/ ,..:',,0,_,,_ ,, ,,, "~" ~~.. ,', .,.'..,"~. 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 \q-918825-14-8 (pbk.) Poetry is that' which is worth translating. For example, this four-line poem, 1200 years old: a mountain, 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, perpetual 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 ofaeatures 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 massive horizontal landscape scroll, a genre invented by Wang. The paintingwas 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 1/lD ,.1 (text) t~ ~w ;fJL ),,-, ~~k~'1 ~ J:',' A ~';ft, 'M rt9. .:t.. -Jt 1__ ~~~" -]:1 t2 ....r::-.. II( The poemis by Wang Wei (c. 700":"761), ~nown inhis 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 ofEzra 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 Tangspeech; 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 language. 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. Forpoetry, this means that rhyme is inevitable, andWestern "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 eHmiTo 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 Buddha 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 7 1i.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 aJapanese 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 Fenollosa 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 matterfunctions som,ewhatlike DNA, spinningoutindividual 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. Fletcherexplaihs 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:nslation 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 inevitable Iand 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 tradition 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 reflected by the blue lichens-accurate to nature, if not to Wang. But Jenyns-at the time iAssistant Keeper of the Department ofOriental Antiquities at the British Museum, scribblirtgthrough 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 offthEfecho 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 ponderous 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 mlOsIanon 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 theair. The mountainis 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 "improve" the original. Such cases are not uncommon, and are the product ofa 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 jadegreen 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 innovation is the creation of eight lines for Wang's four-a gesture 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, TheArt ofChinese 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 cannot be translated, in the original. ,The title is. eliminated, and the philosophical empty 1'tunllitain becomes the empirical mountain wilderness. Certain words and phrases are his own invention. One of them, whereinobody e:oer Comes leads him into a trap: he must modify the SDund ofa 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 onomatopoeiC. 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 classical 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 precision, concision, and the use ·of everyday speech. [Curiously, while most of the French. and American modernists 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 poetry, 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 ofthe 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 ofChinese poetics to 20th century American poetry. As a translator he is. less successful, perhaps because English is apparently 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 otperson 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 anthology 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 echoedWith 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, unhappily, 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 moUntain.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 poetry: 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; readingsomeMahayana texts, Iwas 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 biographies 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 aesthetidsVl 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 illumination. Poetry perfectly objective, impersonal, far from the m~ticism ,of a St. John of the Cross, but no less authentic or profound than that ofthe;Spanish poet~ Transfonnation ofman 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 ofthe 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 dramaticlight 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 unpleasantly squishy. (How mossy-soft and damp-is the English 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 inits recurrence, thatbecomes cosmic. Relld..; ing the image as a metaphor for illumination, the ordinary' (sunset in the forest) represents the extraordinary (the enlightenment 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 (