On Translation (The Big Backcountry): Guimarães Rosa, Nabokov, J. M. G. Le Clézio, Apollinaire, Sappho, Wang Wei

On Translation

I’ve been thinking about translation and its many manifestations, limitations and compromises lately, partly due to my own interest in the subject and partly due to the efforts of acquaintances more intimately involved in the practice. For example, a friend has turned an internship at a small publishing house into an opportunity at translating a new edition of Mexican novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s Calling All Heroes into English, available through PM Press, as well as embarking on translation and editing services through his own personal website. Similarly, another acquaintance has turned his interest in a long-lost (to English readers, at any rate) Brazilian novel into an ongoing blog/research project drawing attention to what he has dubbed “A Missing Book”. João Guimarães Rosa’s 1956 novel Grande Sertão: Veredas (literally, Big Backcountry: Tracks, but commonly known in English as The Devil To Pay In The Backlands) is a long out-of-print masterpiece considered to be the (a?) Brazilian Ulysses, currently languishing in the realm of overpriced online trading via a rather antiquated 1963 English translation that begs for a new attempt. His blog is continually updated, and has ranged from interviews with noted scholars to lovely images of vintage edition covers. Far from a dusty work of scholarship, the blog is an exploration of the multifaceted ways one might approach a beloved, albeit neglected, work.

In the case of The Devil To Pay In The Backlands, one would be grateful merely for the opportunity to order a $13.99 soft cover copy from Amazon, even if the existing translation remained the travesty it supposedly is. A book’s in-print status and availability is often the first obstacle to appreciating a work – a shoddy translation is sometimes par for the course. But let’s leave aside the issue of availability for the moment (trusting to the efforts of used bookstores everywhere, perhaps?) and focus on what I’ll dub the Translation Perplex. Because while the decision to reclaim a novel for and/or from posterity by firing off a new run with improved dust jackets may be primarily a monetary one, any attempts at re-casting the words themselves via an improved translation necessarily involves sweat, frustration, and a leap of faith.

Whenever my mind turns to translation, I usually start thinking about Nabokov. This is partly due to a long personal infatuation with Nabokov’s glorious and flowing prose, an infatuation that burns ever more brightly with each passing year as I ponder Nabokov’s miraculous mastery of two distinct languages, Russian and English. Is it not enough to be a master prose stylist in one world language – a trendsetter, innovator, genius? To inarguably add to the tradition of a literature and a language that is not one’s own, as Nabokov did to English, is little short of astonishing. One can think of few others gliding as successfully between languages. And yet such efforts were far from effortless. Indeed, it took many years for me to recognize the labor so skillfully hidden by Nabokov, and only recently have I begun to understand he was forever conscious of the wide gulf permanently existing between himself and a language that was not truly his own.

One need only consider the 1957 novel Pnin, his fourth written in English and thirteenth overall. Of course the portrait of an intellectual Russian émigré on an American campus during the height of the Cold War would contain certain autobiographical echoes of a man who bounced around Europe and America for most of his life, seeking refuge from a land that assassinated his father and harassed his Jewish wife. But what I find surprising is the attention Nabokov draws to the humiliations inherent in any attempt at assimilation. Pnin is an intellectual, a scholar, a researcher, a great mind and a man of high moral courage. And yet he is also a figure of some amusement to the denizens of the university campus. “Handicapped and hemmed in by his incapacity to learn a language,” as Nabokov writes, Pnin is “a figure of fun to many an average intellectual.” That is hardly how one would describe as urbane and sophisticated a fellow as Nabokov. Yet how much of himself is present in his unsparing image of a distraught Pnin sobbing, “I haf nofing” – dignity denied simply due to differences in local pronunciation? (Never forget that nearly all English speakers both during Nabokov’s lifetime and today have no idea how to correctly pronounce his name. “One cannot hope to understand an author if one cannot even pronounce his name,” he once sternly rebuked those who would turn Gogol into ‘Go-gall’. ‘Na-bo-kov,’ he insisted. “A heavy open ‘o’ as in ‘Knickerbocker’. My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle ‘o’ of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful ‘Nah-bah-kov’ is a despicable gutterism. Well, you can make your choice now”).

