酷我-北美枫

[ericcoliu]

Translation: More Than a Leap from Dictionary to Dictionary (The First Draft)

Thematic Review of Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated Written by Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz


Challenging Robert Frost’s comment that “Poetry is what gets lost in translation,” Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz argue in the introduction to their slim volume, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated, that “poetry is that which is worth translating.” They take one single poem written by one of the greatest Chinese poets, Wang Wei, as a stellar example. This four-line poem is over 1200-year-old and made up of a mountain, a forest, and the setting sun illuminating a patch of moss. Literary critic and translator Eliot Weinberger compares 19 translations of this small poem with further commentary from Nobel Prize Winner Mexican poet Octavio Paz, As Paz admits in the book, the translation of this poem is complex and difficult “for the poem carries to an extreme the characteristics of Chinese poetry: universality, impersonality, absence of time, absence of subject.” In this autobiographical poem, the solitude of the mountain is so great that “not even the poet himself is present.” It is fascinating in its deceptive simplicity, its precision of observation, and its philosophical depth rooted in Buddhist tradition.

Following T. S. Eliot’s ideas that every translation must be rethought as an interpretive exercise bound to its own time, yet able to enrich and renew the existing poetic tradition, Weinberger and Paz begin with Wang Wei’s poem in Chinese written characters, transcribe the poem in pin-yin as a transliteration, and then give a character-by-character translation before proceeding to another 16 translations (13 in English, written between 1919 and 1978, two in French, and one in Spanish translated by Paz himself). This gives the reader the great opportunity to appreciate Wang’s poem in as many formats as possible and to enhance his/her culturally-specific poetic sensibilities. For every translation, Weinberger give a one-page comment in terms of fidelity, understandability, the relationship to the previous translations, and poetic aesthetics. Paz also gives a six-page essay on his reading and translation of the poem, as well as a balanced and interesting exploration of the issues involved in translating it. In my view, his essay is the gem of the book.

The main focus of my thematic review is an emphasis on the interpretive differences revealed in the English translations by translators across three different generations of Chinese poetry translation. All of the English translations can be found on the webpage entitled Several Translations of One Poem by Wang Wei.

Now, let’s first look at James Liu’s translation:

On the empty mountains no one can be seen,
But human voices are heard to resound.
The reflected sunlight pieces the deep forest
And falls again upon the mossy ground.

Liu faithfully follows a traditional English format by beginning each line with a capital letter and by rhyming at the end of lines two and four. In order to achieve the above-mentioned formalities, the beauty of English is being compromised; his translation is a little cumbersome, especially his translation of line two, “But human voices are heard to resound.”

Then, let’s read Burton Watson’s translation:

Empty hills, no one in sight,
only the sound of someone talking;
late sunlight enters the deep wood,
shining over the green moss again.

Without using rhyming or capitalizing, Watson successfully creates the vivid imagery in everyday language. For example, he translates the first two Chinese characters of line one with two English words: no article, no explanation. His way of presenting the imagery is as direct and concrete as the Chinese one. There are 24 English words for 20 Chinese characters, yet every Chinese character has been translated. More importantly, he faithfully keeps Wang’s parallelism – the dual nature of the universe, yin and yang -- employed in the poem, and he is the first translator to do so. For example, if we now look at the first two lines, we find alternating yin and yang: absence (emptiness) and presence (mountain); absence clearly not there (no one in sight) and presence unclearly there (only the sound of someone talking, nonlocalized voices).

Finally, we come to see Gary Snyder’s translation, which is well known and appreciated by Western-influenced Chinese readers:

Empty mountains:
ggno one to be seen.
Yet – hear –
ggHuman sounds and echoes.
Returning sunlight
ggEnters the dark woods;
Again shining
ggOn green moss, above.

Surely, Snyder's translation is, as Weinberger and Paz claim, one of the best translations partially because he has experienced living in the forest and therefore he knows the images firsthand. Like Watson, he uses simple language to re-create the vivid imagery, and every Chinese character has been translated. Yet, his line placement, dramatically different from those of the previous two translations, adds complexity for the reader, and the second half of the concluding line, “moss, above,” challenges the reader to interpret the “above” in light of his/her experience.

His translation demonstrates the opening up of the possibilities of contextualized interpretation of a poetic work to make it “new” for each generation, as American writer and pioneer Chinese poetry translator Ezra Pound had hoped:

ggggggBy now this is more or less ‘how we do it’ in English, and if you tried to do it some other way, it ggggggwould probably sound false, Victorian and strange.

