in the West? Irreverence for authority is a popular theme in the West. Do you see many similar examples in China?
In China, political satire is a concept built in the Confucian commentaries on the Book of Poetry, one of the Confucian classics, in which each and every poem was interpreted by the Confucian commentator as either a “praise” (美) of the benevolent King Wen or the Duke of Zhou, or a “satire” (刺) on a king or prince who had fallen short of the standards set up by former sage kings. Any literary work in praise of a better past or future is in itself a critique of the present, and political satire can come in different sorts in Chinese literature, but mostly subtle, indirect, and suggestive. The Scholars, an 18th-century novel by Wu Jingzi (1701-1754), is probably the best-known work of social satire in classical Chinese literature, and more pungent political satires appeared in late Qing literature when people lost confidence in the corrupt government after repeated defeats not only in the Opium Wars but also the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894-95 and a series of humiliating, unequal treaties. “Novels of exposure” became popular with such titles as Officialdom Disclosed by Li Bojia (1867-1906) and Bizarre Happenings Eye-Witnessed Over Twenty Years by Wu Jianren (1866-1910), but their social critique sometimes lose effectiveness because of their excessive caricatures.
The great modern writer Lu Xun (1881-1936) was a radical iconoclast and a superb satirist, whose critical essays are compared to “daggers and javelins” to attack old China and the Confucian tradition, but in much of the 20th century in China, especially under Mao’s tight ideological control, literary expressions, and satire in particular, became all but impossible. It is such a relatively recent history that has created the impression that Chinese literature seems to lack active political satire as can be found in Western literature.
In the West, there is of course a long tradition of political satire, and the thriving satirical works in literature and art in the modern West, particularly the irreverence for political authority, are indications of a high degree of openness and freedom in Western societies. At the same time, however, we must remember that censorship is always active in Western societies and many famous literary works were banned or put on the list of forbidden books. In 1832, the French painter and satirist Honoré Daumier was jailed for 6 months on the charge of insulting the king in his political cartoons. In contemporary societies, it is not so much government as big social media corporations like Facebook or Twitter that impose censorship on a much larger scale. Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News (Beacon Press, 2021) by Eric Berkowitz would make an informative and interesting reading. Indeed, how much uncensored political satire is active is a mark of the degree of freedom and the openness of a modern society.
Q8. What are important differences between Chinese and Western literature in their expressions of philosophical, cultural or ethical themes? Did Western religious traditions or Chinese metaphysical traditions create separate value categories?
One major difference between Chinese and Western literature concerns tragedy. In Western literature, tragedy with an unhappy denouement or even death of the protagonist at the end occupies a very important place, but in Chinese literature, most sad stories and plays have a “happy ending” that offers a sort of “poetic justice” to satisfy the moral sense of the reader or the audience. For example, Guan Hanqing’s (c. 1225 – c. 1300) Injustice to Dou E is probably the greatest tragedy in Chinese drama, a sad story about an innocent girl wrongly charged of murder and beheaded, but even this play ends with Dou E’s father coming back to mete out justice, who had been so poor as to have sold his daughter to pay his debts and thus partially responsible for the tragedy, but he has passed the imperial examination and become a senior government official in the end. Given Mencius’s influential idea of good human nature and relatively high moral expectations, as well as the Buddhist idea of retribution, a “happy ending” in Chinese literature suits the strong demand for poetic justice.
Facing death, the theme of memento mori so popular in medieval and early modern Western literature and art, is definitely a Christian influence, while depiction of death and images of a skull or skeleton are extremely rare in Chinese literature and would be considered too ominous or even of a bad taste to be suitable for a work of art or literature. This is certainly the influence of Confucius who dismissed the whole question when his student Ji Lu asked him about death, saying “How can you know anything about death, when you don’t even understand life?” (The Analects, xi.12). Another passage in The Analects tells us that “The Master did not talk about uncanny things, violence, disorder, or deities” (vii.21). Under such an influence, the kind of black humor in memento mori and danse macabre is all but impossible in Chinese art and literature.
The difference is a matter of degree, however, not of kind. In the West, not everyone likes the representation of death in a tragedy. Lev Tolstoy (in)famously disliked Shakespeare because by the fifth act of Shakespeare’s tragedies, half a dozen characters are lying dead on the stage. For the latter half of the 18th century and the whole of the 19th, the English audience apparently found Shakespeare’s King Lear too painful to watch and what was put on the stage was Nahum Tate’s “revised” version with a happy ending, in which Lear recovered his wits, Cordelia was alive and married Edgar, and everyone was to live happily ever after. In China, on the other hand, the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi tells a fascinating story that he found a skull on his way to the south and, as it was getting dark, he used the skull as a pillow and slept on it. The skull came to his dream and told him that “in death there is no king above and no subjects below, and there is no hard work in the four seasons. Leisurely I take heaven and earth as the natural course of change; this is a greater pleasure than that of assuming the position of a king.” Admittedly this is a rare moment in classical Chinese writings, but as usual, Zhuangzi’s text displays extraordinary brilliance and bold imagination, coached in beautiful language and even a touch of black humor.
