For work-related reasons, I'm learning about classical Chinese poetry forms in the hopes of finding something easily translatable into English like Haiku, Sonnets, Ghazals, and Sijo. This sorts of structured small forms are really fun for teaching people who don't see themselves as writers how to write poetry and get started feeling out that satisfaction of writing and finishing something.
And, well, no, classical Chinese poetry forms really can't be super easily transposed to English and turned into a fun activity for new writers. Holy crap. These are so complicated and work with very specific linguistic elements of Chinese that really are not present in English. It's extremely cool actually. They're all very very cool. And for most of these I cannot even conceive of how you would make an English version without losing a lot of the form. The Duilian is the one fascinating me the most right now. I am thinking about how to make an English Duilian.
So Chinese doesn't have stressed and unstressed syllables the way that English does, but of course it does have tones. So a poetic meter instead manifests as specific tone patterns. Having specific patterns of alternating between level and oblique tones. In a Duilian, the tone patterns of a couplet are inverse of each other.
For one example I found, the tone pattern is:
平平仄仄平平仄 仄仄平平仄仄平
Keeping in mind that in Classical Chinese, each of those would usually be an entire word. Modern Chinese has a lot of multi-syllabic words but not-so-much Classical Chinese. I think maybe an English equivalent of this would be, perhaps, alternating lines between iambic and trochaic pentameters?
◡ –◡ –◡ –◡ –◡ – – ◡– ◡– ◡– ◡– ◡
Alert the guards the sun is rising up Go now, find it, bask in morning sunshine
I kinda hate how this sounds personally. For English poetry I want the meter to be consistent from line to line. But this is sort-of what is happening in the Duilian. Perhaps we could do pyrrichs and spondees, which is much less English but does correspond to the earlier example more directly.
– –◡ ◡– –◡ ◡ ◡ – –◡ ◡–
Dear Sun, everyday sleepless For the day will come again
This was so difficult to write and I kind of hated it, haha. Iambic pentameter has been the standard in English for a long time for a good reason. I'm going to stick with alternating stress.
But wait, the Duilian doesn't just have couplets with inverted meter, but also corresponding lexical categories and meanings. So if the first word in the first sentence is a noun, the first word in the second sentence is also a noun, and those nouns must be related in meaning, possibly through inversion. Isn't that wild? That these Classical Chinese poems would have these two sentences where every single syllable is a mirror of each other. That's so cool. And of course you can't mirror what isn't there, so the two lines must be the same number of syllables. Parallelism is very common in Classical Chinese poetic forms.
I think for English, we obviously can't mirror every syllable semantically, unless we restricted ourselves to one syllable words, which makes poetic meter difficult. So I think it would make most sense to say that it should mirror on a word-to-word basis rather than syllable-to-syllable. Flexibility with articles would also be necessary. When writing in iambic meter, you'll often use articles and other grammatical particles as your initial unstressed syllables. If you're going to mirror the meter, then all those articles become stressed syllables, which isn't how we usually speak.
Alert the guards, the sun is rising up Rest, the ward of moons is sinking downwards
So what's interesting to me about this is that if you know that the poem is a Duilian and so every word is meant to relate, then you can imply relationships here. I used "ward" here which implies that a ward and a guard have something in common, or are invert of each other. Do I intend to say that a guard is not like a ward? What does that mean? Now what if I used a word like "beast" instead. Is a guard like a beast, or the opposite of a beast?
The final rules of the Duilian that I haven't mentioned is that the final syllable of the first line is to be an oblique tone so that the final syllable of the second line will be level. Since we're using iambs and trochees in our English poem, the final syllable naturally will be an inverse solitary syllable. I guess I'm not sure whether level or oblique tones correspond to "stressed." I don't really know Chinese well enough to know what vibe ending on a level tone gives the poem, especially since I only know Modern Mandarin and not Classical Chinese. My inclination is that ending on an iamb is closer to ending on a level tone, but that means the first line has to be in trochaic meter and I don't know if I want to live in that world.
Chinese is also more semantically dense than English on a syllable to syllable level. A 14-syllable Chinese poem actually says a lot more than an English poem of 16 words. I imagine perhaps decameter would be more appropriate than pentameter, with maybe a mid-line caesura.
So I guess here is my "English Duilian" rule set.
- The "Duilian" is two lines of any number of syllables, here we will use ten syllables.
- The lexical category of each semantic word must be the same as its corresponding word in the other line. Nouns to nouns, verbs to verbs, adjectives to adjectives. Grammatical particles are exempt.
- The stress of each syllable must be inverse of the corresponding syllable in the other line. If the first line is in trochaic decameter, the second line must be in iambic decameter.
- The last syllable of the first line should be unstressed, to force the last syllable of the second line to be stressed (optional).
- The lines must have related meanings, and each semantic word must have a related meaning of its corresponding word in the other line, excluding grammatical particles. Relationship may be through inversion or relation.
So my first line will be in trochaic decameter and my second line will be in iambic decameter.
Kill the cop who lives in every noggin // Judging worth from wealth and lily skin tone Then birth a rebel occupying zilch // Accepting weight of life from beating hearts
The Duilian is not exclusively but often used to express positive hopes for the new year. My coworker today said that 2024 is shaping up to be the year of the expose, of people dragging long rotten laundry into clean open air. I hope that if this becomes a year of call-outs and exposures, that we can move slowly and remember to hold every life as heavy in our hands.