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NINETEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT WANG WEI

How a Chinese poem is translated

Exhibit & Commentary by Eliot Weipberger Further Comments oy Octavio Paz

MOYER BELL UMITED Mt. Kisco, New York

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Copyright 0 1987 Eliot Weinbetger and <Xtavio paz All rip!8 reserved. Fmlt Edition 1987 Printed In the United States of America

For pennission to reprint copyrighted material, the authors are indebted to the following:

Georges Bol:dwdt Inc.: for the ~is Cheng tra.n.slation, Copyright 1977 by J;.cIitions du SeuU.' ' Columbia UniverSity Press: for the BurtoJi, Watson tral:UJiation, Copyright 19']2 by the Colwnbia University Preas; and for the H.C. Chang translation, Copyright 1977 by H.C. Clang. . . Farrar Straus &: Giroux: for the Witter 8ynner &: Iaang J:ang Hu trarlsiatlon, Copyright 1978 by the Witter Bynner Foundation. indiana University Preas: for the Donald 'A. Riggs &: Jerome P. Seaton tral:UJiation of Fl'lIn~ Cheng, Copyright 1!}8a by the.lndlana University Press. New~: for the Kenneth Rexroth translation, Copyright 1970 by Kenneth Rexroth. ' . Octavio paz: for his translations, Copyright 1974, 1978 by Octavio Pu. Penguin Boob: for the C.W. Robinson transiation, Copyright 1973 by C.W. Robinson. . Gary Snyder: lor his translation, Copyright 1978 by Gary Snyder. Chu1es E. Tuttle Co.: for the. C.J. Chen &: Michael Bullock translation, Copyright 1960 by, Jerome Chen &: Michael Ilullock; and for the WiBiam McNaughton translation, Copy,right in Japan 1974 by Charles TuttJe. University of California PreiS: for the Peter A. Boodbel'l translation, Copyright 1979 by The Repnts of the University of California. University of Chicago Preas: for the Jamee J. Y. Uu trans",tion, Copyright 1962 by James J.Y. Liu. Wai-lim YIP: for his translation, Copyright 1972 by Wai..um Yip.

An earlier version of Weinberger's essay·fIrst appeared in ZERO: CONTEM­ PORARY BUDDHIST THOUGHT, edited by Eric Lemer. Paz's original essay, plus a SPanish translation of Weinberger's essay by Ulalume Go~1ez de Le6n, first appeared in VUELTA (Mexico City). The translation of Paz's essay Is by Bliot Weinberger.

Library of Congress Cataloglng--in-Publication Data

Weinberger, Eliot. Nmeteen waY!' of looking at Wang Wei.

1. Wang, "rei, 101-761. Lu ch'ai. 2. Wang, Wei, 7Ot-']61-Trahslations. I. Wang. Wei, 101-761. Lu ch'a!. Polyglot. l,sJ. n. Paz, Octavio, 1914­ m. TItle. Pl.2676.A68)W4 1987 895.1'1) 87-216J4

ISBN <>-918825-14-8 (pbk.)

Poetry is that' which is worth translating. For example, this four-line poem, 1200 years old: a moun­

tain, a forest, the setting sun illuminating a patch of moss. It is a scrap of literary Chinese, no longer spoken as its writer spoke it. It is a thing, forever itself, inseparable from its lan­ guage.

And yet something about it has caused it to lead a nomadic life: insinuating itself in the minds of readers, demanding understanding. (but on the reader's own terms), provoking thought, sometimes compelling writing in other languages. Great poetry lives in a state of perpetual transformation, per­ petual translation: the poem dies when it has no place to go.

The transformations that take shape in print, that take the formal name of "translation, n become their own beings, set out on their own wanderings. Some live long, and some don't: What kind of aeatures are they? What~happens when a poem, once ~ese and still Chinese, becomes a piece of English, Spanish, French poetry?

Here are 19 incarnations of a small poem by Wang Wei (c. 100-161), who was known in,his lifetime as a wealthy Buddhist painter and ca1li.grapher,· and to later generations as a 'master poet in an age of masterll, the Tang Dynasty. The quatrain is from a series of twenty poems on various sights nea.r the Wang River (no relation). The poems were written as par of a mas­ sive horizontal landscape scroll, a genre invented by Wang. The painting was copied (translated) for centuries. The original is lost; and the earliest surviving copy comes from the 11th century: Wang's landscape after 1000 yearS of transformation.

1

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,.1

(text)

t~ ~w ;fJL ),,-, ~~k~'1 ~ J:',' A ~';ft, 'M rt9. .:t.. -Jt 1__ ~~~" -]:1 t2 ....r::-..

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The poem is by Wang Wei (c. 700":" 761), ~nown in his lifetime as a wealthy Buddhist painter and calligrapher, and to later generations as a master poet in 'an age of masters, the Tang Dynasty. The quatrain is from a series of twenty poems on various sights near the Wang (no relation) River. The poems were written a,s part of a massive horizontal landscape scroll, a genre he invented. The painting was cOpied (translated) for centuries. The original is lost, and the earliest surviving copy comes from the 17th century: Wang's landscape after 900 years of transformation.

In classical Chinese, each' character (ideogram) represents a word of a ~ingJe syUabJe. Few of the characters are, as is commonly thought, entirely representational. But some of the basic vocabulary is indeed pictographic, and with those few hundred characters one can play the game of pretending to read Chinese. .

Reading the poem Jeft to right, top tooottom, the second character in line 1 is apparently a mountain; the. last character in the same line a person-both are stylizations that evolved from more literal representations. Character 4 in line 1 ,was a favorite of Ezra Pound's: w:hat he interpreted as an eye on legs; that is, the eye in motion,' to see. Character 5 in line 3 is two trees, forest. SpatiaJ relationships are concretely portrayed in: character 3 of line 3, to enter, and. character 5 of line 4, aboDe or on (top of). '

More typical of ChineSf! is character 2 of li11e 4, to $hine, which contains an ~ge Qf the sun in the upper .left and of fire at the bottom, as well as a purely phonetic element-key, to the word's pronunciation-in the upper right. Most of the other characters have no pictorial content useful for decipher­ ment.

