Chinese Songs in a French Key by Pauline Yu

Chinese Songs in a French Key: How Judith Gautier's Book of Jade Introduced Europe to Chinese Poetry

By Pauline Yu

Columbia University Press 2025

In a world hot with the fever of expectancy and hungry for the unknown, fin de siècle Paris was at the heart of a culture of translation in Europe, a civilizational watershed with parallels throughout history, but unique in scale due to increased levels of literacy and a growing ease of producing books. In an atmosphere so primed for cultural surprises, the literary salons of the Second Empire still stood stunned for a publication in 1867; Judith Gautier’s The Book of Jade had just opened the doors to classical Chinese poetry for Europe. In her Chinese Songs in a French Key, noted American sinologist Pauline Yu posits a biography of this remarkable book, while painting the society in which its author lived and created.

The world of nineteenth century French sinology (“a combat sport”) pops out of these pages in rollicking colour; an arena where pedantry walked hand in hand with libel suits, and transmuting Chinese texts for a general audience was the last thing on anyone's mind. But armchair scholarship had an invidious twin in France’s “discovery” of China, and the opulent plunder stolen by imperialist raids was being carted back to Parisian displays and igniting a lasting fascination with the Far East in many a heart. One such enthusiast was Judith Gautier, a young woman with an artistically febrile mind who moved in literary circles with luminaries such as Dumas, Flaubert, Baudelaire, and the Goncourts, and grew up in the culturally eclectic household of her famous father Théophile Gautier, a particular bit of biographic detail that chased her all her life. It was her sinophile father who appointed the colourful political refugee Tin-Tun-Ling as Judith’s Chinese tutor, thus igniting the collaboration that would ultimately bear fruit in The Book of Jade just a handful of years later.

Yu energetically fleshes out this backdrop to the book's release before recounting the ripples it made on the French literary scene on impact. From the onset, this young Parisienne’s work invited suspicion, as critics struggled to decide how much of her book was genuine translations of such Chinese giants as Du Fu and Li Bo, and how much were the concise flights of unbridled imagery of a poet's daughter. The blinkered literati of the day found it impossible to believe that such beauty could come out of the “uncivilized East”, while purists ever since have enjoyed taking the work to task for its infidelity to the source material. Gautier herself favoured telling it slant, and while she only officially appended the label of translations to her book in a later 1902 edition, her efforts were always focused on penetrating into the heart of the poems in front of her, and to try and midwife them into an alien culture. “Adaptation was her primary mode, and translation involved taking liberties”, writes Yu, as she spends a significant amount of time unpacking the mechanics behind classical Chinese poetry; it is in these pages of lucid elucidation and gentle, considered evaluations of the art of translations, that the book truly shines. She argues that, for bringing Chinese poetry to Europe:

Translators [needed] to unpack and explain historical and textual references … [supply a] grammatical infrastructure … [grapple with] a language whose poetry was so concise yet so steeped in allusion … [so as not to] “copy a miniature with a piece of charcoal”

problems that anyone who has dabbled in a modern translation of these poems can attest to. Yet to a large extent, Gautier was successful in letting her oblique imagery embody the thoughts and feelings present in the poetry and thus eschew the panoply of scholarly apparatus which would have doomed her work to oblivion. She had an ear for recognizing the dramatic stories buried within the ancient manuscripts in front of her and for bringing them out for her readers through subtle embellishments. Indeed, one is left with the impression that if a book that would have pleased modern translation snobs would have sprung out of her head it would never have become a minor classic in French letters, and a work that was disseminated and translated widely, and going on to influence everything from French prose poems to the “dispassionate, concrete, and imagistic style, that became the hallmark of translations of Chinese poetry.” In a discussion dominated by Ezra Pound, Yu posits Gautier’s supremacy in inventing Chinese poetry for her era.

The classics, of any culture, are not fragile, and the stylistic liberties taken by Gautier in her book of course couldn't harm the originals in any real way, as evidenced even by those Chinese of her day who could read French. While she has largely become a footnote as an alleged love interest in the lives of Victor Hugo, Wagner, and Singer Sargent (avenues which this book unfortunately feels the need to digress into), one wishes that Gautier would be celebrated more for her grace in bringing down seemingly impenetrable barriers of understanding; as this book is likely to send you back to your bookshelves hunting for the Chinese poetry discussed so intelligently in these pages, perhaps you'll browse with a wry smile.

Siddharth Handa is a book critic currently living in New Delhi