Parsing a Couplet of “Passing Scented Temple” (1)

王維

過香積寺

不知香積寺

數裡入雲峰

古木無人徑

深山何處鐘

泉聲咽危石

日色冷青松

薄暮空潭曲

安禪制毒龍

Before I dive into the deep end, the parsing of the third couplet, here are a few words on the title, Passing Scented Temple.  The second word Xiāng 香 as a noun means ‘incense’, ‘scent’; as a verb, ‘to perfume’, ‘to incense’, ‘to scent’, ‘to imbue with a sweet odor’;   as a modificative, ‘incensed’, ‘fragrant’, ‘perfumed’, ‘odorous’, ‘scented’. The third word Jī 積 means ‘accumulated’, ‘piled up’, ‘packed’ and the corresponding noun/verbs. It may not be too much of a stretch to press the participle of the preceding word into implying the meaning of Jī 積 and thereby skip having to use a full word to translate it, i.e., Scent -ed Temple, a temple has been imbued with an accumulation of the scent of incense from long time use. The first word, Guò 過 means ‘pass’, ‘go over to’, ‘visit’, and ‘transgress’. Again the English part of speech, a distinction which is unnecessary to make explicit in Chinese, depends entirely on context. Probably the “safest’ translation would be “Visiting Scented Temple”, but in these blogs I am trying to push the envelop, always.

Here are four translations of lines 5 and 6: 泉聲咽危石 / 日色冷青松 .

(1) “A stream scrapes over sharp rocks, / Sunlight chills green pines.” (Dongbo)

(2) “Noise from the spring swallows up lofty rocks; / The color of sun chills green pines.” (Pauline Yu)

(3) “streamsound murmuring boulders / the sun through cold green pines” (Red Pine)

(4) “泉声　危石にむせぶ　/ 日色　青松に冷やかなり” [Note 1.] which might be translated into English as “Spring sounds: gobbled up by rocks. / Sun colors : chilled by green pines.”

I think the Japanese translation comes closest to the original Chinese. But it’s hard to see how the Chinese allows it. See below.

Generally, in five-character lüshi verse (律詩), there is a long break, a caesura, after the first two characters of each line. This allows us to talk about the pre-caesural half and the post-caesural half of a line.

Translators (1) and (2) above read the post-caesural half of each of the two lines in the normal way dictated by Chinese prose— Verb-Object:

“A stream scrapes over … rocks,”
“Sunlight chills… pines” (1)

and

“Noise … swallows up… rocks”
“The color … chills… pines” (2)

First, there is the question of ‘scrapes’ for the Chinese word yè/yàn 咽 which is glossed in Chinese dictionaries as ‘obstructing’, ‘blocking’; ‘sound damped out’; ‘swallowing’; ‘abruptly speechless’; ‘gulp down’.

[yè〈動〉阻塞、填塞 2.謂聲音滯澀。多用於形容悲切。or yàn 〉①吞嚥 同「嚥」 or ② 突然停住不說 . yàn 吞入；吞食。]

The verb might be better expressed with various synonyms of ‘to choke’, or ‘to block’, e.g, ‘to throttle’. I don’t understand what justifies the use of ‘scrape’ for yè/yàn 咽 here.

Leaving that aside, it is the syntactical relationship between the parts of the line that I want to explore. To be blunt (and perhaps wrong), I don’t think we have the usual prose sentence pattern, S- (pre-caesura) V-O (post-caesura), here.

The first two characters of the fifth and the sixth lines, the pre-caesural half, can be read as what Professor Boodberg called, a ‘hypothematic’, abbreviated ‘H’. The prefix ‘hypo-’ means (1) under, beneath, down and (2) less than normal. In other words, a ‘sub-theme’. If we consider the first two characters an H, the two lines would read:

“As for the sounds… it’s the rocks.”

“As for the colors… it’s the pines.”

The “it’s” stand for “It is the rocks/pines that are xxx.”

The xxx refers to the participle-like third characters, ‘choking’/’chilling’, thus:

“As for the sounds… it’s the rocks that are choking [it/them].”

“As for the colors… it’s the pines that are chilling [it/them].”