Adam Thirlwell recently highlighted this aspect of Nabokov’s struggles with linguistic differences, although his essay (a review of the recently released collection Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry Selected and Translated by Vladimir Nabokov), seeks to highlight the stark changes the man himself underwent regarding poetry translation, specifically Russian-to-English translations. The details are startling. In 1944, Nabokov released a collection of Russian poetry translations, featuring works by Lermontov, Pushkin and Tyutchev. In 1964, he released a massive four-volume edition of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Between those twenty years, Nabokov had settled in America and had notably chosen to abandon Russian as his primary compositional language of choice. What is most obviously distinct between the two volumes of translated poetry, Thirlwell notes, is Nabokov’s mutation from a “free” translator, attempting to wrestle with the original language by closely hewing to rhythms and rhymes at all cost, to a more “literalist” approach abandoning forced rhyme (or “padding and trimming,” as Thirlwell puts it) for a stubborn faithfulness to form. Even an aloof observer can note the marked difference between Nabokov’s 1944 and 1964 translations of Stanza XXXIII of Eugene Onegin – “no, never did a passion roll/ such billows in my bursting soul” vs. “no, never did the surge of passions/ thus rive my soul”. The former may well be “better” poetry, with rhymes and rhythms intact. Yet “passion roll” is clearly the translator’s invention, inserted solely to provide a mandated rhyme and to echo the similarly extended concluding line. And as Thirwell notes, only through abandoning excessive ornamentation did Nabokov come close to transmitting what may well be one of the more distinctive features of Pushkin’s art – the swift change in tone from everyday language to idealistic turns of phrase, a feature lost in his earlier, more acceptably “poetic,” version. Put another way, what would the reader prefer? A good Nabokov poem or a good translation of a good Pushkin poem?

But we’ve strayed into the realm of Pushkin while we have yet to fully agree on proper pronunciation of his translator’s name. “Well, you can make your choice now”.



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Faced with such conundrums, who might not be struck with paralysis of action? If even Nabokov found himself reversing his course of action over the span of a mere twenty years, what of us monolinguists? Despairing of ever mastering the Russian tongue enough to stumble through a Chekhov short story, let alone larger efforts by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, I settle for translations, imperfect as they may be (am I going to take a five-month night course in Turkish so I can better appreciate Orhan Pamuk?). But these are the notable names, the celebrities on the world stage. What of the countless authors not yet afforded the right to life in English form? A recent essay by novelist and professor Tim Parks simultaneously depressed and cheered me regarding this matter. For as Parks sadly explains, only 3 to 5% of all books published in the United States are translations. This paltry number negatively impacts not only the opportunities afforded American readers to better understand the continuing trajectory of world literature, but also contributes to a poor global recognition of individual authors – the lack of an English translation, for example, results in a work likely being passed over for international prizes, such as the Nobel. Cut off from the world’s dominant language renders even the most accomplished author a mere rumor or regional obscurity.

Compare America’s 3-5% showing with the situation in France, Germany or Italy, where Parks notes translations account for something on the order of 50% of all published fiction. Certain European newspapers divide their bestseller lists into two competing columns, foreign and domestic, so as to make sure foreign translations do not completely shut out local offerings. However, lest anyone mournfully curse American ignorance and isolationism, Parks has an essential distinction to make. The vast majority of these translated works (“all but a few,” as he puts it), are from novels originally written in English, meaning German, Polish, Dutch, Turkish and Greek novels (to remain firmly within the European mainland), are not being adequately represented outside their own cultures. Even more sobering is the fact that the vast majority of these translations are what we might describe as “genre” novels, or what I might in a less generous mood deride as “trash” – detective novels and mysteries, thrillers, romances, sci-fi, fantasy. Let’s call it pop lit. Or lite.

On the other hand, a research program by the University of Rochester lists a figure of nearly 350 works of translated fiction and poetry published in the United States during 2009, the vast majority of these being examples of “sophisticated” literature rather than potboilers or interminable romances. The serious stuff, the prize winners, from a variety of languages and cultures. As Parks points out, 350 works are “more than anyone could read in a single year,” and concludes with the question, aimed at the translation-swamped European mainland, “Does the unceasing translation of the second-rate matter?”