Liu doesn’t follow Pound at all. Watson does, but not to the same degree that Snyder does, and yet his translation does not sound “Victorian and strange.” In contemporary political terms, Liu is a faithful conservative translator, Watson is a centrist, and Snyder is a left winger. All of the other translators can roughly fall into one of these three categories.

As Weinberger and Paz emphasize, “translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining of the poem.” Likewise, every reading of the poem in itself is an act of translation: “translation into the reader’s intellectual and emotional life." In addition to comparing reading to translating, every reading, for me, is a struggle between what I want to make of the poem and what the poem wants to make of me. When a poem or any other literary work is successful, it is because it makes us “better” – it stimulates an experience which makes us more interesting, more nuanced, more multi-faceted, and more flexible. This book on how one Chinese poem has been translated is slim, yet it stimulates.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

Translation: More Than a Leap from Dictionary to Dictionary (The First Draft)

Thematic Review of Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated Written by Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz


Challenging Robert Frost’s comment that “Poetry is what gets lost in translation,” Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz argue in the introduction to their slim volume, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated, that “poetry is that which is worth translating.” They take one single poem written by one of the greatest Chinese poets, Wang Wei, as a stellar example. This four-line poem is over 1200-year-old and made up of a mountain, a forest, and the setting sun illuminating a patch of moss. Literary critic and translator Eliot Weinberger compares 19 translations of this small poem with further commentary from Nobel Prize Winner Mexican poet Octavio Paz, As Paz admits in the book, the translation of this poem is complex and difficult “for the poem carries to an extreme the characteristics of Chinese poetry: universality, impersonality, absence of time, absence of subject.” In this autobiographical poem, the solitude of the mountain is so great that “not even the poet himself is present.” It is fascinating in its deceptive simplicity, its precision of observation, and its philosophical depth rooted in Buddhist tradition.

Following T. S. Eliot’s ideas that every translation must be rethought as an interpretive exercise bound to its own time, yet able to enrich and renew the existing poetic tradition, Weinberger and Paz begin with Wang Wei’s poem in Chinese written characters, transcribe the poem in pin-yin as a transliteration, and then give a character-by-character translation before proceeding to another 16 translations (13 in English, written between 1919 and 1978, two in French, and one in Spanish translated by Paz himself). This gives the reader the great opportunity to appreciate Wang’s poem in as many formats as possible and to enhance his/her culturally-specific poetic sensibilities. For every translation, Weinberger give a one-page comment in terms of fidelity, understandability, the relationship to the previous translations, and poetic aesthetics. Paz also gives a six-page essay on his reading and translation of the poem, as well as a balanced and interesting exploration of the issues involved in translating it. In my view, his essay is the gem of the book.

The main focus of my thematic review is an emphasis on the interpretive differences revealed in the English translations by translators across three different generations of Chinese poetry translation. All of the English translations can be found on the webpage entitled Several Translations of One Poem by Wang Wei.

Now, let’s first look at James Liu’s translation:

On the empty mountains no one can be seen,
But human voices are heard to resound.
The reflected sunlight pieces the deep forest
And falls again upon the mossy ground.

Liu faithfully follows a traditional English format by beginning each line with a capital letter and by rhyming at the end of lines two and four. In order to achieve the above-mentioned formalities, the beauty of English is being compromised; his translation is a little cumbersome, especially his translation of line two, “But human voices are heard to resound.”

Then, let’s read Burton Watson’s translation:

Empty hills, no one in sight,
only the sound of someone talking;
late sunlight enters the deep wood,
shining over the green moss again.

Without using rhyming or capitalizing, Watson successfully creates the vivid imagery in everyday language. For example, he translates the first two Chinese characters of line one with two English words: no article, no explanation. His way of presenting the imagery is as direct and concrete as the Chinese one. There are 24 English words for 20 Chinese characters, yet every Chinese character has been translated. More importantly, he faithfully keeps Wang’s parallelism – the dual nature of the universe, yin and yang -- employed in the poem, and he is the first translator to do so. For example, if we now look at the first two lines, we find alternating yin and yang: absence (emptiness) and presence (mountain); absence clearly not there (no one in sight) and presence unclearly there (only the sound of someone talking, nonlocalized voices).

Finally, we come to see Gary Snyder’s translation, which is well known and appreciated by Western-influenced Chinese readers:

Empty mountains:
ggno one to be seen.
Yet – hear –
ggHuman sounds and echoes.
Returning sunlight
ggEnters the dark woods;
Again shining
ggOn green moss, above.