3

2

.(transliteration)

,", LU'ZHAI

, , , Kong shan bu'-Han ren

" , , w w

Dan wen ren yu xiang w _,

Fan jing (ying)rushen lin

Fu " zhao qing tai " shang

4

The transliteration is from modem Chinese, using the cur... rent, quirky pinyin system. Obvious, perhaps, to the Ruma~ nlans who helped develop it, but not to English speakers, is that the zh is a j sound, the x a heavily aspirated s, arid the q a hard cit. The ais the ah of father.

Though t)te characters have remained the SaIl1e, their p~ nunciatiQn has changed considerably since the Tang Dynasty. In the 1920's the philologist Bernhard Karlgren attempted to recreate Tang speech; a transDteration of this poem, using Karl:. gren's system may be found in Hugh M. Stimson's 55 Tang Poems (yale,. 1976). Unfortunately, the transliteration is written in its own forbidding language, with upside-down letters, let-· ters floating above the. words, and a leveled forest of diacritical marks.

Chinese has the. least number of sounds of any major lan­ guage. In modem Chinese a monosyllable is pronounced in one of fOur tones, but ~ny given sound in any given tone has scores of possible meanings. Thus a Chinese monosyllabic word (and often the written character) is 'cOmprehensible ori.ly in the context of the phrase: a ~guistic basis, perhaps, for Chinese philosophy, which was always based on relation rather than substance.

For poetry, this means that rhyme is inevitable, and Western "meter" impossible. Chinese prosody is largely concerned with the number of characters per line and the arrangement of tones-both of which are untranslatable. But translators tend to rush in where wise men never tread, and otten may be seen attempting to nurture Chinese rhyme patterns in the hostile environment of a Western language ..

IJ,Z 5

3 (charac.ter-by-characft~r I have presented only those definitions that are possible for

ti'anslatioh) this text. There are others. A single character may be noun, verb, and adjective. It may

even have contradictory readings: character 2 of line 3 is either fing (brightness) or ying (shadow). A,gain, context is all. Of

Empty mountain(s) hill(s)

(negative) ,to see person people

particular difficulty to the Western translator is the absence of tense in cru.nese verbs: in the poem, what is happening has happened and will happen. Similarly, nouns h~ve no number:

But to hear person, people

words conversation

Sj)und to echo,

rose is a rose is all roses. ' Contrary to the evidence of most trans1ations~ the first,,:

person singular rarely appears in Chinese ~. By eHmi­ To return bright(ness)

shadow(st to enter' deep forest

nating the controlling individual mind of the po~t, the experience becomes both universal and immediate to the reader.

The title of the poem, Lu wi, is a place-name, something To return Again

to shine to reflect

green 'blue blade

moss lichen

above on (top of) top

like Deer Gr~, which I take from a map of illinois. It probably alludes to the Deer Park in Sarnath, where the Gautama Bud­ dha preached , his first sermon.

The first two lines ilJ'Ci! fairly straightforward. The' second couplet;has, as we shall see, quite a few possible readings, all of them equally "correct./I

• According to ~Cheng, murning s1uItIt:Iws is a trope ~g rtIf/I of JIlnsd.

6 71i.J

4

The Form 6f the Deer. .

So lone seem the hills; there is no one in sight there.

But whence is the echo of voices I hear?

The rays of the sunset pierce slanting the forest,

And in their reflection green mosses appear.

-W.J.B. Fletcher, 1919

The h:anslation is typical of those written before the general recognition of Ezra Pound's Cathay, first published in 19J5. Pound's small bOOk, containing some of the most beautiful poems in the English Ia~guage, was based on a notebook of literal Chinesetranslations.prepared by the orientalist Ernest Fenollosa and a Japanese informant. The "accuracy" of Pound's versions remains a sore point: pt!dants still snort at the errors, but Wai-lim Yip has demonstrated that Pound, who at the time knew no Chinese, intuitively corrected mistakes in the Fenol­ losa manuscript. Regardless of its scholarly worth, Cathay marked, in T.S. Eliot's words, "the invention of Chinese poetry in: our time." Rather than stuffing the Original into the corset of traditional verse forms, as Fletcher and many others had done, Pound created a new poetry in English drawn hom what was unique to the Chinese.

"Every force,". said Mother Ann Lee of the Shakers, "evolves a foim. H Pound's genius was the discove~ of the living matter, the force, of the Chinese poem-what he called the "news that stays news" through the centuries. This living matter func­ tions som,ewhat like DNA, spinning out individual translations which are relatives, not clones, of the Original. The relationship between original and translation is'parent..child. And there are,

. inescapably, some translations that are overly attached to their originals, and others that ate constantly rebelling.

Fletcher, like all early (and many later) translators, feels he must explain and ;'improve" the. original poem. Where Wang's sunlight enters the forest, Fletcher's rays pierce slanting; where Wang states simply that voices are heard, Fletcher invents a first-person .narrator who asks where the sounds are coming

: &om. (And if the hiDs are there, where is the narrator?) . In line 4, ambiguity has been transh:tted into confusion: ..Fletcher's line has no meaning. (What reflection where?) Or perhaps the line has a lovely aIldunJikely Platonic subtlety: if their refers to the mosses,. then what appears·is the reflection. of moss itself.

Fletcher explaihs his curious (and equally Platonic) title With a note that wi means "the place where the deer sleeps, its 'form'." .

/.8'1­

.., Deer-Park Hermitage .

There seems to be no one on the empty mOUl)tain ...

And yet I tl.Unk I hear a voice,

Where sunlight, entering a grove,

Shines back to me from the green moss.

