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| https://www.jonvonkowallis.com/readers/CHIN5910/178-206-Eliot_Weinberger_&_Octavia_Paz-Nineteen_Ways_of_Looking_at_Wang_Wei.pdf |
NOTE
It seems to me like translation is all there is. Every recorded, idiosyncratic or mundane record requires that interpretative reflection, though it occurs inside when reading. All of these translations, the heart of which is supposedly fixed and can spawn an infinite amount of texts that attempt to mirror (or not), or capture some essence but end up different.
There are spaces between words, and in words.
Note
There’s a fun activity possible here. To have a sequence of nouns/adjectives like in the literal translation of piece below, and then as an exercise perform the made up translation between a group of friends and see what different styles arise.
I have this typing training app, and it will give a sequence of random words that you must type to then measure your WPM. So on the screen it’ll say ‘now decide form ten together road.’ What subconsciously happens sometimes is a sequence of words will conjure an image that I have to pass over. It could be like that.
This four line poem, 1200 years old: a mountain, a forest, the setting sun illuminating a pass of moss. It is a thing, forever itself, inseparable from its language.
Great poetry lives in a state of perpetual transformation, perpetual transition: the poem dies when it has no place to go.
In classical Chinese, each character (ideogram) represents a word of a single syllable. Few of the characters are, as is commonly thought, entirely representational. But some of the basic vocab is indeed pictographic, and with those few characters one can play the game of pretending to read Chinese.
What kind of method would you use to select a pictographic character, from one that is non-representational?
Chinese has the least number of sounds of any major language. In modern Chinese, a monsyllable is pronounced as one of four tones, but any given sound in any given tone has scores of possible meanings. Thus a Chinese monosyllabic word is comprehensible only by the context of the phrase: a linguistic basis perhaps for Chinese philosophy which was always based on relation rather than substance.
… attempting to nurture Chinese rhyme patterns in the hostile environment of a Western language.
Character by Character translation
| Empty | mountain hills | negative | to see | person people |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| but | to hear | person people | words conversation | sound to echo |
| to return | brightness shadow | to enter | deep | forest |
| to return again | to shrine to reflect | green blue black | moss lichen | above on (top of) top |
A single character may have contradictory readings (bright/shadow).
Translation - The Form of the Deer
So lone seems the hills; there is no one in sight there. But whence is the echo of voices I hear? The rays of sunset pierce the slanting forest, And in their reflection green mosses appear.
- W.J.B Fletcher 1919
This living matter functions somewhat like DNA, spinning out individual translations, which are relatives, not clones of the original
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 from?
Translation - Deer-park Hermitage
There seems to be no one one on the empty mountain… And yet I think I hear a voice, Where sunlight, entering a grove, Shines back to me from the green moss.
- Witter Bynner & Kiang Kang-hu 1929
Translation - To 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, preferring lichen to moss. Chinese poetry was based on the precise observation of the physical world. Jeyns comes from the tradition where the notion of verifying a poetic image would be silly, where the word “poetic” itself is synonymous with “dreamy”
Translation - La Foret
Dans la montagne tout est solitaire, On entend de bien loin l’echo des voix humaines, Le soleil qui penetre au fond de la foret Reflete son eclat sur la mousse vert
- G. Margoulies
The forest. One the mountain everything is solitary./ One hears from far off the echo of human voices / the sun that penetrates to the depths of the forest / Reflects its rays on the green moss
Translation - Deer Forest Hermitage
Through the deep wood, the slanting 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/Walmsley
Classic example of translator trying to “improve” the original. He did not. It never occurred that Wang could have written the equivalent of casts motley patterns on jade-green mosses if he wanted 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 translator - that is, when one sees no poet and hears only the translator speaking.
Translation - Gary Snyder 1978
Empty mountains: no one to be seen Yet — hear— human sounds and echoes. Returning sunlight enters the dark woods; Again shining on the green moss, above.
Surely one of the best translations, because of the translators lifelong forest experience. “The reason for moss above is that the sun is entering (in its sunset sloping hence again a final shaft)”