Q9. Do Chinese characters carry within them ideas and values from their historical and cultural context? Is that very different from Latin or Roman alphabets? Does this manifest itself in literary differences between China and the West?
Language is a social institution and certainly reflects social and cultural values in the very words of that language. Many Chinese characters are composed of a “radical” and a main part, each having some basic meaning or indicating pronunciation. For example, the character hong 紅, meaning “red” or “needlework,” is composed of a “radical” si 系on the left, meaning “silk,” and the main part on the right side gong 工, meaning “work,” especially “women’s needlework,” and it also indicates sound, for hong 紅 (red) and gong 工 (work) are of the same vowel. Carrying basic meanings, many Chinese characters reflect some cultural biases or stereotypes, and as the Confucian tradition, like many other old traditions, are terribly patriarchal, many characters with a “female” radical, nü 女, would have pejorative or negative meanings. For example, nu 奴 (servant or slave), yao 妖 (demon, monster), du 妒 (envy, jealousy), wang 妄 (delusional, absurd), and when you put three females together, you get the word jian 姦 (lewd, promiscuous).
The word “woman,” fu 婦, has a “female” radical nü 女on the left side and on the right side zhou 帚, a “broom.” According to Shuowen jiezi 說文解字, the authoritative dictionary compiled by Xu Shen in the first century, the character fu 婦 means fu 服, that is, “to obey,” based on the same vowel sound. Composed of the “female” radical on the left and a “broom” on the right, the character or word “woman” is defined as someone whose work is to sweep the floor and clean the household. Another character with a very negative meaning is jian 奸, with a “female” radical on the left, and gan 干 on the right, meaning “to commit (a crime), to violate,” and this character has the meaning of “to violate, to sexually assault,” or “perfidious, wicked.” In Chinese history, there are numerous bad guys or perfidious ministers, and they are called jian chen 奸臣, “bad ministers,” but none of them is female!
But again, we cannot generalize simplistically because many characters with positive meanings, particularly referring to things or qualities beautiful and good, have a “female” radical. The very word “good,” hao 好, has a “female” radical nü 女 on the left and zi 子, originally a “newborn baby,” on the right. According to the same old dictionary, this character’s earliest meaning is “to like or love,” particularly to love a woman, as in these famous lines in the very first poem in the Book of Poetry:
窈窕淑女， The pretty and good girl,
君子好逑。 The gentleman loves to woo her.
Then by extension, the character 好 refers to anything beautiful and good, and finally the general meaning of “good,” while still retaining the meaning of “to like or love” as a verb.
The way Chinese characters are composed is of course different from English words made of letters of the Latin alphabet, but English or Western words also have interesting stories to tell, and their composition is not totally arbitrary. “Hippopotamus,” for example, comes from Greek “hippos,” a horse, and “potamos,” a river; “schadenfreude” comes from German “schaden,” harm or injury, and “freude,” joy. Some feminists object to the word “history” and want to use “herstory,” but “history” is not “his story,” because it comes from the Greek “histor,” meaning “knowing, knowledge.” It is always fascinating to study etymology and semantics to learn about words, their origins, and their changes of meaning in history.
Q10. To what extent does economic development or the stage of a country’s economic progress impact its literature or literary traditions?
This question needs to be looked at from two different perspectives. Within a literary tradition, economic development and a relatively free and open social milieu certainly create a favorable condition for poets and writers to thrive and give full play to their imagination and creativity. The literary world is, however, somewhat independent from economic development, for sometimes great works of literature may be responding to the suffering and pain in a chaotic and miserable world. The great Chinese poet Du Fu (712 – 770) wrote some of his best poems during and immediately after the An-Shi Rebellion (755 – 763) that marked the turning point of the Tang dynasty from prosperity to decline. Tolstoy’s War and Peace tells the story of the Napoleonic war and its impact on Russian society, and there are numerous great works of literature that represent the tragic human condition with depth and promote human moral values despite the disastrous living conditions and the violent behavior of man’s inhumanity to man. We may conclude that sufficient economic development and a relaxed social milieu are necessary for the thriving of literature, but the two are not equivalent; wealth may not directly translate into great literature.