-Witter Bynner & Kiang Kang-~u, 1929 . .

Witter Bynner was a.primary purveyor of Chinoiserie tra:ns­ lation in English in the 1920's-though not as. extreme an exoticist as his Imagist counterparts, Amy Lowell and Florerice Ayscough. His Chinese poet does however write from the ethereal mists of tentative half-perception: there seems to be, and yet I think I hear. (Wang, however, quite plainly sees no one . and hears ~meone.)

Whet:e Wang is specific, Bynne:(s Wang ~ to be watch~ ing the world through a haze of opium reflected in a hundred thimbles of wine. It .isa world where no statement can be made without a pregnant, sensitive, world-weary ellipsis. Th~ I even hears a voice whe~ the sunlight shines back to hinl. from the moss. Such lack of sense was traditionally expbiined by reference to the mystical, inscrutableFu Manchg East.

10 12> 11

6

The Deer Park

An empty hill, and no one in sight

But I hear the echo of voices.

The slanting sun at evening penetrates the deep woods

And shines reflected on the blue lichens.

-Soame Jenyns, 1944

Dull, but fairly direct, Jenyns' only additions are the in­ evitable I and the explanatory slanting sun at evening. He is the only translator to prefer lichen to moss, though in plural form the word is particularly ugly.

In the fourth line zhao becomes both shines reflected, rather than one or, the other, but he is still in the "reflected" trap: from what is the sun reflected?

: Chinese poetry was based on the precise observation of the physical world. Jenyns and other translators come from a tra­ dition where the notion of verifying a poetic image would be silly, where the word "poetic" itself is synonymous with "dreamy. "

He might have squeaked by had he written And shines re­ flected by the blue lichens-accurate to nature, if not to Wang. But Jenyns-at the time iAssistant Keeper of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum, scribblirtg through the Blitz-was so far removed from the poem's experience that,he,found it necessary to add the fonowing footnote to line 2: "Th~ w(jods are SQ thick that woodcutters and herdsmen are hidden."

12 lit 1)

7 La Foret.

Dans la montagne tout est solitaire,

On entend de bien loin l'kIlo des voix htunaines,

Le solei! qui p~n~tre au fond de la fo~t

Reflete son ~clat sur la mousse vert.

-G. MargouJi~, 1948

..

[The forest. On the moun~ everything is solitary'.1 One hears from far off thEfecho of human voices, I The sun that penetrates to the depths of the forest I Reflects its rayon the green moss.}

14

MargouJi~s prefers to generalize Wang's specifics: Deer Crcme becomes, simply, The Forest; nobody in sight becomes the pon­ derous malaise of everything is solitary. In the second line he poeticizes the voices by having them come from far off. The lrenCh indefinite pronoun happily excludes the need for a \arI'I1tor.

167- 15

8

Deer Forest Hermitage

Through the deep wood, the slantirlg sunlight

Casts motley patterns on the jade- green mosses.

No glimpse of man in this lonely mountain,

.Yet faint voices drift on the air.

-:-Chang Yin-nan & Lewis C. Walmsley, 1958

Chang and Walnisley published the first book-length mlOs­ Ianon of Wang Wei in English, but Unfortunately their work bore little resemblance to the original. .

In this poem, the couplets are reversed for no reason. The voices are faint and drift on the air. The mountain is lonely (surely a Western conceit, that empty = lonely!) but it's a decorator's delight: the moss is as green as jade and the sunlight casts motley patterns.

It is a classic example of the translator attempting to "im­ prove" the original. Such cases are not uncommon, and are the product of a translator's unspoken contempt for the foreign poet. It never occurs to Chang and Walmsley that Wang could have written the equivalent of Casts motley patterns on the jade­ green mosses had he wanteq to. He didn't.

In its way a spiritual exercise, translation is dependent on the dissolution of the translator's ego: an absolute humility toward the text. A bad translation is the insistent voice of the translatot- that is; when one sees no poet and hears only the translatot speaking.

16 IfJ 17

9

The Deer Enclosure

On the lonely mountain

I meet no one,

I hear only the echo

of human voices.

At an angle the sun's rays

enter the depths of the wood,

And shine

upon the green moss.

-C.]. Chen &: Michael Bullock, 1960

Chen and Bullock make some familiar "improvements": the first-person narrator, the lonely mountain, the sun at an angle. Wang's see becomes meet in their second line. Their main in­ novation is the creation of eight lines for Wang's four-a ges­ ture that apparently caught them short when they had to break the last line into two. .

18 ;,:9q 19

10

On the eIl)pty moun~ins no one can be seen,.

But human voices are heard to resound.

I The reflected .sunlight pierces the deep forest And falls again upon the mossy ground.

j I

~James J.Y. tiu, 1¢2

Liu's book, The Art of Chinese Poetry, applied the techniques of 1940's New Criticism to the interpretation of Chinese poetry. The New Critics preached strict ~ttention to sense (special emphasis on learned irony) and the general neglect of music. Thus Liu'sversion is more accurate than most, but the first two lines heave; the third gasps, and the fourth falls with a thud on the mossy ground. .

In the first line, by changing the expected is to can be, Liu has transfonned Wang's specifics into a general and not terribly bright remark. Human voices, a steal from Eliot, is redundant; and thel9th century resound is only there to rhyme with ground. A ray of sunlight might pierce the deep forest, but reflected sunlight wouldn't,. and absent from Liu's third line is the sense that it is late afternoon, that the sunlight is returning to the forest. In the fourth line, green has been subtracted, ground added. .

In Liti's favor, however, are the absence of the ~I" arid the usual explanations.

20 21t~o

11

Deep .in, the Mountain Wilderness'

Deep in the mountain wilderness

Where nobody ever comes

Only once in a great while

Something like the sound of a far off voice.

The low rays of the sun

Slip through the dark forest,

Andgleam again on the shadowy moss ..