However, the question remains of what is and is not second-rate. Is the French novelist and Nobel Prize winner J. M. G. Le Clézio “second rate?” Probably not. Yet up until a few weeks ago, when I picked up a “new” book by Le Clézio at the nearby University Heights library branch, I doubt I could have picked the author out of a lineup. Bound in an attractive volume and bearing the proud logo “Winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature,” Desert caught my eye on the new book shelf – vaguely familiar name, I thought, and shouldn’t I jump at the chance to read more contemporary French fiction? Scanning the bookflap more closely once back home, I shamefully discovered that Le Clézio has been at this writing gig for some time, having published his first novel in 1963 (Le Proces-Verbal / The Interrogation), for which he won the Prix Renaudot. I also discovered that Mr. Le Clézio, a “new” author, has over 40 works of fiction and non-fiction to his name. I finally discovered that the current volume I was holding in my hand, the one that had been plucked off the “new books” shelf, available for the very first time in English translation, and cited as his “breakthrough” novel by various critics and the Nobel authorities, had been originally published in 1980, a mere thirty years ago.

I’m glad this translation of Désert exists at all. And at least Le Clézio is still actively working in his chosen field, a relatively youthful 70 rather than a long-ago-passed-on and recently-discovered master. But a thirty year lag between a work’s creation and that work first being appreciated by a supposedly sophisticated English-speaking audience is somewhat disturbing. Are we returning to those pre-electronic media days when the visual arts took decades to spread beyond modest confines, when vast metropolitan areas like New York City could remain blissfully ignorant of innovative changes taking place across the pond in the realm of modern art, in which epochal exhibitions like the 1913 Armory Show introducing shocked artists and public alike to works already fully disseminated among European audiences? I’ll admit there is something exhilarating in knowing artistic influences are still capable of moving slowly between cultures (one thinks of the ongoing discovery of ‘decadent’ artistic practices as totalitarian barriers tumble). Yet what are the full ramifications of an art form if novels remain in limbo for over a generation?

For example: what if music or film suffered the imposition of thirty-year time lags upon their full release? What if contemporary artists and performers had only this year stumbled across, say, the New York No Wave recordings of the late 1970s, the first 12” hip-hop singles from the Bronx, or the films of David Cronenberg and Peter Greenaway? What if we would all need to wait another half-decade before rumors began to trickle in of Jim Jarmusch, Michael Haneke, Laurie Anderson or Sonic Youth? How much poorer would both our popular and high culture scenes be!

So we are caught between the question of whether our culture produces and consumes enough translated works of art (answer: yes and no?) and questions of the quality of these existing translations. And here we enter the quagmire that led an old friend of mine to initiate a verbal throwdown with me concerning the moral acceptability of relying upon translation to convey the specific qualities of a given master stylist. It’s easy enough to scoff at the notion of needing to master Greek in order to settle down with a volume of Nikos Kazantzakis, he suggested. But what would you say to a well-meaning reader whose only encounter with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was in Cyrillic form? Is μυρτιλός “huckleberry” or “blueberry” or (yikes) “whortleberry”? How would you suggest translating the accidental transformation of The Duke of Bridgewater to “Bilgewater”? For crissakes, what about “hain’t”? Do we seek as literal a translation as possible, throwing caution to the wind by allowing for clunky phrasing and unintentional mouthfuls? Or do we search for the elusive literary flow, thereby creating a “new” text that nevertheless has some relation to literature as we know it? Or is there perhaps a third option – to reject an insistence upon an either/or approach of originalism or activism by fully submersing one’s self inside the work in question, not merely reading and understanding the novel but inhabiting the work, before recreating one’s experience of the novel through respect, creativity and a willingness to seek what is merely comparable rather than that which is identical.




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Key to issues of translation, then, are the dueling priorities of accuracy and creative inspiration. Perhaps our constant dissatisfaction with translated offerings stems from a translator’s fidelity to a single approach. Even a reader completely ignorant of the nuances of an original language can quickly identify the “authorless” flow of translated prose that utterly fails to convey the art of a spoken or written language – prose that moves the story forward and records dialogue, yet imparts little of the mystery, charm or poetry of the original (an immediate example that comes to mind are the translations of Japanese novelist Kōbō Abe, which I found to be stilted and archaic beyond belief). Add such examples of mannerism and innacuracy to the loss of original puns, wordplay and rhyme, and one is left with mere shells of literature. Even the most painstaking translation requires copious footnotes to convey that which has been lost and explanations of choices made.


