"I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality"
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There is a particular kind of musician-curiosity embedded here: not the touristy “exotic East” impulse, but the restless suspicion that translation is a beautiful cheat. Verlaine isn’t name-checking Chinese poetry to sound worldly; he’s circling an aesthetic problem he spent his whole career obsessing over in song form: how much can you strip away and still keep the voltage?
“I wonder what…sound like in Chinese” puts the ear first. That’s a songwriter’s tell. It’s about cadence, consonants, breath, the way meaning rides on tone and rhythm before it ever becomes “content.” In English, classical Chinese poetry often arrives as a kind of minimal, clarified essence: images floating in white space, emotion implied rather than stated. Verlaine’s phrase “distilled quality” is an artist’s compliment with a skeptic’s edge. Distillation is refinement, but it’s also processing. Something has been cooked down, filtered, maybe altered to suit the container.
The subtext is a quiet challenge to the Anglophone fantasy of “pure” Eastern brevity. What we admire as spare might be partly the translator’s knife, partly our own hunger for a cleaner, less cluttered language than the one we live in. Verlaine, coming out of the New York art-rock ecosystem, understood that style is never innocent: it’s a set of choices about what to omit, what to leave jagged, what to let listeners supply.
He’s also confessing a bias toward compression: the poem as a tight coil rather than a lecture. That’s not just a literary preference; it’s a musical one.
“I wonder what…sound like in Chinese” puts the ear first. That’s a songwriter’s tell. It’s about cadence, consonants, breath, the way meaning rides on tone and rhythm before it ever becomes “content.” In English, classical Chinese poetry often arrives as a kind of minimal, clarified essence: images floating in white space, emotion implied rather than stated. Verlaine’s phrase “distilled quality” is an artist’s compliment with a skeptic’s edge. Distillation is refinement, but it’s also processing. Something has been cooked down, filtered, maybe altered to suit the container.
The subtext is a quiet challenge to the Anglophone fantasy of “pure” Eastern brevity. What we admire as spare might be partly the translator’s knife, partly our own hunger for a cleaner, less cluttered language than the one we live in. Verlaine, coming out of the New York art-rock ecosystem, understood that style is never innocent: it’s a set of choices about what to omit, what to leave jagged, what to let listeners supply.
He’s also confessing a bias toward compression: the poem as a tight coil rather than a lecture. That’s not just a literary preference; it’s a musical one.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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