-Kenneth Rexroth, 197()

The taxonomy of Chinese translators is fairly simple. There are the scholars: most are incapable of writing poetry, but a few can (among them: Burton Watson, A. C. Graham, Arthur Waley, Jonathan Chaves). And there are the poets: most know no Chinese, a few know some. Kenneth Rexroth belonged to this last category (along with Gary Snyder and the later Pound}-although this particular example is perhaps more Uimitationll than translation. '

RexrothJgnores what he presumably dislikes, or feels can­ not be translated, in the original. ,The title is. eliminated, and the philosophical empty 1'tunllitain becomes the empirical moun­ tain wilderness. Certain words and phrases are his own inven­ tion. One of them, where inobody e:oer Comes leads him into a trap: he must modify the SDund of a far off voice with SDmething like, and it makes a rather clutzy fourth line. But this is cleady the first poem of the group, able to stand by itself. It is the closest to the spirit, if not the letter, of the original: the poem Wang ~ght have writtert had he been bom a 20th century American. '

Rexroth!s great skill is ,~pparent in three tiny gestures. In line 2, by using comes rather than the more obvious goes he has created an implicit ·nanator-observer (i.e., "comes here where I am") without usitig the first person. Second, he takes an. utterly ordinary phrase, once in II great while, and lets us hear it, for the first time, as something lovely and onomato­ poeiC. And third, Rexroth~s slip for Wang's enter is'perhaps too sensual-reminiscent of Sanskrit forest trysts-but it is irre­

·sistible.

,U tqI 23

12

Deer Fence

Empty hills, no one ill sight,

only the sound of someo~e talking;

late sunlight enters the deep wood,

shining over the green moss again.

.-Burton Watson, 1971

Watson is a prolific and particularly fine translator of clas­ sical Chinese and Japanese poetry, history and philosophy; he is comparable only to Arthur Waley in this centwy. He was also the first scholar whose work displayed an affinity with the modernist revolution in American poetry: absolute preci­ sion, concision, and the use ·of everyday speech.

[Curiously, while most of the French. and American mod­ ernists lit joss sticks at the altars of their newfound Chinese ancestors, the scholars of Chinese ignored, or were actively hostile to modern poetry. Many still ate. Chinese poets were, however, excited by the doings in the West. Hu Shi's 1917 manifestoes, which laUllf.ited the "Chinese Renaissance" in literature by rejecting classical language and themes in favor of vernacular and"reaUsm", were largely inspired by Ezra Pound's 1913 Imagist manifestoes. Full circle:Pounq. thought he found it in Chirui, Hu Shi thought it came from the West.]

Watsori here renders the first two characters of line 1 with two words; no article, no: explanation. His presentation of the image is as direct as the Chinese. There are 24 English words (six per line) for the Chinese 20, yet every word of the Chinese has been translated without indulging, as others have done, in a telegraphic minimalism. In the translation of Chinese po­ etry, as in everything, nothing is more difficult than simplicity.

More than anangements of tones, rhymes, and number of . characters per line, Chinese poetry, ~e all ancierit poetries, is based on parallelism: the dual (yin-yang) nature of the universe. Wang's first two lines are typical: see no peaplel but hear people. He even repeats a character. Watson retains Wang's parallelil;m effortlessly enough (no cmelsomeone) yet he is the first translator to do so.

I tf2... 2524

13

Deer Enctosure

Empty moun~: no man is seen,

But voices of men are heard.

Sun's reflection reaches into the woods

And shines upon the green moss.

-WaHim Yip, 1972

26

Yip is a critic who l}.as written brilliantly on the importance of Chinese poetics to 20th century American poetry. As a trans­ lator he is. less successful, perhaps because English is appar­ ently his second language. (It is rarely possible, though many try, to translate out ot one's natural language.) Thus the strangeness of no man is seen and the oddly anthropomorphic reaches into.

Like Burton Watson, Yip follows Wang's repetition ot person in the first two lines (though his persons are men) and presents six EngIish word~ per line· tor the ~ese five. But unlike Watson· and the other translators, Yip actually gives us less than the original-leaving out deep and again.

In a later version of this transJation, published in his an­ thology Chinese Poetry (University of California Press, 1976), Yip clipped the first line to the almost pidgin Empty mountain: no man.

27 [r3

14

Deer Park

~s empty, no one to be seen

We hear only voices echoed-

With light coming back into the deep wood

The top of the green moss is lit again.

-G.W. Robinson, 1973

Robinson's tranSlatfon, published by Penguin Books, is, un­ happily, the most widely' available edition of Wang in English.

In this poem Robinson not only ~ates a narrator, he makes it a group, as though it were a family outing. "With that one word, we, he effectively scuttles the mood of the poem.

Reading the last word of the poem as top, he offers an image that makes little sense on the forest floor: one would have to be small indeed to think. of moss vertically.

For a jolt to the system, try reading this aloud.

28 19'f 29

'15

En la Ermita delParque',de los Venados

No se ve gente en este monte.

5610 se oyen, lejos, voces.

Por los ramajes la luz rompe.

Tendidaentre la yerba brilla verde.

-Octavio Paz, 1974

[In the Deer Park Hermitage. No people are seen on this moUn­ tain.1 Only voices, far off, are heard.J Light breaks through the branches.J;Spread among the grass it shines green,]

For the second (1978) edition of Versiones y Diversiones, his selected translations, Paz wrote:

The translation of this poem is particularly difficult, for the poem carries to an extreme the characteristics of Chinese po­ etry: universality, impersonality, absence of time, absence of subject. In Wang Wei's poem, the solitude of the mountain is so great that not even the poet himself is present. After a number of attempts I wrote these four llnrhymed lines: three with nine syllables each and the last with eleven.