And it is this requirement of supporting evidence, I find, that oddly enough means poetry very often works better in translation than prose. Not all the time, and certainly not always as poetry. Rather, one can more fully gauge the experience of the translated poem, and appreciate the choices made by the translator, on the relatively smaller canvas a poem presents. Because every word in a poem matters, and because there are generally far less words in even a lengthy poem than will be found in a novel, novella or short story, copious amounts of space can be devoted to exploring and explaining decisions, and limitations. In addition, poetry benefits from the option of side-by-side presentation, with the original poem in its original language on one side of the page and the translated work on the other. Footnotes or end notes can explore the full ramifications of words and language – their history, multiple meanings, literary echos, internal rhymes, puns, imperfections and the dreaded “untranslatable phrase”. Any attempt at providing such services to even the slimmest volume of prose would bloat the work beyond belief and disrupt the flow of narrative to such a degree as to turn any reading of the work into a sluggish crawl. Yet poems – so keenly tied to the eccentricities of language, so easily “lost in translation” – undeniably benefit from such careful finagling and finessing.

(I’m pleased to note at least a hint of kinship here with deceased Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, who achieved some degree of fame stateside for his sprawling and astonishing novels, but who viewed himself as a poet first and foremost, even going so far as to declare in an interview with Melanie Jösch that he viewed fiction writing to be the lesser art. His own translator, Natasha Wimmer, writes in her introduction to one of those sprawling novels, Los detectives salvajes / The Savage Detectives, “Bolaño’s short novels are tightly controlled models of precision. His two big books were intended to be something else: works encompassing rough edges, loose ends, lapses, faults”. One could never hope to encompass all that is present in the 600-pages of Los detectives salvajes in even the finest translation. Yet given their “rough edges” and “loose ends,” perhaps this matters less than being immersed in the dazzling display of the whole. Of Bolaño’s “tightly controlled models of precision” – his short prose and, we suspect, poetry – we demand a bit more detail and intricacy).


The 1980 bilingual edition of Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, published by the University of California Press, remains the standard bearer of this exhaustive approach towards poetry. Expertly translated by Anne Hyde Greet and featuring commentary and explication by both Greet and S.I. Lockerbie, this handsome volume collects all of Apollinaire’s “Poems of Love and War” composed between 1913 and 1916, and preserves the visual format and playfulness of his calligram offerings (which admittedly only make up a handful of the many examples of verse in the collection). The calligrams are especially worthy of such careful treatment, as these experiments in literal poetic form, in which words on the page assume pictorial or spatial layout commenting upon the poem itself, can seem mere games and showmanship if left to a hapless “straight” translation – the realm of Hallmark greeting cards rather than high modernism. With a literal display of the original text, and with a translation that painstakingly recreates the imagery, the reader is left with a heightened appreciation of Apollinaire’s craft. Add to this an extensive explanation of language choice and the rich backdrop of Apollinaire’s historical worldview, and one begins to note the dual meanings behind each curved line, one understands the careful decisions behind each bend and turn, and can marvel at the richness of symbolism and wordplay pulsing through even the briefest doodle (an example: Carte Postale / Postcard, a poem that assumes the literal outline and form of a handwritten postcard, even down to the fake postal code stamped along the poem’s edge.


Far more than simply a clever wink, Apollinaire here is likely referencing cubist collages, then in vogue with intellectuals of all stripes. Yet the poem itself is a patriotic declaration of sorts, mimicking the free correspondance available to troops during the ongoing Great War, even recycling a popular phrase by Philippe Pétain (On les aura / We’ll get them yet). Thus, within a steadfastly modern appropriation lies a decidedly non-modern patriotic verve).

Both calligrams and standard poems alike receive in-depth explanation, with single poems yielding up several pages of notes and often reference citations. This approach bears a price – over 160 pages of the book are devoted to explanatory notes. Thus, far from a slim volume of poetry, Calligrammes has become transformed into a solid treatise on a modern master. By insisting that a five-line poem deserves a least an entire page of notes, Greet and Lockerbie have offered at least a suggestion of what is lost in any translated work of prose or poetry. And it is partly the result of admitting what is lost that helps transmit the richness and complexity of the original work. Glimpsing the struggle behind the transformation and tasting the imperfection in the finished product has actually strengthened my understanding of Apollinaire’s technique – an understanding I’ve often been denied when reading nearly any other non-English poet.



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Although it represents a much different project, I can’t help but be reminded of Anne Carson’s landmark 2002 bilingual translation of the surviving fragments of Sappho, the ancient Greek poet. The similarities arrive through the acknowledgment by Carson of the gaps present in any translated work – aesthetically in the case of Apollinaire, quite literally in the case of Sappho. One of the many tragedies in world literature is the near-complete loss of all Sappho’s work. Her lyrics were written specifically for the lyre, as musical performances. Of course, we know nothing whatsoever of her melodies. Of the nine volumes of lyrics attributed to Sappho, only one poem has survived in complete form. The rest of our knowledge of Sappho is dependent upon fragments, many jumbled and butchered, countless others cut off, a few consisting merely of single lines or a dozen words.

