A hidden agenda

The translations they write are displayed in galleries, stenciled on walls,

inscribed on small wooden blocks and stuck on the kitchen door and printed on acetate sheets and hung in shopping malls. Poets, non-literary people and children are invited to make sense of writing that, at the first glance, seem to be letters strewn on a rectangular black patch. The latter category is often found to have a better success rate, not being bogged down by years of literary and social conditioning.

Dissatisfied with the set forms and conventions practiced in literature, Majzels was drawn to the ancient Hebrew Talmud (200-280 BC) and the Torah scroll, looking for answers to the question: What is a book? The Talmud's answer: A book was a book if it contained a minimum of 85 letters, and deserved to be saved. That's how Majzels zeroed in on the magic figure of 85.

The similarity in ethos between the ancient Aramaic-Hebrew texts that might contain a world of meanings in a single sentence and a Tang poem, which Majzels says, "is like a small stone that drops into a still pond" did not take long to strike him. Reading a Tang poem, he says, conjures up "a single subtle image, which goes on to create ripples in the reader's mind, gradually expanding into ever-wider circles of meaning and feeling". He experimented with trying to fit in his translations of Tang poems into an 85-letter constraint, hacking at and chipping away an article here and a word too many, till the material at hand was reduced to its bare minimal state, in a form so transparent, porous and open-ended, that sunlight might pass through it.

"The poems I chose to translate are permeated by a combination of longing, of disappointment in the state of the world, a renunciation of worldly things, a release from the self. The poem is about the struggle for release, the tension between the desire to dwell in the world and the desire to be free of it," says Majzels, adding that a similar tension marks the ink-brush paintings and inscriptions done by Bada Shanren. The 17th-century hermit painter-poet's inscriptions, points out Huot, are marked by "self-mockery and brooding". The calligraphy, done mostly using the Chinese indelible red ink, straddles cultural traditions, combining the old and the modern, especially when one looks at the artist's abundant use of blank space.

The minimalism in the works of Bada Shanren and the Tang poets tie up beautifully with the Hebrew tradition, in which the Kabbalist thinkers struggle to retreat from the world by involving themselves in complex meditative practices even as they talk about more worldly matters such as marriage, dietary habits, financial deals, legal issues and sex. Indeed, so do a lot of Tang poems, like Meng Haoran's Spring Morning, or Du Fu's Lodging at the Magistrate's, which Majzels has translated. But the constraint of 85 characters has necessitated whittling down an already compact form to its bare essentials, and it would take a reader the extreme patience of a chess player, to locate the nuances, the detail and the possibilities latent in the text, which might elude him in the blink of an eye.

Majzels and Huot are now toying with the idea of linking the works of the Tang Dynasty poet Xue Tao and the contemporary Sichuan poet Zhai Yongming. "We believe the latter's work is influenced by Xue Tao's poetry and we want to break away from the historicizing practice of isolating periods, whether Tang or Song or Ming, etc, to combine a very contemporary writer with an ancient voice, to find commonalities in attitude and feeling between women poets that bridge time," says Majzels.

Essentially, what the Majzels-Huot duo is trying to highlight is the limiting nature of receiving Chinese culture in English. The effort assumes extra significance especially now, since the West is making a renewed attempt at trying to make sense of China and its culture. The point the academics from Calgary are trying to make is that it's not an easy job.

"Let's struggle with it," says Majzels, "so that newer possibilities open up." At the end of the day, he says, "we know so little about China. We can only try and build bridges across cultures."