Months later; reading some Mahayana texts, I was surprised by the frequency with whlch the Western paradise, domam of the Aptida Buddha,' is mentioned. I remembered that Wang Wei had been a fervent Buddhis~: I consulted one of his bio­ graphies and discovered that his devotion for Amida was ,such that he had written a h~ in which he speaks of his desire to be reborn in the Westeht Paradise-the place of the setting sun... ,

This is nature poetry" but a Buddhist nature poetry: does not the quatrain reflect, even more than the naturalistic aes­ thetidsVl traditional. in this kind of composition, a spiritual experience? Sometime later, Burton Watson,who knoWs my love for .Chinese poetry, senf me his Chinese Lyricism~,Th&e I encountered a confirmation of my suspicion: for Wang Wei the light of the setting sun had a very precise meaning. An allusion to the' Amida Buddha: at the end of the afternoon the adept meditates and, like the moss 'in the forest, recei,,!es illumina­ tion. Poetry perfectly objective, impersonal, far from the m~­ ticism ,of a St. John of the Cross, but no less authentic or profound than that of the; Spanish poet~ Transfonnation of man and nature beforethf! divine light, although in' a sense inverse to that of Western tradition. In place of the humanization of the world that stqTounds us, the Oriental spirit is iJ:i\pregnated with the objectivity, passivity and impersonality of the trees, grass and rocks, so that, impersonally, it receives the impartial light of a revelation that is also impersonal. Without losmg the

30 31 19k"""

reality of the trees, rocks and earth, Wang Wei's mountain and forest are emblems of the void. Imitating his reticence, I limited myself to lightly c~ging the last two lines:

No se ve gente en este monte. 5610 se oren, lejos, voces. La luz poniente rompe entre las ramas. En la yerba tendida brilla verde.

[No people are seen on this mountain.! Only voiceS~ far oft, are heard.! Western ligh~ breaks through the branches.! Spread over the grass it shines green.]

Paz drops empty from the, first line; in the second, like Margouli~s and Rexroth, he makes the voices far off. His third line, though not strictly literal, may be the most beautiful of all the versions: rep~dng the abstract light enters the forest with the concrete and dramatic light breaks through the branches-:-­ the light almost becoming the sudden illumination, saton, of Zen Buddhism. In the fourth line, the moss has become grass, no doubt because the Spanish word for moss, musgo, is un­ pleasantly squishy. (How mossy-soft and damp-is the En­ glish moss!)

What is missing from these lovely third 'and fourth lines is the cyclical quality'of the original. Wang begins both lines with to return: taking a specific time of day and transforming it into a moment, frozen in its recurrence, that becomes cosmic. Relld..; ing the image as a metaphor for illumination, the ordinary' (sunset in the forest) represents the extraordinary (the enlight­ enment of the individwlI) which, in terms of the cosmos, is as, ordinary as sunlight illuminating a patch of moss. , An endless series of negations: The mountain seems empty (without people) because noOne's in sight. But people are heard, so the mountain is not empty. But the mountain is empty because'it is an illusion. The light from the Western Paradise, the: light called shadow falls.

33

(<I,

16

Li Ch'ai

In empty mountains no one can be seen.

But here might echoing voices cross.

Reflecting rays

entering the deep wood

Glitter again

on th.e dark green moss.

-William McNaughton, 1974

McNaughton offers the Otinese place-name as a title, but his transliteration is incorrect-something like B!!tr Park..

Line 1 has been turned into a general statement, almost a parody of Eastern Wisdom: in an empty glass there is no liquid. Line 2 places the action here for no reason and adds cross for the rhyme scheme he .has imposed on himself.· (Not much rhymes with moss; it's something of an albatross. But he might have attempted' an Elizabethan pastora:l echoing. voices toS$ or perhaps a half-Augustan, half-Dada echoing voices sauce.)

Splitting the last couplet into four lines is apparently an attempt at pictorial representation. The last line adds dark .to fill out the thumpety-thump.

,r; 34 iff­

17

Clos aux cerfs

Montagne'deserte. Personne n'est en vue.

Seuls, les echos des voix resonnent, au loin.

Ombres retoument dans la forlllt profonde:

Demier eclat de la moussei vert.

-Fran~is Cheng, 1977

[Deer Enclosure. Deserted mountain. No one in sight.! Only, the echoes of voices resound, far off.! Shadows retum to the deep forest:/ Last gleaming of the moss, green.]

Cheng wI1-tes:

[Wang1 describes here a walk on the mountain, which is at the same time a spiritual experience, an experience of the Void and of communion with Nature. The first couplet should be interpreted "On the empty mountain I meet no one; only some echoes of voices of people walking come to me." But through the suppression of the personal pronoun and of locativeele­ ments the poet identifies hiniself immediately with the"empty mountain," which is therefore no longer merely, a "comple­ ment of place"; similarly, in the third line he is the ray of the setting sun that penetrates the forest. From the point of view of content, the first two li:qes present the poet as still "not seeing"; in his ears the echoes of human voices still resound. The last two lines are centered in the theme of "vision": to see the golden effect of the setting sun on the green moss. Seeing here signifies illumination and deep communion with the es­ sence of things. Elsewhere the poet often omits the personal pronoun to effect the description of actions in sequence where human acts are related to movements in nature.

(tr. Donald Riggs & Jerome Seaton)

Cheng also presents a literal translation of the poem:

Montagne ,vide 1 n~ percevoir personne Seulement entendre 1 voix humaine resonner Ombre-retoumee / penetrer forlllt profonde Encore luire I, sur la mousse verte

It is curious to see how' Cheng poeticizes and even Wes­ ternizes his literal version to create a finished translation. The Buddhist montagne vide (empty mountain) becomes theRo­ mantic montagne deserte'(des~rted mountain). Echos and au loin, (far off) are added to the second line. In the third, his literal omhre-retournte (returned shadow-a trope he notes as'mean­

36 37 ffa­

ing Nrays of sunset") has become a subject and verb, ombres retournent (shadows return) which considerably alters the meaning. Cheng's last line'is quite peculiar: the literal E.ncore luire sur III mousse verte (to shine again on the green moss) becomes Demier iclllt de lR mousse, vert (last gleaming of the moss, green-:-the green referring to the gleaming, not the moss). The line owes more to FrenCh Symbolists than to Tang Buddhists.

