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.

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Introduction

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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.

1. Text

[x_los]

The poem is by Wang Wei (c. 700":"761), known 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 single syllable. 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 Chinese is character 2 of li11e 4, to $hine, which contains an 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 decipherment.

2. Transliteration

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LU ZHAI

Kong shan bu jian ren
Dan wen ren yu xiang
Fan jing (ying)ru shen lin
Fu zhao qing tai shang

3. Character-by-character translation

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This is really difficult to reproduce when you can't use tabs in this window. You're going to have to look at the book.

4. The Form of the Deer

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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

5. Deer-Park Hermitage

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There seems to be no 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

6. The Deer Park

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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

7. La Foret

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Dans la montagne tout est solitaire,
On entend de bien loin l'kIlo des voix htunaines,
Le solei! qui penetre au fond de la foret
Reflete son eclat sur la mousse vert.

- G. Margoulies, 1948

8. Deer Forest Hermitage

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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 Yin-nan & Lewis C. Walmsley, 1958

9. The Deer Enclosure

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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.J. Chen & Michael Bullock, 1960

[forestofglory]

I'm waiting for a physical copy of the book to show up in the mail. (I read much better on paper than on screens)

In the meantime I thought I would try translating it myself to see how much I can understand on my own. I don't know what I'm doing, I just have a small amount of knowledge of classical grammar, and a classical Chinese dictionary.

Anyways here's my attempt:

On the empty mountain I don't see any people
Merely hear the echo of people talking
Sunlight goes back and arrives deep in the forest
it returns to the shining green moss above