Poets From England

"Friendship's an abstract of this noble flame, 'Tis love refined and purged from all its dross, The next to angel's love, if not the same, As strong as passion is, though not so gross: It antedates a glad eternity And is an heaven in epitome."

"The desire to have many books, and never to use them, is like a child that will have a candle burning by him all the while he is sleeping. (The Compleat Gentleman, 1622)"

"Be just before you're generous."

"Waley is a special case. He is a fine poet who has deliberately limited himself, as a kind of rigorous aesthetic discipline—a little like the self-imposed rigors of Paul Valéry—to translation from the Chinese and Japanese."

"Greatness in men is a rare but unmistakable quality. In our small profession it is unlikely we shall see a man of such magnitude again."

"The translator who can be accurate and yet idiomatic is both craftsman and artist. [...] Such a one is Arthur Waley, translator of exquisite Chinese poetry and of the monumental Japanese novel by Lady Murasaki. Translator Waley learned both Japanese and the still more difficult Chinese from native teachers in London. He has never been east of Suez, and yet he is a recognized authority on literature and art of the Far East. By profession Assistant in the Oriental Section of the British Museum Print Room, his favorite diversion is the poetry of Chinese Po Chu-i."

"Suddenly they saw a body in the water, drifting rapidly down stream. Tripitaka stared at it in consternation. Monkey laughed. 'Don't be frightened, Master,' he said. 'That's you.' And Pigsy said, 'It's you, it's you.' Sandy clapped his hands. 'It's you, it's you,' he cried. The ferryman too joined in the chorus. 'There you go!' he cried. 'My best congratulations.'"

"Tripitaka stepped lightly ashore. He had discarded his earthly body; he was cleansed from the corruption of the senses, from the fleshly inheritance of those bygone years. His was now the transcendent wisdom that leads to the Further Shore, the mastery that knows no bounds."

"A large capacity to accept the assumptions of any world-view, without assuming any merit for our own, is the basic virtue of Waley's mind."

"A handful of one's country's soil is worth more than ten thousand pounds of foreign gold."

"He belonged not only to the world of oriental studies, but to the world of literature."

"'If the Government gets hold of you they'll flog you to death; if the Buddhists get hold of you they'll starve you to death.'"

"Whatever Waley's achievement as a poet may ultimately appear to be, there can be little doubt that his most widely-known works, the novels Genji and Monkey, are likely to survive longest in popular regard. Indeed, both are likely to retain a permanent place in English literature [...]. It is unthinkable that other translations of these novels could ever supersede them in popularity, and improbable that the astringent charm and ascetic delicacy of their style could displease the taste of any age, however much literary fashions may fluctuate and change. Of course he made mistakes—so did the translators of the Authorized Version; but not enough ever to make his translations obsolete."

"'Insensate groom! What crime is there that you have not committed? You have stolen peaches and stolen wine, upset the high feast, purloined Lao Tzu's elixir, and then taken more wine for your banquet here. You have piled up sin upon sin; do you not realize what you have done?' 'Quite true,' said Monkey, 'all quite true. What are you going to do about it?'"

"'Nothing in the world is difficult,' said the Patriarch, 'it is only our own thoughts that make things seem so.'"

"'To hope for [immortality],' said the Patriarch, 'would be like trying to fish the moon out of the water.' 'There you go again!' said Monkey. 'What pray do you mean by fishing the moon out of the water?' 'When the moon is in the sky,' said the Patriarch, 'it is reflected in the water. It looks just like a real thing, but if you try to catch hold of it, you find it is only an illusion.'"

"There was a rock that since the creation of the world had been worked upon by the pure essences of Heaven and the fine savours of Earth, the vigour of sunshine and the grace of moonlight, till at last it became magically pregnant and one day split open, giving birth to a stone egg, about as big as a playing ball. Fructified by the wind it developed into a stone monkey, complete with every organ and limb."

"You that in far-off countries of the sky can dwell secure, look back upon me here; for I am weary of this frail world's decay."

"Think not that I have come in quest of common flowers; but rather to bemoan the loss of one whose scent has vanished from the air."

"Ceaseless as the interminable voices of the bell-cricket, all night till dawn my tears flow."

"Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams."

"It is in general the unexplored that attracts us."

"Though the snow-drifts of Yoshino were heaped across his path, doubt not that whither his heart is set, his footsteps shall tread out their way."

"I would rather be dead."

"I have a theory of my own about what this art of the novel is, and how it came into being. To begin with, it does not simply consist in the author's telling a story about the adventures of some other person. On the contrary, it happens because the storyteller's own experience of men and things, whether for good or ill—not only what he has passed through himself, but even events which he has only witnessed or been told of—has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart."

"When translating prose dialogue one ought to make the characters say things that people talking English could conceivably say. One ought to hear them talking, just as a novelist hears his characters talk."

"Anyone with a good classical education could learn Chinese by himself without difficulty."

"Anything whatsoever may become the subject of a novel, provided only that it happens in this mundane life and not in some fairyland beyond our human ken."

"To the European poet the relation between man and woman is a thing of supreme importance and mystery. To the Chinese, it is something commonplace, obvious—a need of the body, not a satisfaction of the emotions."

"Since the classical language has an easy grammar and limited vocabulary, a few months should suffice for the mastering of it."