Surely, Snyder's translation is, as Weinberger and Paz claim, one of the best translations partially because he has experienced living in the forest and therefore he knows the images firsthand. Like Watson, he uses simple language to re-create the vivid imagery, and every Chinese character has been translated. Yet, his line placement, dramatically different from those of the previous two translations, adds complexity for the reader, and the second half of the concluding line, “moss, above,” challenges the reader to interpret the “above” in light of his/her experience.

His translation demonstrates the opening up of the possibilities of contextualized interpretation of a poetic work to make it “new” for each generation, as American writer and pioneer Chinese poetry translator Ezra Pound had hoped:

ggggggBy now this is more or less ‘how we do it’ in English, and if you tried to do it some other way, it ggggggwould probably sound false, Victorian and strange.

Liu doesn’t follow Pound at all. Watson does, but not to the same degree that Snyder does, and yet his translation does not sound “Victorian and strange.” In contemporary political terms, Liu is a faithful conservative translator, Watson is a centrist, and Snyder is a left winger. All of the other translators can roughly fall into one of these three categories.

As Weinberger and Paz emphasize, “translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining of the poem.” Likewise, every reading of the poem in itself is an act of translation: “translation into the reader’s intellectual and emotional life." In addition to comparing reading to translating, every reading, for me, is a struggle between what I want to make of the poem and what the poem wants to make of me. When a poem or any other literary work is successful, it is because it makes us “better” – it stimulates an experience which makes us more interesting, more nuanced, more multi-faceted, and more flexible. This book on how one Chinese poem has been translated is slim, yet it stimulates.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[Champagne]

[[Champagne]]

[Champagne]

[[Champagne]]

[Lake]

Well summarized three approaches of translating classical Chinese poems.

[[Lake]]

Well summarized three approaches of translating classical Chinese poems.

[Lake]

[[Lake]]

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[ericcoliu]

[quote="Lake"]

Western-influenced Chinese readers? Do you mean the English-speaking Chinese?

Yes, the English-speaking Chinese or the Chinese English learners who are interested in or directly or indirectly influenced by the counterculture of the 1960s.

[[ericcoliu]]

[quote="Lake"]

Western-influenced Chinese readers? Do you mean the English-speaking Chinese?

Yes, the English-speaking Chinese or the Chinese English learners who are interested in or directly or indirectly influenced by the counterculture of the 1960s.

[fanfan]

[quote="ericcoliu"]

[[FFFFFF]]

[quote="ericcoliu"]

[dundas]

[[dundas]]

[ericcoliu]

Yes.

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 ray of the sun
Slip through the dark forest,
And gleam again on the shadowy moss.


In Weinberger’s view, Rexroth’s translation is perhaps more “imitation” than “translation.” He ignores what he presumably dislikes, or feels cannot be translated. That means his translation is “loosely based’ on Wang’s poem.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

Yes.

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 ray of the sun
Slip through the dark forest,
And gleam again on the shadowy moss.


In Weinberger’s view, Rexroth’s translation is perhaps more “imitation” than “translation.” He ignores what he presumably dislikes, or feels cannot be translated. That means his translation is “loosely based’ on Wang’s poem.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[robarts]

[[robarts]]

[hahaview]

The following is my attempt to provide one more way, the twentieth way in terms of Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz, of looking at Wang Wei’s poem:

Empty mountains, no one in sight,
only human echoes are heard;
reflected sunlight enters the deep forest,
and shines upon the green moss again.
_________________
I came, I saw, and I conquered

[[hahaview]]

The following is my attempt to provide one more way, the twentieth way in terms of Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz, of looking at Wang Wei’s poem:

Empty mountains, no one in sight,
only human echoes are heard;
reflected sunlight enters the deep forest,
and shines upon the green moss again.
_________________
I came, I saw, and I conquered

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[温暖的水獸]

How come there is no translation by any of female translators in their "slim book"? Such as Pauline Yu's translation?

One question for you:

What's their translation principle, if there is one, articulated in this "slim yet stimulating" book?
_________________
舌頭那匹温暖的水獸　馴養地在小小的水族箱中　蠕動
那獸說：是的 我願意

[[温暖的水獸]]

How come there is no translation by any of female translators in their "slim book"? Such as Pauline Yu's translation?

One question for you:

What's their translation principle, if there is one, articulated in this "slim yet stimulating" book?
_________________
舌頭那匹温暖的水獸　馴養地在小小的水族箱中　蠕動
那獸說：是的 我願意

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]