I remember reading some commentary red pine made about his daode jing translation and thinking “holy shit, this guy has no idea what he’s talking about, he gets basic facts about the ddj wrong” That was my strike two, beyond the pretense of the name.
speaking of, I am anticipating reading Brook Ziporyn’s upcoming translation of the daodejing, this afterword doesn’t say anything new to anyone who has done a lot of reading, but it clearly shows he knows his stuff.
Hmm. I want to say Gary Snyder looks like the notably poor translation of Cold Mountain Road while both Red Pine and Paul Rouzer’s seem much better. Chronologically it makes sense, Snyder came first and it sounds like he had few Chinese scholarly resources at his disposal.
I’m thinking the indefensible one here is actually Snyder’s “laughable”, which undermines the meditative mood by having the poet take a mocking tone towards the beautiful landscape (???). If I assume that the “delightful” in Rouzer’s scholarly edition is probably a literal-ish interpretation, Snyder’s “laughable” then has the ring of a misunderstanding of 可笑 (in Japanese 笑 always means laugh/smile, never delight more generally, so I can easily imagine how that happened).
Red Pine’s choice of “strange”, on the other hand, is so far off that I believe it cannot be a naive misinterpretation of 可笑 but rather a creative decision to diverge from the literal meaning of individual words in service of a gist meaning. For example, “strange” may constitute a way to more elegantly communicate the “and yet” you highlighted as awkward in Rouzer. “Delightful, and yet nobody ever goes there” is, in other words, strange right?
Expanding to the poem as a whole, many of Snyder’s other choices also diverge in similarly weird ways from both of the others: “sign”, “unbelievably”, “grass”, “bend”, “hill”, “hums”, “shortcut”, “keep up”. (Like really the pine trees are humming?) Whereas with Red Pine, he always seems to me to have started with the same understanding as Rouzer, then quite deliberately altered details as necessary to polish it down
Red pine’s reads the best to me, no idea on how faithful the translation is but the other two feel clunky. shoulda called the path bewildering tho
I’m in the stance that a translation is its own work and should be judged separately to the original work, except for factual errors. yes, I am a big fan of Le Ton beau de Marot, how did you know
I can read some Chinese too, but I always want to check myself before using that knowledge to interpret old texts like these. The Chinese I know is from today and has taken new kinds of connotations and meanings since then. I mean, to my understanding, ‘千草’ seems easy to interpret as many blades of grass or something similar. It’s difficult for me to know, so that’s why I enjoy reading multiple translations so I can see what shades of meaning I can gather.
It also helps me to hear what other people think in comparing them because I lose my path, to borrow a phrase, when trying to hold so many interpretations in my head at the same time.
Absolutely agree with this
the hanshan poems terrify me because they are both deliberately cryptic and playful with language and also use a lot of medieval vernacular that is really hard to get at with normal dictionaries, which tend to focus on the relatively static formal written language.
the one quoted above doesn’t have too much of this, but, for example, trying to figure out what exactly 可笑 would mean in this context is the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night. i mean, yes, it literally just means “able to be laughed/smiled at.” so… what about the path makes it that way? what kind of laughter are we talkin’ here? to me it is much easier to just read the poem and assume that your gut take on it is right than it is to actually consider that you might have no idea what the fuck a mysterious thousand+ year old zen author-figure would think was funny. because where do you go after that? it could be a very long journey, or you could just get lost.
anyway, as of 2000 there is an apparently pretty decent annotated chinese edition of the poems that as far as i know addresses the vernacular phrases used in the text, i haven’t really looked at it because like i said i am afraid of these poems.
i think for people who enjoy a certain kind of translation this is like the most exciting text you can encounter, and this is the same reason there are like thousands of translations of dao de jing. but imo you can’t really do that kind of work and then also stay in the mindset that one can either be “right” or “wrong” or “accurate” in a kind of clinical, quantitative way. i think part of my problem is that i just don’t have much of an ear for english language poetry, so most of what distinguishes these things on that level is kind of lost on me.
i don’t want to knock it in a condescending way, i want to say that this is the sort of thing that literally terrifies me. much respect to people who have the stomach for it!