Translatiol)s aside, Cheng's book is a luminous, original study of Chinese poetry. In the English version, published in 1982, Jerome P. Seaton, working "after the lnterpretations of" Cheng, Qffers a translatiqn that seems to owe more to Gary Snyder's 1978 poem (#19) than to Cheng:

DEER PARK

Empty mountain. ~one to be seen. But hear, the echoing of voices .. Returning shadows enter deep, the· grove. Sun shines, again, on lichen's green.

39

IffY

18

The Deer Park

Not the shadow on a man on the deserted bill-

And yet one hears voices speaking;

Deep in the seclusion of the woods,

Stray shafts of the sun pick out the green moss. tI

-H.C. Chang, 1977

Chang translates 12 of Wang's 20 words, and makes up the rest.

In tine 1 the first on, is probably a typographical error, but in such surroundings,'it's hard to tell. In any event, what's that shadoio doing (or more exactly, not doing) there? Only the shadow knows.

Why are the shafts of sun stray? Why are'they shtlfts at all? And why do they pick put the moss? The verb is unavoidably reminiscent of the consumption of winkles and crab.

In short, the poem is more Chang than Wang. (It is taken from a three-volume set, all by the same translator, and pub­ lished, oddly, by ColumbUiL.University Press.)

:too40 41

19

Empty mountains:

no one to be seen.

Yet-hear­

human sounds and echoes.

Returning sunlight

enters the dark Woodsi

Again shining

on the green moss, above.

-Gary Snyder, 1978

4:L

Surely one of the best translations, partially because of Sny­ der's lifelong forest experience. Like ReXX'9th, he can see the scene. Every word of W~g has beeti. translated, and nothing added, yet th.e translatiorl. exists as an American poem.

Changing the passive is heaTd to the imperative heaT is par­ ticularly beautiful, and not incorrect: it creates an .exact mo­ ment, which. is now. Giving us both meanings, sounds and .echoes, for the last word <;If line 2 is, like most sensible ideas, revolutionary. Translators always assume that only on~ read­ ing of a foreign word or phrase may be presented, despite the fact tr ..... perfect correspondence is rare. .

The poem ends strangely. Snyder takes the last word, which everyone else has read as on, and translates it with its alter­ native meaning, above, isolating it from the phrase with a comma. Whlit's gOing on? Moss presumably is only abOve if one is a rock or bug. Or are we meant to look up, after seeing the mo$s, back toward the sun: the vertical metaphor of en­ lightenment?

IIi answer to my query; Snyder wrote: "The reason for'... moss, above' ... is that the sun is entering (in its sunset slop­ ing, hence 'again'-a fin/ill shaft) the woods, and i1luminating some mpSs up in the trees,' (NOT ON ROCKS.) This is how my teacher Ch'en Shih-hsiangsaw it, and my wife Oapanese) too, the first time she looked at the poem."

The. point is that translatiOn is more than a leap from dic­ tionary to dictionary; it is' a reimagining of the poem. As sueh, every r~ading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into th,e reader's intellectual and emotionallUe. As no individual reader remains the same, each reading becomes a different-not merely another-reading. The same poem cannot be read twice..'

Snyder's explanation is only one moment, the Jatest, when the poem suddenly tranf:lfonns ~foreour eyes. Wangs20 characters remain the same, but the poem continues in a state, of restless change. .

,2p( 43

Further Comments

Eliot Weinberger's commentary on the succes~ive transla­ tions of Wang Wei's .little poem illustrates, with sut:cinct clarity, not only the evolution of the art of'translation ih the modem period but at the same ti1l'\e the changes in poetic sensibility. His examples come frOm English and, to a lesser extent, from French; I am sure that a parallel exploration of German or Italian would produce similar resuJts. Wefuberger cites only one Spanish version, my own: There may be another, and perhaps one or two in PortugUese. One must admit, however, that Spanish and Portuguese do' not enjoy a corpus of Chinese translation sirililar inimportar\ce or quality to that of other languages. This is regrettable: the modem era has discovered other classicisms besides that of Greco,...Roman culture, 'and one of them is China and Japan. '

Weinberger's commentary led me backto my own trans­ lation. Probably the greatest difficulty for any translator of a Chinese poem is the unique temper of the language and of the writing. The majority of the poems in the Shi jing, the mbst ancient collection of Chinese poetry, are written in lines of fouT syllables that are four characters/words. For example, the pho-, netic transcription of the first line of a sm~U erotic poem in the Shi jing is composed of these' foUr q1.onosyllables: Xing nu qi shu. The literal translation is: Sweet girl how pretty. It is not impossible to transform'this phrase ,in.to a line from a ballad: iQu~ linda 1tl dulce niM! or How lcroely the pretty maiden! Five words and eight syllables, twice the original. Arthur Waley thought to resolve the prosOdic'problem by having each Chinese mo~osyllable correspond toa,tonie'accent in the English line. The result was English lines that were quite long, but with the same number of acCents as the Chinese,original. This method, besides being not terribly perfect, is iriapplicable to Spanish: in our language words' generally have 'more syllables than En­ glish iainbtc pentameter. ~Our,line has either three accents (in the fourth syllable, in the seventh or' eighth, and in the tenth) or only two (in the sixth and the tenth). In contrast, the English line has five accents or rhythmic beats. Furthermore, in English

~o1...

the number of syllables may vary; not only do we have more consonants, but we may also rely on a rich assonaitce. The great advantage of the assonant is that the rhyme becomes a . distant echo, one which never eXactly repeats the endings of the previous line. I will note, finally, a small similarity between Chinese arid Spariish versification: in Chinese poetry only paired verses are rhymed, exactly like our romances and traditional assonant poems."

