Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, Week 1 of 2

[x_los]

This week and next, we're looking at Eliot Weinberger's "Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei". This short book discusses many ways to translate a single, brief Tang dynasty poem and the choices involved therein. We'll look at the first nine poems (or versions thereof) this week, and the remainder the following. 

I'll reproduce the translations under discussion here, but c/ping from the pdf is not very reliable and frequently introduces errors. I'm including the text here primarily as a reference point for our discussions: I advise you to look at the book file itself for your reading.

Comments

Introduction

[x_los]

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. It is a thing, forever itself, inseparable from its language.

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," become their own beings, set out on their own wanderings. Some live long, and some don't: What kind of creatures are they? What happens when a poem, once Chinese 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 ca1ligrapher, 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 River (no relation). The poems were written as par of a massive 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.

Re: Introduction

[x_los]

Point about translation occurring in the original language is well taken, this feels v inflected by Benjamin’s task of a translator

Re: Introduction

[superborb]

Perhaps especially relevant since references and allusions to poetry form a greater part of modern Chinese than English?