When we look at literary traditions from the global perspective of world literature, we may clearly see a connection of a country’s economic, political, and even military power with its soft power. There is obviously an imbalance of knowledge between China and the West, which reflects the imbalance of power in economic and other aspects. A college student in China would know the names of Dante, Shakespeare, Dickens, Woolf, Kafka and many other famous Western poets and writers, but a European or American college student, even a literary scholar, would have no idea who the most famous poets and writers in Chinese literature are. This is an unsatisfactory situation and badly in need of improvement. To change that situation is what I have been trying to do as a comparatist and a student of Chinese and world literature. A History of Chinese Literature, my latest book, is an effort to introduce the best Chinese literary works to those readers who have no prior knowledge of Chinese but are interested to learn about the long history and the rich tradition of Chinese literature.
Q11. What are your thoughts on artificial intelligence as a potential creator of literature?
An AI robot can never create as a human subject can because whatever a robot does is dependent upon algorithms and programs, not free and independent creation with originality and effectiveness. AI technology is getting increasingly sophisticated, and engineers are happy to point out that in 1996, Deep Blue, an IBM computer, already defeated the world’s chess champion Garry Kasparov. Like other sports and games, chess has rules and the rules are not infinite. Insofar as language has grammatical rules and poetry has conventions and patterns, it is possible for AI to generate lines that look like poetry, but it is neither original nor unique, and lacks the living spirit of a genuine work of literature. In using a natural language, a literary work of course follows the rules of grammar, but every true poem or great work of literature always does something in violation of grammar and in response to a specific event or a particular situation. That unique response in substance, not purely in form, is something a machine cannot do, no matter how advanced its technology might be.
Already in the 19th century, the German poet Heinrich Heine told the story of “an English inventor” (ein englischer Mechanikus), who invented a humanoid automaton, “a perfect gentleman” (ein vollendeter Gentleman), with nothing short of “a real human being except a soul” (einem echten Menschen fehlte ihm gar nichts als eine Seele). But soul is something the inventor cannot make, so the poor machine is always chasing after him and crying: “Give me a soul!” I hope the day will never come when humanity is surrounded by machines demanding their souls!
Q12. As an experienced translator, what are the main challenges and pitfalls in achieving successful translations?
Translation has always served the human needs of communication across gaps in languages and cultures. My idea of a successful translation is one that makes an unintelligible foreign text comprehensible, as if originally written in our own language, but at the same time, it must not lose what is specific of the foreign text and foreign ideas and values. Translation of literary and philosophical texts is difficult because it demands a high level of understanding of both languages and cultures. For example, the remarks I quoted earlier from the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi, “words exist for the meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, forget the words. Where can I find a man who will forget words so that I can have a word with him?” If translated literally, the last sentence reads: “Where is a word-forget man that I can speak with him?”
In English, the tense is needed for a verb, and Burton Watson translated this sentence as “Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?” The translation reads fluently, but it lost the whole point. Zhuangzi wants to find a man who will get his meaning but forget his words. Watson’s use of the past tense (“has forgotten words”) implies that this man has done the forgetting, but Zhuangzi hasn’t talked with him yet, so whatever words this man has forgotten is not Zhuangzi’s words. So in my translation, I choose the future tense to indicate that the man Zhuangzi is trying to find is someone who “will forget words,” that is, will forget Zhuangzi’s words, and that is precisely the reason why Zhuangzi would “have a word with him.”
Another interesting example of mistranslation on cultural grounds is an anonymous poem from ancient China, a woman’s vow to undying love to her lover, an unnamed individual. In the Chinese original, the woman prays to Heaven (shang 上), and the poem in my translation reads:
上邪！ O Heaven!
我欲與君相知， I would be with you,
長命無絕衰。 And my love will never die.
山無陵， Only when mountains are gone,
江水為竭， And all rivers are dry,
冬雷震震， When thunders roll in winter,
夏雨雪， In summer snowflakes fly,
天地合， When heaven and earth join as one,
乃敢與君絕！ Only then my love may die!
Here is Anne Birrell’s translation:
Almighty on High!
I long to know my lord,
Let our love never fade or die
Till mountains have no peaks,
Or rivers run dry.
Till thunder roars in winter,
Or snow pours down in summer,
Till the skies merge with the ground—
Then may I die with my lord!
Again, this translation reads smoothly, but it turns a Chinese poem into a poem with heavily Christian overtones. The Chinese poem is a simple vow of secular love, not a medieval pious prayer using love as a symbol of devotion. In fact, we may find an amazingly similar expression in one of the beloved poems by Robert Burns, “A red, red rose”:
My Luve is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June:
My Luve is like the melody
That’s sweetly played in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun!
And I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.
And fare-thee-weel, my only Luve,
And fare-thee-weel awhile!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho’ it were ten-thousand mile.
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