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Tree Talks

by Huang Xiao-yi

Translator's Introduction

The Discovery
In May, 1979, Cadre-leader Tam Cheng Song was strolling in the hilly countryside near his Sezhuan village. Having stopped to relieve himself against a stony outcrop beside the path, he was puzzled to note that the seemingly solid rock face against which he directed his stream quickly crumbled, almost dissolved, leaving a hand-sized opening. As he would later tell reporters and TV persons from all over China, it was not through lack of initiative that he had risen to his village leadership position. Thus he did not even have to think twice before enlarging the hole and peering into a chamber of indeterminate size. With the sun at a favorable angle he was able to discern a number of dust-covered jugs, a couple of chests and tatters of what looked to be fine silk.

What Tam Cheng Song afterward neglected to reveal to his various interrogators was the excited hour during which he sat with his back against the opening, weighing the various possibilities his discovery presented to him. At the least, he knew his find would give his party career a boost, possibly a very large boost. The question was: Might the chamber hold items, of gold or jade perhaps, whose value on the black market could have an even more favorable long-term impact on his prospects?

At length, after carefully checking to see that no passers-by were approaching from either direction, Tam enlarged the hole further and went so far as to poke his head in. His first reaction was disappointment, great disappointment in fact. The "chamber" looked to be little more than a declivity-- whether natural or man-made, he could not tell, in the hillside. The walls were rough, undecorated, and the objects were placed in no order, were in fact arranged in a rather rough and tumble manner, as if deposited in haste.

Craning further, Tam tried to suppress his disappointment and made a mental catalog of what he was seeing: four jugs, ranging in size from one to perhaps three liters, and two quite small chests which seemed to have originally been covered with the silk he had noticed at first. Otherwise, nothing. No golden coffin, no ranks of ceramic soldiers, no glass casket filled with jewels, no jade statuary.

Once again Tam withdrew and sat calmly, with studied nonchalance. In a nation of 1.2 billion, you never know who or how many might come sauntering by any given spot, no matter how remote, and read one's face.

Buried treasure, and thus the burying of treasure, is hardly unknown in China. So inured to and distrustful of all government have the Chinese become in 5,000 years that one might almost say that burying treasure is a national pastime. Tam himself had a stash of rainy-day valuables hidden away not more than an hour's walk from this very spot. He knew that every person in his village who had enough to spare would have a similar outdoor cache.

Thus he was surprised by his find, but not astonished as an American or a European would have been. He gathered his thoughts and asked himself what he knew about the discovery.

One, it was old. The dust, the condition of the silk, plus the musty odor all bespoke age, though he had no idea how old.

Two, the crude hollow, the lack of decoration, the carelessness of the arrangement of objects did not give the impression of great hidden treasure, of the kind one occasionally saw archeologists displaying on television.

Three, the dimly-lit tableau also did not have the appearance of trickery, that is, an almost casual burial of items of great wealth to discourage the further curiosity of someone, just like himself, who might stumble across the little hoard.

What else? Ah. Four-- and here is where his story to the TV and newspaper people picked up. Four, a memory was jogged and he recalled a most informative program he had seen on the most informative government channel concerning manuscripts of great antiquity discovered when? Eight, ten years ago. Now he could almost see the TV image in his mind, showing a small, unassuming site just such as this.

Ah, he said to himself again, his decision now made for him, perhaps I have found documents which will aid in throwing further light on the feudal exploitation of the peasants in their millennia-long struggle toward true socialism. (Only half-acknowledged was his awareness of the enormous difficulties and risks involved in moving such ephemeral properties into and through the commercial underground.) I must hurry to the village, call Party Central and get expert help out here to properly investigate yet another artifact from our troubled and tormented past, for what do I, Cadre Leader Tam Cheng Song, know about handling such historically valuable artifacts.

That is in fact what he, to his credit, did.

Within 24 hours, a team from the provincial university was carefully poking about in Tam's chamber. Three days later a much larger group arrived from Beijing, and within a week Tam's face was known throughout China as the discoverer of the long-lost Tree Talks by Huang Xiao-Yi.

The Background
In the years since, as Tam expected, Chinese scholars have labored to fill in the massive gap in cultural history which the missing manuscripts represented.

Tree Talks was first mentioned in 112 B.C. by the legendary chronicler of the distant Chinese past, Yin Ye. He spoke of the work in the same glowing if somewhat puzzled terms which he used in describing that other problematic monument of Chinese non-conformity and metaphysical insubordination, the Tao Te Ching:

Yin Ye even appended a brief, though hardly helpful, biographical snippet concerning Huang Xiao-Yi, the author:

References to Tree Talks continue for several centuries and then-- one of the mysteries of Chinese history-- they stop. Not only that, but it seems that an incredibly efficient campaign of eradication was carried out because, until Tam's fortuitous stroll in 1979, the work simply disappeared.