As a translator, there’s a lot about Chinese poetry that’s attractive because of how much freedom you can have. There are few cognates so there’s no tension over whether to use one or something else. Punctuation and syntax for old Chinese poetry is more interprative, too. Copying any formal constraints of Chinese poetry seems right out because of how different it is from English, so you can pick your own battles as far as meter and melody goes.
to a certain extent definitely, but a lot of poems are less ambiguous than these, especially tang poetry. things are a little looser after and before that but not to the same degree you see in like, contemporary english free verse and stuff. well, even a lot of the hanshan poems are in pretty standard forms, they just use more varied vocabulary and have a lot more of what at least appears to be deliberate ambiguity.
in most poems, punctuation is absolutely not something that can be interpreted, as they follow fixed line lengths and rarely have any enjambment. within lines there is typically a caesura between the first two and final three characters of a five-character line, and between the first four and final three in a seven character line. those create pretty decisive conceptual units that are pretty fundamental to understanding each line, but of course there are times when poets kind of deliberately break those rules too, but these are usually pretty obvious.
of course translators don’t have to pay attention to this stuff, but imo that’s something pretty different than cases where there is genuine ambiguity. though idk if i would call it inaccurate either, well unless its just egregiously ignorant. this is also why translations that attempt to do the real sparse thing of just translating each character as a single word (or something) are really misguided, as they are just totally ignoring the way syntax gives those units additional meaning. it’s formulaic to the extent that it’s actually legible, but there’s still a lot of room for creativity within those patterns.
i also think there tends to be a lot more imitation of these formal constraints in english translation than one might expect given how different the languages are, but few people really hold themselves to this as strictly as can be observed in the original poems. for example, all of the translations above keep each line basically where it is in the original, rather than adding in enjambment that isn’t there in the original or doing other creative things with the spacing of the lines on the page. so this means the logic of each couplet is basically preserved. and, more significantly i guess, both porter and rouzer use dashes to basically imitate the 2-3 pattern of certain lines in the original, though, funnily enough they do it for different couplets.
but yeah i do tend to kind of bristle against claims people (not you) make about how all classical chinese writing is sort of impressionistic and inscrutable. there are lots of degrees to this. in some ways i guess there is more ambiguity or flexibility with poetry than prose, but in others the formal constraints actually help make the meaning much clearer. (again, ddj has a lot less of this, another reason why it has the reputation it does i guess). imo many of the hanshan poems are in a different level of illegibility than most other similar poetry, even though they are way more formally constrained and predictable than really archaic stuff like dao de jing.
Kinda on topic, I just ran across this extremely valid daode jing translation
Thank you for this post because it’s helping me refine my thoughts about this. I’ll take back what I said about syntax because you’re right about the consistent structures used in Chinese poetry. So much of Chinese poems revolves around using juxtaposition and parallelism to communicate depth with just a few words.
An English translator has to consider how to translate that parallelism because we’re never going to be able to mirror the concision exactly. Furthermore, we don’t have the same language tools. I don’t know exactly what poetic devices Hanshan was using, but I know tone and rhyme interact with each other in other poems. Not having tones or such a modular vocabulary makes these patterns impossible to replicate. This leads to the freedom in choosing meter, assonance, consonance, and so on. In some ways, it’s more of a freedom from the traditions of English poetry than from the original, target text.
Yeah, this is an interesting point. Although something I’ve always struggled to understand is the extent to which contemporary American anglophone poetry actually is indebted to Chinese literary traditions, or, at least, certain understanding of what Chinese poetry is. That is, I think there’s some kind of connection between freedom from archaic conventions of English poetry and the radical results of experimental translations of Chinese poetry into English. If Adilegian (sp?) still posted here he could probably tell us I guess.
It would probably not be fair to point only to Chinese poetry as the root of this, but I do think it’s kind of under-acknowledged. Or maybe it isn’t? Like I said, I don’t really know that much about poetry in English. But I think there’s a perception that there is some kind of essential cultural divide there, and it is one that is timeless rather than one that was bridged pretty effectively (but, of course, imperfectly) in the early to mid 20th century.
I guess what I’m saying is I don’t think it’s possible to argue that any poetry written in America in the last 50 years would look exactly the way it does were it not for people like Ezra Pound, Burton Watson, Gary Snyder, and probably a lot more I’m missing. Even though I’m not sure how exactly one could quantify that relationship or even describe it completely, I do find it irritating that there is still a sense of incommensurability between the two literary traditions, when, in some ways, I feel like contemporary American poets have more in common with Tang poets than they do with, like, John Donne or William Langland or Petrarch or whatever.
