This is particularly true of translators of Chinese poetry. From a set of monosyllabic, largely pictographic characters calligraphed perhaps on a Chinese painting, fan, or scroll, the poem proceeds through a hall of mirrors, reappearing on the other side of time, culture, and speech as a few bytes of memory laser-etched on a white page in the polysyllabic, phonetic language of the English-language translator. The effect is that of moving from the iconic, graphics-based Macintosh operating system to the text-based DOS system. It is very difficult to make the systems compatible because the conceptual paradigms that underlie them are so radically different. We can create a neutral language that will transfer information between the two systems, but small things will change: the formatting will go awry, certain special characters will disappear if their correspondents are not found, and attached files—such as graphics and footnotes, which modify our sense of the text—may become separated or lost. Raw information will be preserved, but the aesthetic unity, the gestalt of the poem, will be lost in the translation. Literary translation is more than anything an attempt to translate that gestalt, which a machine is not sensitive enough to detect, much less reconstruct.
Those who discount the creative element in translation believe that translations should consist of word-for-word cribs in which syntax, grammar, and form are all maintained, and in which the translator is merely a facilitator who allows the original poem to speak for itself in a new language. Poetry, however, can't be made to sing through a mathematics that doesn't factor in the creativity of the translator. The literary translator is like the musician who catalyzes the otherwise inert score that embodies Mozart's genius. In that act, musician and composer become a creative team. However, it won't necessarily be good music just because the musician can keep time and scratch out the correct notes in the correct order. Musical skill inevitably enters into the equation. Fidelity comes from a musician's deeper understanding of the music. As John Frederick Nims says, “The worst infidelity is to pass off a bad poem in one language as a good poem in another.”
From the early metrical and end-rhymed translations of Herbert Giles to the so-called free-verse translations of Ezra Pound, Arthur Waley, and Kenneth Rexroth, Chinese poems have been reinvented in English. The Chinese poem in English is like a stolen car sent to a chop shop to be stripped, disassembled, fitted with other parts, and presented to the consumer public with a new coat of paint. But despite its glossy exterior, it's a Chinese engine that makes it run, and fragments of the poem's old identity can be glimpsed in its lines, the purr of its engine, the serial number, which we may still be able to read. In these thoughts on translation, I wish to discuss ways I've found of negotiating between Chinese and English-language poetic paradigms, and to touch on the aspects of English that have proved compatible with the Chinese poem, which has been a part of Western poetic traffic since the early years of modernism.
Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi says, “The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap…. Words exist because of meaning; once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?” Words are the net we cast upon the waters in search of knowledge, meaning, enlightenment. Ultimately, though, the fish has to come to us of its own volition (Native American hunters believe that when the hunter is in harmony with nature, the animal comes to him and sacrifices itself). In his poem “The Placid Style,” Sikong Tu, a famous ninth-century poet whose “The Twenty-four Styles of Poetry” is a Daoist treatise on how to write poems, speaks of the need to find poetic inspiration through lack of effort: “You meet this style by not trying deeply;/it thins to nothing if you approach.” There is always something ephemeral about the knowledge behind a poem, about the inspiration that creates it—or that creates a translation. To find a poem in translation we need to discover what I call “the poem behind the poem.” Sometimes we can't find it just by looking; we also have to see. Sometimes we can't find it by trying; it comes to us while we're doing something else.
Let's take as an example the following poem, “River Snow” by Liu Zongyuan—translated by Chou Ping and me. But before discussing it, let's take a moment to read it out loud, slowly. Empty our minds. Visualize each word.
A thousand mountains. Flying birds vanish.
Ten thousand paths. Human traces erased.
One boat, bamboo hat, bark cape—an old man
alone, angling in the cold river. Snow.
“River Snow” is considered a prime example of minimum words/maximum message and has been the subject of numerous landscape paintings. It is terrifically imagistic: the twenty Chinese characters of the poem create a whole landscape, sketch an intimate scene, and suggest a chill, ineffable solitude. To get this poem across in translation, we strove to reproduce the sequential way the characters unfold in the reader's mind. The syntax is particularly important because it is perfectly constructed. We walk into this poem as if walking into a building, and the spaces that open up around us and the forms that revise themselves at each step unfold according to the architect's master plan.
The first two lines create a fine parallelism: birds passing through the sky leave no trace, just as human traces are effaced in the mountain paths. It makes me think of the Old English kenning for the sea: “whale path.” Here the sky is a bird path. In the second line, it's clear that the snow is the active agent in erasing humanity from the natural scene, yet snow is never mentioned. After the last trace of humanity disappears with the word “erased,” a human presence is rebuilt in this landscape, character by character, trace by trace: “One boat, bamboo hat, bark cape” and—the sum of these clues— “an old man.” These first two lines sketch a painterly scene: the vast emptiness of the sky above and the snowy solitude of the landscape below have the same effect on the reader as a glance at a Chinese landscape painting. And then the tiny strokes that create a man in the third line direct our imagination deeper into the poem, as if we had discovered a tiny fisherman's figure on the scroll. The next line tells us what the old man is doing. He is alone and fishing in the cold river. The Chinese word for fishing is “hooking,” so we used “angling” for its specific meaning of “fishing with a hook.” We see the man fishing the river, almost fishing for the river. Silence. We take in the last character, which sums up the entire poem: “Snow.”