"'Master, we can start now; I have killed them all.' 'I am very sorry to hear it,' said Tripitaka. 'One has no right to kill robbers, however violent and wicked they may be. The most one may do is to bring them before a magistrate. It would have been quite enough in this case if you had driven them away. Why kill them? You have behaved with a cruelty that ill becomes one of your sacred calling.' 'If I had not killed them,' said Monkey, 'they would have killed you.' 'A priest,' said Tripitaka, 'should be ready to die rather than commit acts of violence.'"

"I have not used rhyme, because what is really, in the long run, of most interest to American readers is what the poems say; and if one uses rhyme, it is impossible not to sacrifice sense to sound."

"A team of horses cannot overtake a word that has left the mouth."

"I'm always trying to understand myself, but it's like there's a point in the centre of the room, and there's a hundred windows to look at the same point from. All I can do is give you different angles on the same thing. God, you know, if I could find one conclusive thing in anything I would probably have something to put an anchor down on. But I can't, and I haven't met anyone that can. You can pick out anything you like in my lyrics, I don't seek to be cryptic. I love words for the sake of words, for me they're kind of free standing, and they don't really need to be explained. I think every word has its own character and colour and picture and the result you get with lyrics just depends how you put them together."

"I think drugs can be a bit of a lazy way for creativity anyway, you're better off in the cold light of day in the mirror."

"I think taking the stage is one of the most unnatural things anyone can do. In a way, just walking on stage actually creates an altered state–it's not right, no one's meant to do that, unless you're a priest or a magician, or something like that. To put somebody who's very incapable in many ways in to that position creates a combustion reaction inside me. I know that, and I take the stage knowing that."

"I strain my voice doing bad work, [but] sometimes the impulse is too huge [and] I just have to."

"There isn't anyone you meet that isn't absolutely peculiar. Everyone you meet is absolutely extraordinary. I've never met a human being that isn't, that doesn't have a fantastic story and is completely valid in their...you know, madness, really."

"I know what turns me on, and it's that fine line, that point where you're falling off the edge of a cliff, where your stomach turns, [and] I'm always trying to find that point in music. You rarely hit it, and again, that's the joy of playing live, because there you can be just at that point where you've lost balance. I'm always walking between polarities, trying to find the opposing sides."

"You know, in a way touring is the most grounding thing you can do."

"I layer myself in dirt because I want to be a child; I want to scream. Sometimes I'm unhappy with myself, so I want to look aesthetically unpleasing. At the end of tours I feel completely beaten and destroyed. I kick and scream and destroy myself. I cut myself—my legs are cut to shreds—and my chest. I get up and I shout. I truly feel it's like a purge."

"That was such a perfect childhood. Up until recently I thought I saw too much too young. But now I feel truly lucky. It showed me how nice life could be and how it should be better for every person."

"I get accused of many things, promoting pedophilia and stuff like that. I find that extraordinary. I dress myself like I would paint a picture. I try to use that to project how I feel inside. I'm a complete romantic as well, but within traditional romantic images you have so much blatant sexism. So it's all those contradiction mixed up. But that's OK. We should embrace all that instead of tearing each other apart for it. That's what I'm admitting to."

"Who's to say there'll be anyone here to remember me?"

"There are no answers."

"The bourgeois ... necessarily regards all behaviour that bursts ‘spontaneously’ forth from the individual ignorant of its causality, as above all free. Therefore the instincts are conceived as freely striving for unconscious goals, and psychology becomes the adventures of the free instincts in their struggles against the restraints of the environment (in Freud, of society) which impede and cripple their freedom. Out of this struggle cognitive and emotional consciousness is born.Now the only objection to this bourgeois psychology is that it inverts the picture. The instincts are not free springs of connation towards a goal. They are, so far as they can be abstractly separated, unconscious necessities, as Kant realised. They are unfree."

"That the environment does wrongs to man’s mind today none will deny. These wrongs are not done because consciousness imprisons the instincts with the fetters of necessity; but because bourgeois man is unconscious of the determinism of his culture. Because of this the instincts are losing such freedom as they attained, are becoming crippled, and less free. Unconsciousness and inexperience, not consciousness and experience, are the gaolers of modern bourgeois man."

"The domination inherent in the slave-owning system is not repressed, as with the bourgeois, but is conscious, and the illusion consists, not in supposing that no domination exists, but that society is in fact really determined solely by the will of the master, and does not in turn determine his will."

"The slave-owner is at times visited with a nightmare. He finds that his free will, in spite of its freedom, is thwarted, not by a superior will but by things-in-themselves – by inferior wills, accidents, mistakes, and his own ignorance. Yet he is still unable to conceive his will except as being thwarted like that of his slave’s by another will, and since he the master is so thwarted, might not even the world’s master and his – God Himself – be thwarted in his volition by some grand over-riding will, by Will-in-Itself? This is the slaveowning conception of Moira, or Fate, a comparatively late development reaching its noblest expression in Greek tragedy. This Fate, in spite of its closeness to bourgeois determinism, betrays its slave-owning parentage by the fact that it is always visualised as a consciously forseeing Will, and always as thwarting, not determining human wills as well as events, but interfering with human wills by means of events."

"The bourgeois ... conception of freedom really arose as a special case of a group of illusions about domination which has been associated with all forms of society based on dominating classes. This group of illusions has for a common factor the belief that domination secures self-determination."