Or,

“As for the sounds… it’s the rocks that are doing the choking.”

“As for the colors… it’s the pines that are doing the chilling.”

Now let’s include the modificatives, the adjectives modifying sound and colors in pre-caesura, and modifying rocks and pines in the post-caesura.

“As for the creek sounds… it’s the steep-dangerous rocks that are choking [it/them].”

“As for the sunlight colors… it’s the deep-green-black pines that are chilling [it/them].”

In a wordy paraphrase the poem runs like this:

The poet has transgressed deep into the rugged, isolated mountainous terrain. He has just heard the throaty peel of a temple bell coming from somewhere, location unclear. Now he becomes aware of running water sounds (pre-caesura). Then he perceives that these sounds include sounds of swallowing, choking and, as attention becomes focused, he realizes this comes from steep rock banks that cut into the flowing water. He widens his angle of perception to include more of the environment picking up the shades and colors of the sunlight over the creek and into the woods, hues that are cool, toned down. He sees this is due to the dense blues, blacks, grays and dark greens of the screening evergreens.

How to read the pre-caesural part of a five-character line as an H (hypothematic) may be answered with reference to Japanese grammar. (This speculation is primarily intended for those who read or are learning Japanese.)

In the Japanese translation (4) of lines 5 and 6 given above, the Japanese translator added a blank space at the caesura. When treating the pre-caesura as an H, it occurs to me that this is much like one of the uses of those most common of Japanese grammatical particles (joshi), the wa (は) and ga (が). Now, quite literally, entire books have been written about the use of wa and ga. Furthermore, I am emphatically not an expert in Japanese grammar. But the explanation that has appealed to me most was a somewhat artificial example produced by Antonio Alfonso in an NHK TV course on spoken Japanese.

Imagine a garden with a lovely rose bush in it. In English we could plainly say, “In the garden the rose bush is lovely.” In Japanese one could frame the scene first, the immediate topic, with the particle wa. ‘Niwa‘ means garden.

“Niwa wa…” This would mean “As for the garden…” Or, in more words, “Let us limit our topic to the garden.” The Japanese sentence might continue, “Niwa wa, bara ga kirei desu.” “As for the garden, the roses (actual subject of the sentence indicated by the particle ga) ‘are lovely’ (kirei desu)”. Or, “As for the garden, it is the roses that are [especially] lovely.”

In beginning his discussion of this sentence pattern using wa, Antonio Alfonso observes: “There is not a set sentence in the English language which squarely corresponds with the Japanese sentence to be developed in this Unit.” [Japanese I, page 189. Tokyo 1989. ISBN4-14-399141-1 C1381] And if I am right about the close analogy between this Japanese sentence pattern and lines of Chinese poetry, the same could be said of the Chinese pattern. What’s common in the one language, is uncommon and perhaps awkward in another.

When we treat the pre-caesural part of a line in a five-character lshi or jueji poem as an H (hypothematic), it seems to me we are dealing with much the same type of sentence as the Japanese sentence described above. Where the particle wa is used in Japanese to introduce a topic (a subtopic of the overall conversation, discourse, or poem), and then the sentence proceeds to say something specific about it, the Chinese lüshi (律詩) or jüejü（絕句) poem can rely on the implied caesura to introduce a subtopic. In other words the caesura in the Chinese line acts like the wa sometimes does in a Japanese sentence.

It can be likened to using a zoom lens on a camera. Imagine that you begin by setting your lens to the highest wide angle setting. Then you decrease the angle until you have framed the scene you want to show first, the maximum visual context you are prepared to give the viewer. You snap a picture at that zoom setting. This is like capturing the image of the first two characters, the setting, the pre-caesural part, of the Chinese line.

But you want to amplify something in the scene, a particular aspect. You zoom in, narrowing your field of vision, until you have focused on exactly what you want to bring out of the scene. You take another picture. This is like capturing the image of the last three characters, the post-caesural part of the Chinese line.

Note 1: 王維詩集 Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo, 1972, page 152.

Authors: 小 川　環 樹 (Ogawa Tamaki)
都　留　春　雄　(Tsuru Haru’o)
入　谷　仙　介　(Iritani Sensuke)