Snow is the white page on which the old man is marked, through which an ink river flows. Snow is the mind of the reader, on which these pristine signs are registered, only to be covered with more snow and erased. The old man fishing is the reader meditating on this quiet scene like a saint searching himself for some sign of a soul. The birds that are absent, the human world that is erased, suggest the incredible solitude of a meditating mind, and the clean, cold, quiet landscape in which the man plies his hook is a mind-scape as well. Thus, there is a Buddhist aspect to the poem, and Liu Zongyuan's old man is like Wallace Stevens's “Snow Man,” whose mind of winter is washed clean by the snowy expanse. He is “the listener, who listens in the snow,/And, nothing himself, beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
“River Snow” is a perfectly balanced poem, a tour de force that quietly, cleanly, easily creates its complexly simple scene. To merely paraphrase it in translation is to ignore the poem behind the poem. The translator must discover the poem visually, conceptually, culturally, and emotionally, and create a poem in English with the same mood, simplicity, silence, and depth. Each word must be necessary. Each line should drop into a meditative silence, should be a new line of vision, a new revelation. The poem must be empty, pure perception; the words of the poem should be like flowers, opening one by one, then silently falling. As William Carlos Williams was fond of saying, a poem is made up of words and the spaces between them.
If this technique is taken to extremes, it can create a poem that sounds too choppy. The magical economy of “River Snow” lies in the unfolding of visual clues in a meditative sequen
ce of discrete images, but with too many dashes, colons, or periods, the poem can seem fragmented. Alternatively, a translation that fills in the gaps between images can seem wordy and prolix, with prepositions and articles that make the lines fluid but dilute them in the process. The addition of a few parts of speech or an unfortunate choice of punctuation can significantly alter the translation and affect the reading experience.
While it is difficult to translate economically from a language that typically eliminates articles and pronouns, one can nevertheless attempt to create a translation that reads as cleanly and concisely as possible. We consider it a great success if we can translate a five-character line of Chinese poetry into a five- or six-word line in English, though this is not always possible. Too often translators will translate a seven-character line into two full lines of poetry in English, which makes the poem read like Walt Whitman, when the Chinese is much closer to Emily Dickinson.
The poetry of Wang Wei—the poet I've translated most extensively from the Chinese—is often spare and clean, like “River Snow.” Each character resonates in emptiness like the brief birdcalls he records in one of his poems. The inventor of the monochrome technique, Wang Wei was the most famous painter of his day. In his work, both painting and poetry were combined through the art of calligraphy—poems written on paintings. As Su Shi said of him, “His pictures are poems and his poems pictures,” and as Francois Cheng has pointed out, painting and calligraphy are both arts of the stroke, and both are created with the same brush. I like to imagine each character in “River Snow” sketched on the page: a brushstroke against the emptiness of a Chinese painting—like the figure of the old man himself surrounded by all that snow.
The most famous piece by Zen-influenced composer John Cage was titled “4′33″” (1952). The audience came in and sat down, and for four minutes and thirty-three seconds nothing happened. The audience was the music. Their rustlings, coughs, chatter, the creaking of seats, perhaps the rain on the roof of the auditorium—all this was the music. In classical Chinese painting the white space defines what forms emerge, and in Buddhism emptiness is wholeness. The perfect man's mind, according to Zhuangzi, is empty as a mirror, and according to the Daoist aesthetics of Chinese painting, each stroke of the brush is yin (blackness, woman) upon yang (light, whiteness, man). All the empty space reacts to one brushstroke upon the page. Each additional stroke makes the space adjust itself into a new composition, in much the way each great poem makes all of literary history readjust itself, as T S. Eliot wrote. To make a Chinese poem in English we must allow silence to seep in around the edges, to define the words the way the sky's negative space in a painting defines the mountains.
As I stated earlier, I think the poem in translation must carry on a conversation with other poems in order to discover itself. For me, “River Snow” calls to mind Japanese Zen poems and poems of the English Romantics in addition to poems from the Chinese tradition, and it is this conversation that allows me to hear its silence.
Consider these lines from the poem “People's Abuse” by Japanese Zen poet Muso Soseki (1275–1351), translated by W. S. Mer-win and Soiku Shigematsu:
Don't look back
to this world
your old hold in the cellar
From the beginning
the flying birds have left
no footprints on the blue sky.
In Soseki's image, the flying birds pass through the sky without leaving a trace, as in “River Snow,” which also shares with Soseki's lines a distinction between the human world and the natural world. Now consider these lines from Zhu Xizhen's poem “Fisherman, to the Tune of ‘A Happy Event Draws Near,'” in which the fisherman
spins his boat around at will
traceless like a bird across sky.