The first to attempt to make English poems out of Chinese originals was Ezra Pound. AU of us since who have translated Chinese and Tapanese poetry are not only his followers but his debtors. I never found P01,lfid's theory of translating Chinese persuasive, and in other writings I have hied to explain my reasons. It doesn't matter: though his theories seemed unre­ liable, his practice not only convinced me but,:Jiterally.. en­ chanted. me. Pound did not attempt to findm.etrical equivalents or rhymes: taking off hom the images-ideograms of the orig~ inals, he wrote English poems in free verse. ThOse poems had (and still have) an enormous poetic freshness; at the same time they allow us to glimpse another civilization, and one quite distant from Westem Greco-Roman tradition.

The poems of CAthay (1915) were written in an energetic: language and in irregular verses which I have rather loosely labeled as free. In fact, ctIthough they do not have fixed mea­ sures, each one of them is a verbal unity. Nothing could be more l!linote from the prose chopped into short lines that today passe,S for free verse., Do Pound's poems correlJlPond to the originals? A useless question: Pound invented, as Eliot said, Chinese poetry in English. The points of departure were sOme ancient Chinese poems,revivedand changed by a great poet; the result was other poems. Others: the same. With that small volume of translations Pound, te) a great extent, began modem poetry in English. Yet, at the same time, ,he also began some­ thing uriique: the modem tradition of classical Chinese poetry in the poetic: conscience of the West.

Pound's effort was a success, and after Cathlly many

others followed on various paths. I am thinking above a.n of Arthur Waley. The translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry into English have been so :great and so diverse that they them­ selves form a chapter in the modem poetry of the language. I find nothing similar in French, although there are notable translations, sl:lch as those by ,Claude Roy or Fran~ois Cheng.. Certainly we owe to Claudel, Segalen, and Saint-John Perse poetic visions of China-'but not memorable translations. It's a pity. In Spanish this lack has impoverished us.

In my own isolated a,ttempts I followed, at first, the ex­ amples of Pound and, more than anyone, 'Waley-a ductile talent, but OJ'),e less intense and less powerful. Later, little by little, I found my own way. At .the beginning I used free verse; later I hied to adjust myself to ~ fixed rule, without of course attempting to reproduce Chinese meter. In general, I have endeavored to retain the number of lines of each poem, not to scom. assonances and to respect, as much as possible, the plU1illelism. This last el~ent is central to Chinese poetry, but neither Pound nor Waley gave it the attention it deserves. Nor do the other translators in English. It is a serious omission not only because parallelism· is the nucleus of the best. Chinese poets and philosophers: the yin and the yang. The unity that splits into dualty to reunite and to divide again. I would add that parallelism links" however slightly, our own indigenous Mexican poetry with that of China.

, In the Han era they moved ,from a four-syllable line to one of five and seven (gu shi)'. These poems are composed in a sbict tonal counterpoint. (The classica.llanguage haS foUr tones.) 'f:he number of lines is' undefined. and only paired. lines 'are rhYJl":ld. During the Tang period, versification became more stri~ and they wrote poems of eight and four lines (lu shi and jue qu; respectively). The lines of those poems are, as in the earlier style; composed of five and seven syllables; the same rhyme is used throughout the poem. The other ntlea apply to parallelism (the four lines in the center of the poem must form two antithetical couplets) and the tonal structure. This last

}..o] 47

recalls, in certain respects; classical quantitative versification­ although the rhythm does .not co~e from the combination of short and long syllables bUJ rather from the altemation of tones. Every Chinese poem· offers a 'true counterpoint that cannot be reproduced in any Indo-European language. I will spare the reader the chart of the various combinations (two fOr the five syllable lines and two for the seven). There are other forms: the ci (tz'u), poetry written to accompany already existing musical tunes and with lines of unequal Jengthi dra­ ~tic verse (qu) and the Iyric·dra~tic (san qu). .

Wang Wei's poem is written in four lines o.f five sy&bles each (jue qU)i the second line rhymes with the fourth. In older to transmit the information of the original, while attempting to recreate the poem in Spanish, I decided to use a line of nine syllables. I chose this meter not only because of its greater amplitude but also because it appeared to be, without actually being, a trunCated hendecasyllable. It is the least traditional of our meterS and it appears infrequently in Spanish poetry, ex· cept among the Nmodernists"-above all, Ruben Darlo-who used it a great deal. I t,Uso decided to use assonant rhyme, but unlike the ChineSe original I rhymed all four lines. The poem is divided into. two parts. The first alludes to the solitude of the forest, and aural rather than visual sensations predominate (no one is seen, only voices are heard). The second refers to the apparitiqri of light in a forest clearing and is comPosed of silently visuAl sensations: the lightmeaks through the branches, falls on the moss and, in a manner of speaking, rises again. Attentiv~: to this sensual and spir.i.tual division, I: divided the poem into two pairs: the £irst line rhymes with the secqnd and the third rhymes with the fourtJ:t. I left the two first lines of my earlier version intact, but !radically changed the third. and the fourth lines:·

48

No se ve gente en este monte, 8610 se oyen, lejos, voces. Bosque profundo: Luz poniente: alumbra el Il\usgo y, verde, asciende.

(No people are seen on thismountain,l only voices, far-off, areheard.l Deep forest. Western Iight:1 it illuminates the moss and, green, rises.]