This is the kind of situation that can leave classics majors weeping – the fact that we have one complete poem of Sappho, only eleven of forty plays by Aristophanes, a single line from Adrianus’ epic poem Alexandriad, while the complete seasons of American Idol will no doubt be stored for perpetuity in some form of digital preservation. Given the loss of Sappho’s output, one might be tempted to throw up their hands, mourn the inability to ever experience the works of a great 5th century mind, grumble about the preciousness of ancient wisdom. However, better folks than me, such as Anne Carson, have set about turning this loss into a tangible gain, by translating and presenting the surviving words of Sappho in all their fragmented glory. As Carson herself puts it in her introduction to If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, “There is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp.” The result is a nearly 400 page volume which one might suggest offers a wholly inaccurate impression of Sappho’s verse – spurts, glimpses, halved fragments, meaning and context hopelessly lost to time. In their mutilated form, Sappho’s poems seem undeniably modern, even postmodern, conforming to the hallmarks of extreme minimalism. They read like brutal haiku.

Yet these fragments are also undeniably lovely, deeply moving and haunting – a glimpse not only into what might have been but what also is. And because such a glimpse is perhaps all that will ever be available to any reader of translated poetry, we feel the loss – the missing words - less keenly. Some of these fragments, even the startlingly brief ones, are very nearly perfect, such as #39: the feet/ by spangled straps covered/ beautiful Lydian work. Or #134: I conversed with you in a dream/ Kyprogeneia. Or #47: Eros shook my/ mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees (the fragments look even more beautiful in Carson’s book, in which she awards each poem, no matter how brief, a wide blank gulf to lie upon, often moving gently across the page). Might this volume be a nearly perfect act of translation? Perhaps, if perfection is allowed to encompass the vast gulf any translator must acknowledge extends between the reader and the original language.



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If poetry can be agreed to be more amenable to translation than extended works of prose (if not for matters of style, than at least for matters of length), and if fragmented verse accepts limitations in a manner beneficial to the reader, then a translation and close examination of a single poem may represent the nearest non-speakers may come to appreciating the richness of a work written in a foreign tongue. A recent article by Cuban novelist and scholar Jose Manuel Prieto magisterially examines a poem by Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), his notorious 1933 Кремлёвский горец – dubbed “The Stalin Epigram,” “Epigram Against Stalin,” or simply “The Kremlin Highlander,” and referred to by at least one critic as “the sixteen lines of a death sentence”. This poem would, indeed, eventually cost Mandelstam his life, although the circuitous route leading to his eventual death inside a transit camp five years after composition represented a longer reprieve than others faced during similar purges.

Prieto’s piece deserves to be read in its entirety, which is currently possible via The New York Review of Books website– no summary of mine could possibly do it justice. Offering line-by-line delineation of the original Russian alongside Prieto’s rendering (which has been, of course, translated a second time by Esther Allen – we are entering a rather dizzying realm), the article explores the historical ramifications of the poem, the personal drama behind Mandelstam’s decision to compose an anti-Stalin poem (even going so far as to recite it in 1934 while visiting Boris Pasternak – an event explained as “an act of total insanity” and “patently suicidal”), and verbal / linguistic specificities. A casual read of Mandelstam’s “Epigram Against Stalin,” especially by a non-Russian, will not suggest anything particularly venomous, let alone suicidal or insane:

EPIGRAM AGAINST STALIN

We live without feeling the country beneath our feet,
our words are inaudible from ten steps away.
Any conversation, however brief,
gravitates, gratingly, toward the Kremlin’s mountain man.
His greasy fingers are thick as worms,
his words weighty hammers slamming their target.
His cockroach moustache seems to snicker,
and the shafts of his high-topped boots gleam.
Amid a rabble of scrawny-necked chieftains,
he toys with the favors of such homunculi.
One hisses, the other mewls, one groans, the other weeps;
he prowls thunderously among them, showering them with scorn.
Forging decree after decree, like horseshoes,
he pitches one to the belly, another to the forehead,
a third to the eyebrow, a fourth in the eye.
Every execution is a carnival
that fills his broad Ossetian chest with delight.