The fisherman on the water is like the birds in the sky, whose trackless flight is a symbol of the enlightened mind's passage through the world without grasping or holding or desiring. Compare “On Nondependence of the Mind,” a poem by Dogen (1200–1253)— founder of the Soto school of Japanese Zen Buddhism—translated by Brian Unger and Kazuaki Tanahashi:
Water birds
going and coming
their traces disappear
but they never
forget their path.
The mind that doesn't depend on the world leaves no traces, just as the “water birds” don't forget their path—a path we can understand as a mystical Way. In these lines from Wordsworth's Prelude, he describes his hike through the Alps:
Like a breeze
Or sunbeam over your domain I passed
In motion without pause; but ye have left
Your beauty with me
(Book 6, lines 675–78)
Because Wordsworth is in tune with the natural setting, his meditative mind passes through nature without leaving tracks. The inverse parallelism he sets up (of his trackless passage through nature's landscape versus nature's beautiful inscription in his mindscape) is implicit in “River Snow” as well. “River Snow” is also a poem in which the mind is washed clean, like the sky empty of birds, the paths empty of humanity. Zhuangzi asks, “Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?” The fisherman in “River Snow” is that man.
Although I felt it necessary in “River Snow” to make a literal, word-for-word translation to get at the heart of the poem, in other cases I've translated lines in unusual ways to get at the poem behind the poem: the urgent image, the quiet mood, the sound that I felt resided in the Chinese poem and needed emphasis to be felt in English. Sometimes I've deviated slightly from a literal translation in order to get an effect that I believe is truer to the poet's vision. There are no fast rules; the translator has to feel it. To illustrate this, I'd like to discuss a translated line that is much more problematic than the ones above.
First, though, I need to discuss what—somewhat idiosyncrati-cally, perhaps—I call deep-image lines in Chinese poetry. There are times when Chinese poets create such strange and evocative nature imagery that it is almost surreal. To learn how to re-create these lines in English, I think it's helpful to look at the school of deep-image poets in America. Most famous among them are Robert Bly and James Wright, although I would classify contemporary Native American poet Linda Hogan as deep image as well (in her practice, as opposed to her literary history). Bly and Wright were deeply influenced by the combination of personal and impersonal perspectives and tones in Chinese and by Chinese rhetorical parallelism, clarity of image, and focus on implication. They blended these characteristics with a late strain of surrealism derived from Trakl, Vallejo, Lorca, and Neruda. It is precisely this mélange of influences on Bly and Wright that opens up a space in American poetry for a blend of the Chinese tradition and the surreal—and that provides a model for translators.
Here are two examples of deep-image lines, the first from Linda Hogan:
Crickets are pulsing in the wrist of night.
and the second from James Wright:
A butterfly lights on the branch
Of your green voice.
How do these lines work? They invert your expectation, blending the human and the natural or engaging in synesthesia (as in Su Shi's great line “With cold sound, half a moon falls from the painted eaves”). Similarly, in Wang Wei's poems “In the Mountains” and “Sketching Things,” nature does strange things; the world is so lush that its green color becomes a liquid that wets his clothes:
No rain on the mountain path
yet greenness drips on my clothes.
and
I sit looking at moss so green
my clothes are soaked with color.
The strange beauty of James Wright's image taps into a profound psychological mystery and opens up a space in the imagination that Wang Wei's lines also reach. Wright makes it possible for us to see Wang Wei's synesthesia, and to see how to translate him into English. As with the Wang Wei lines above, the human and the natural are intertwined in Linda Hogan's line, wh
ich imagines the world as a body through which the blood pulses, an intermittent action that is also a sound, the ba-dump of the heartbeat. The cricket sound is similarly an intermittent, two-beat sound, and it brings the night into our bedrooms, making it as intimate as our bodies—a small, internal event, like a pulse.
Of course, I was thinking of Linda Hogan when translating one of my favorite lines of Wang Wei in which he sets himself the task of getting at the action-pulse of the cricket's song. Wang Wei's line comes from “Written on a Rainy Autumn Night After Pei Di's Visit”: “The urgent whir of crickets quickens.” I like the sound qualities here, the onomatopoeia, the internal off-rhymes, and the sense that the line is just beyond comprehension, yet intuitively right. However, this line as I translated it—in collaboration with Willis Barnstone and Xu Haixin—is extremely problematic, an example of translation as reinvention. Literally, the line reads, “cricket cry already hurried” (), so why did we translate it as “The urgent whir of crickets quickens”? The first two characters, refer to the house cricket and mean “to urge” + “weave,” or “urgent” + “weave” with a sense of “to urgently weave” or “to urge into weaving.” The idiom derives from the similarity of a cricket's intermittent, two-beat chirp, produced by rubbing its wings together, to the shhk-shhhk of a shuttle on a hand loom, or the whir and whirl of a spinning wheel. In other words, this Chinese idiom for cricket derives from a similarity of sound. The ono-matopoetic element is also present in the English word “cricket,” which derives from the French criquer (“little creaker”), and suggests the insect's characteristic sound, cricket, cricket. We forget this unless the word is heard freshly; the off-rhyme “crickets quickens” is meant to focus our attention on the forgotten music of the word—to make us actively bear “cricket,” perhaps for the first time.
The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Page 3