The first two lines need no explanation. It seems to me that I succeeded in transmitting the information whit!:! conserving the impersonality of the original: the I is implicit. The third· line, according to Fran9lis Cheng, means literally: returning sIuuImo-to penetrate-deep-forest. Cheng points out that re­ turning shadow alludes to the western sun. James}. Y. Uu tranS­ lates in similar terms but, with greater propriety, says reflected light in place of returni1'fg shadtniJ. In his literary version Uu writes; The reflected sunlight pierces the deep forest. Cheng has

. Ombrd retournent dans ta for't profonde. The reader, through a note at the foot of the page, learns that ombres retournent-a rather forced trope:-means the rays of the setting sun.· And why shadows and not light or brightness or something similar? I wavered a great.deal about translating this line. First I wrote; Cruza el follaje el sol poniente. (The western sun crosses the foliage.) But the poet does not speak of foliage but rather of the forest. I then tried: .Traspasa el bosque el sol poniente. (The western sun crosses through the forest.) Somewhat better, but perhaps too energetic, too active. Next I decided to omit the verb, as Spanish allowed the ellipsiS. The two syntactical blocks (bosque profundo/luz. poniente; deep forest/western light) pre~ served the impersonality of the original and at the same time afiuded to .the silent ray of light crossing through the over­ growth.

According to Cheng the last lin~ means: still-to Shine­ on-green-moss. Uusays: again......shine-grten-11Wss-upon. That is: the reflection is green. In his literal version Weinberger

'zot 49

includes aU of the possibilities: to,returnlagain-to,shinelto re-­ {lect-grtenJbluelb1ack-mossllichen-abowlon(top of)Itop. In two places my version departs from th.e others. First: the western light illuminates the moss-in place of reflectirig it or shining on it-because the verb illuminate contains both the 'phys~Cal aspect of. the phenome,non (shining, light, clarity, brightness) and the spiritual (to illuminate understanding). Second: I say that the green reflection ascends or rises because I want to ac­ centuate the spiritual character of the scene. The light of the western sun refers to the point of the horizon ruled by the Amida Buddha. Without trying to pin down the floating gante of anal~gies, one might say that the western sun is the spiritual light of the paradise of the West,' the cardinal point of the Amida Buddha; the solitude of the mountain and the forest is this world in which there is noboQy really, though' we hear the echoes of voices; and the clearing in the forest illuminated by the silent ray of light is the one who meditates and con­ templates.

-Octavio paz

50

Postscript

Alter the publication of these 'commentaries in ~e Mexican magazine Vuelta, the editors received a furious letter from a professor at the Colegio de Mexico, charging me with nothing less than ncrimes against Chinese poetry. H Among those crim­ inal acts was the "curious neglect" of "Boodberg's cedule." . The cryptic reference, I later discovered, was to Ctdu1es from. a Berkeley Workshop in Asiatic'P1ulology, a series of essays pri­ vately published by Prof. Pete~ A. Boodberg1n 1954 and 1955. The relevant essay, "Philology in Translation-Land,"' is 1~ pages lo~g and is devoted to excoriating, in idiosyncratic lan­ guage, an other translators and scholars of Wang Wei for failing to reaHze' that th~ ll:'st word ~f the poem, sluzng (which now means above, on (top ofl, top) had an alternate meaning in the Tang dynasty: to rise. '

This usage apparently dropped out of the language cen­ turies ago. But for those who doubt the aCCiJ.raCY of poetry! translated by poets rather than scholars, it should be noted that Octavio P.az, in his latest version of the poem, intuitively divined this forgotten meaning and translated the word a,s" asc(endt. '" ,

Boodberg ends his "cedule" with his own verSion of the , poem, which he calls fla still· inadequate, yet philolOgically. correct, rendition of the stanza (with"due attention to grapho­ syntactic overtones, and enjambment),': .

The empty mountain: to see no men, Barel, earminded of me1,:l talldng-countertones, And antistrophk lights-and,sluidoWs incoming deeper the

deep-treed grove, . ' Once more to glowlight the blue-green mosses-going up

(The empty mountain ... ) .

To me ~ sounds like Gerard Manley Hopkins on LSD, and I am grateful to the furious professor for sending me in search of this, the strangest of the many Weis.

-B.W. ;to.,) 1;1

Sources

Bynner, Witter&: Kiang Kang-hu. The Jade Mountain. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929. .

. .' Clang; H.C. Ghinese LiterrltuTe, Vol 11: Nature Poetry. New'York: Columbia University. Press, 1977.

Chen~ C.J. &: Michael Bullock. roems of Solitude. Rutland, Vt. &: Tokyo: Charle~ E. Tuttle, 1960. .' ..

Cheng, Fran9)is. L'tcriture poetique chinoise. Paris: Editions duo SeuU, 1977. [English translation: Chinese Poetic Writing:. trans.. by Donald A. Riggs &: Jerome P. Seaton. BloominSton: Indiana University Pre~s, 1982.)

Fletcher,w..J.B. Gems of Chinese Verse. Shanghai: n.pbJ., 1919.:

Jenyns, Soame.. Further Poems of the T'ang Dynasty. London; John Murray, ;1944.

Liu, James J.Y. The Art of Chinese Poetry. Chicago: University of Chi~go Press. 1962.

McNaughton, Wi.l1iam. Chinese Uterature. Rutland, \'t.: Charl~ E. Tuttle, 197:4. .

"

Matgouli~s, G. Anthologie Raisonre de 1Il LitthahlTe Chinoise..'Paris: Payot,·1948.

Paz, Octavio. Versiones y Diversiones. Mexico City: Joaqufn Mor- . tiz, 1974 (revised edition, 1978). .

Rexroth, Kenneth. Love and the Turning Year. New York: New ~ctions, 1970. .

Robinson, C.w.. Poems of Wang Wei. Hannondsworth, U.K: Penguin Books, 1973. . .

Snyder, Gary. Journal for the Protection of All Beings. No. ~, Fall· 1978. .

Wang Wei. 1hiding the Universe. tra~. b}r Win-lim Xip. N~ .. . . . ~ York: MunshinshalGrossman, 1972. . ','

Wang Wei. Poems. trans. by Chartg Yin-nan &: Lewis Walm~ley. Rutland, vt. &: Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1958. " Watson, Burton. Chinese Lyricism. New York: Columbia Uni­ versitv Press. 1971.

2,oi