Why? It is both easy and difficult to say. On the surface, Tree Talks seems the harmless, somewhat wild-eyed meanderings of a yet another Chinese nature poet. Some scholars have suggested envy as a cause for scriptorial banishment. One can imagine, so goes the argument, that this or that capricious, fickle emperor, perhaps fancying himself a nature poet, might have for some reason decided to erase a competitor from the records. Persons who have difficulty accepting the possibility of such unrestrained and tyrannical vanity have not been paying attention to the current century.

Another suggestion asserts that the work's occasional overt, if not perverse, sexuality, elicited a knee-jerk reaction in some especially puritanical regime. Possibly, but why the extremity of the reaction? With the ebb and flow of liberal-conservative reigns, Chinese history is filled with repeated censorship, often of works much more obviously-- and perversely-- sexual than this little book. In spite of censorship, those works have survived in rather astonishing quantity. But not Tree Talks.

Having spent some years with my translation of what has turned out to be a highly recalcitrant work, I now suspect another cause behind the disappearance.

The two great ancient contemporaries of Huang Xiao-Yi are, whatever their other qualities, thoroughly prescriptive. Both Lao-Tze and Confucius, each in his way, repeatedly remind the reader that if the reader does such and such, then such and such positive results will follow. Or, if the reader fails to do or act or think or not think in a certain way, then various unpleasant results will occur.

Tree Talks stands quite apart from this attitude that the world-is-broken-but-if-you-listen-to-me-we-can-set-things-right. Oh to be sure, there are tiny prescriptions, nudges one wants to say, tucked away in, sometimes between, the lines of this miraculously re-discovered masterpiece. But nothing of the sweeping, grandiose cure-it-alls that the other two writers emphasize, Confucius with his numbing social constructions and constrictions, and Lao-Tze with his stimulating if often baffling paradoxes.

What we have here, I now suspect, is the most profoundly subversive work in Chinese and possibly world literature. Further, Tree Talks is especially dangerous precisely because there are no tricks, no hidden messages, no coded symbolism. Huang Xiao-Yi, I have come to believe, means exactly what he says. All he does is say the same thing a number of different ways, including the title. Unlike the possible esoteric levels of the Tao Te Ching, there is no mystery here as far as the immediate "meaning" of the work is concerned. Huang Xiao-Yi says simply: Trees talk; listen to them. Over and over, he says it. The work thus has almost a musical quality to it, a sort of theme, deceptively simple, almost naive, and a set of variations, also disarming in their straightforwardness, on that theme.

Ninety-nine percent of humans would immediately dismiss such a suggestion-- Listen to trees? Give me a break-- as that of a madman. One percent are perhaps intrigued enough to read the presentation. Of that one percent, who knows how many, what tiny number, might set out to explore Huang Xiao-Yi's mad path.

And what do they find? What, indeed.

The answer of course is, we don't really know. But the historical record gives us two provocative, even troubling clues-- and both of these Huang Xiao-Yi himself warns us about.

First, whatever the legendary "Languid Arborists"-- the group allegedly formed on the suggestions" of Tree Talks-- may have discovered, it took a long time. Huang Xiao-Yi reminds us after all that trees talk very slowly.

Second, whatever they found, the established powers, apparently took such alarmed offense that they attempted to root out and destroy the work absolutely-- and very nearly succeeded.

Thus, you hold a mystery in your hands, but the mystery lies also beyond the work. On the one hand, it is a simple little book of Chinese nature poetry with an occasional image of some beauty, a tone of yearning not unlike that over which one slumbered in Freshman English fragments of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Whitman even.

On the other hand, it appears to be a guide to something-- a way of being in the world, a way of seeing, a way of talking, a way of feeling, who knows what?-- which an entire, highly perceptive, clever, jaded civilization found out about and then rendered judgment on with a censorious "NO!"

I must repeat: I believe there is nothing secret here, nor anything very complicated. Again: I take Huang Xiao-Yi at his word: he is talking about talking to trees. And that's all. It is the very maddening simplicity of his message of course that no doubt prevented the development of any sort of religion or quasi-religion as has happened with other, similarly enigmatic or suggestive works in Chinese and other cultures. Cleverly, he didn't give the religionists or the would-be religionists any hooks, no miracles, no promises of immortality, to hang on to.

The work is sui generis, with a rare purity which must spring directly from its equally rare simplicity. How do I know this? As Huang himself would say: By this.

The Translation
Cervantes observed that reading a translation is like looking at the back of a tapestry: one sees loose threads, cut ends, and only the vaguest of approximations of the picture on the front.

Translators, like all other humans, fall into three groups: the frightened, the hopeful, and the creative. The frightened, literalists all, vote Republican and when they try their hand at translating, treat ambiguity as a liberal conspiracy. The creative are as unpredictable in their translations as in their politics. You never know which switch they will pull on the voting machine, or which word they will choose when translating. In the middle are the hopeful, who in translation as in everything else, are trying to understand and of course fix the world.

By the lights of the frightened and the hopeful, I have committed grievous translational sins: those of anachronism, pornography, and other irreverences toward the original text. They are right. I have done those things. Whether I have at the same time and thereby managed to shift Huang's long-lost and even troubling world and world-view comprehensibly into another language and another time, the reader alone can decide.
                                                         --Douglas Milburn

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