Arthur Waley is probably the elephant in the room
oh yeah. but like, beyond translators, frank o’hara name dropping tu fu and po chu-i in “to john ashbery” always kind of felt like the tip of an iceberg im not really mentally prepared to spend too long thinking about
but yeah, 20th century imagism, which is pretty foundational to modern american poetry, was indebted to the more concrete sort of Tang poets
A.C. Graham’s introduction in “Poems of the Late T’ang” goes over this very subject in some detail, worth reading.
Yeah and conversely, for instance, the latest wave of Chinese sci-fi like The Three-Body Problem is deeply indebted to the American tradition. Plus the official ideology of the Chinese government is explicitly a 19th-century German guy’s
People want to believe there exists out there an uncontaminated, separated-off wellspring of literature. The hope is that this imagined place retains the potential to radically enrich them with a bracing & total culture shock. But instead, the experience of trying to find something “new” in another country has always included an uncanny feeling of rediscovering your home in the foreign. And you can choose to either be disappointed or delighted by that
Conversation has moved on, but I wanted to make another comparison this morning and took the screenshots and, well, I’m doing another one of these.
重巖我卜居，
鳥道絕人迹。
庭際何所有，
白雲抱幽石。
住茲凡幾年，
屢見春冬易。
寄語鐘鼎家，
虛名定無益。
Original at the top, then Red Pine, Rouzer, and Snyder
This time, instead of deciding what the original poem means, I’m going to try and glean a distinct meaning from each translation. I have tried to use a Chinese-English dictionary to clarify things, but it’s not so easy. What I would need is a period-specific lexicon. Nevertheless, I’ll do what I can with what I have.
First, Red Pine:
I’m picking up on several contrasting images. First, Hanshan’s chosen mountain home is contrasted with the unspoken home that we assume everyone else has. It’s isolated and elevated, but, importantly, not as elevated as the realm of birds.
The final couplet is tricky for me. My best crack at it is that the speaker is making a distinction between different meditative modes. I take the “tripods” to be incense burners and the bells to be another part of ritual practice. If the speaker is contrasted with these “owners,” then it may be that nature is all that’s necessary for them. It reminds me of Emily Dickinson, if that’s the case. I wish there was a footnote or little more to help me access this.
Rouzer gives a footnote and says that bells and tripods are just part of being rich. I have a hunch there’s probably something to it that these particular objects are being used as markers of wealth, but I don’t know. The distinction of bird paths and human paths is clearer. In fact, here it seems that Hanshan’s home is the path for birds. The punctuation helps me get more of a conversational rhythm out of it, and I imagine the speaker talking to a person who is utterly bewildered by the hermit in front of them. The third couplet is interesting to me because the lines appear redundant at first, but there may be a slight twist I’m not seeing.
Snyder really pushes the conversational tone making “many years” into a conversational filler. I imagine the speaker rubbing their chin and looking up to the right as they try to recollect just how much time they’ve lost track of. The big liberty Snyder takes is with the final couplet that is way off in terms of literal content, but appears to follow Rouzer’s footnoted interpretation while making it more accessible to the contemporary, unfamiliar reader. It’s silly and irreverent and that seems like the right mood to be in when approaching Hanshan.
a fav prof of mine shared this on twitter
Not enough context to understand the point about “modern poetics” there either, but I’m imagining “As though verb tenses were not always already thrown beyond themselves by their ontological vehemence!” is something the boy in the meme might be quietly thinking as he listens to that, but he doesn’t have the energy to argue
I read the screenshotted passage more closely, and (without claiming that this is Ricoeur’s intended meaning as I have no context on his general philosophy) the way I am able to make sense of the underlined phrase is that it’s a point about the definition of “language”.
Words on a page, in sound waves or in computer memory are mere patterns of material objects much like an infinitude of other patterns which we do not call language. They only become “language” when they are activated (or we envision a latent potential of future activation) in the dialectical relationship with the speaker or listener. And this activation must necessarily invoke ontology, otherwise we would not call the phenomenon “language”, but something else like “sensing”.
Therefore, any attempt to establish a pure disjunction between words and interpretation (a position I associate with analytic philosophy, but it sounds like Ricoeur is criticizing someone else) is misguided.
I kind of got the feeling it might be gesturing to some people like that. I don’t know who those people are. I was trained by trained Derridians and everything is interpretation because everything is writing.