—Translated by Esther Allen from José Manuel Prieto’s Spanish version

The poem’s opening line – We live without feeling the country beneath our feet – might come across as merely a yearning for a greater engagement with immediate society, not a sense that “the life of the citizens has become [hazardous]” or a display of “the sharp danger everyone takes in with every breath”. Prieto is at pains to impress upon the reader this sense of urgency, however, noting that the Russian verb he has chosen to translate as “feeling” (chuyat’) has an original first meaning in Russian of “to sniff out or to scent” – in other words, echoes of the hunt, the hunted, wild beasts, predator, prey, pursuit. A people adrift in a nightmare world where even the ground they trod upon seems loaded with dread.

Prieto slowly makes his way through the poem in this manner, line by line, making connections a non-scholar might never suspect (a single example: Mandelstam’s use of the word gorets, or “mountain man,” to describe Stalin, a Georgian, and therefore “something absolutely alien, a descent into savagery” to a St. Petersburg intellectual and Tenishev School-educated Russian like Mandelstam – a dismissive insult of the highest order). By the time we reach poem’s end, our complicity in reading a death sentence in sixteen lines has been assured. The poem’s final line – Every execution is a carnival/ that fills his broad Ossetian chest with delight – lands with a chilling thud. Over the course of several dense pages of text, Jose Manuel Prieto has succeeded in transmitting an approximation of what he opened by declaring “perhaps the twentieth century’s most important political poem, written by one of its greatest poets against the man who may well be said to have been the cruelest of its tyrants”.



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But perhaps the finest extant example of the simultaneous joy and heartbreak of translation, the possible pitfalls and the fleeting triumphs, comes in the guise of Eliot Weinberger’s wonderful 1987 volume, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. This 53-page volume brings to the reader exactly what the title promises – nineteen attempts by nineteen different historical writers at translating Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei’s “Lu Zhai” (“Deer Park”), a four-line poem. The various translations span the years 1919 to 1979. Nearly all are in English, aside from one Spanish language translation and two in French. The differences between each version are startling, amusing and fascinating.


The poem itself is deceptively simple, a notable example of the way Chinese poetry can confuse the Western mind with a seemingly straightforward presentation of nature or landscape minus an outside voice. Lacking a narrator, the poem quite simply and plainly details images of an empty forest, voices heard from somewhere, a setting sun, greenery lit by sinking rays….

空 山 不 见 人

但 闻 人 语 响

返 景 入 深 林

复 照 青 苔 上

Weinberger offers a literal, artless translation of each isolated character, in order to suggest to the reader what the following translators will be drawing from in their efforts (for example, Empty - mountain(s) / hill(s) - (negative) - to see - person / people). Linguistic difficulties abound in turning this Chinese poem into a Western artifact. Western “meter” in Chinese poetry is impossible to achieve, and yet translators push on. The numbers of characters per line, tonal arrangement – such features matter far more to Chinese poetry than mere rhymes, and neither are capable of being successfully translated. Of course, multiple meanings also abound, as Weinberger points out: “a single character may be noun, verb and adjective”. Such meanings may even be contradictory. Add to this the fact that tense is absent in Chinese verbs. Nouns lack numbers. The first-person singular is rare (although seemingly impossible to avoid in English).

A quick browse of the preceding list of difficulties in Chinese-to-English translation makes the task seem herculean, if not quixotic. And yet we see countless examples of well-meaning scholars and poets trying their hand at this most-translated of Chinese poets, and in so many cases attempting to impose their will on the poem and attempt to “improve” the document. Is this an artistic drive defeating respect for an original voice, or mere Western arrogance, an inability to leave well enough alone, a cultural assumption that anything “simple” must necessarily be “simple minded”. We observe translators turning Wang Wei’s ambiguity into their own sort of confusion. We see scholars assuming the poet “meant” to use a more complex term than the original character suggests – as if a poet does not choose the exact and most perfect word possible (again, we may be teetering on the precipice of an East-West divide).


Witter Bynner, for example, American poet and a major translator of Chinese verse during the 1920s, writes “there seems to be” and “yet I think I hear” in his translation, even though Wang Wei’s original poem makes it quite clear that there is not and that the speaker does indeed hear. Why add ambiguity where none existed? Why distrust the poet’s words? (And, one might add upon reading other versions, why reverse couplets or break lines into extra stanzas – for mere stylistic diversity?) Kenneth Rexroth’s 1970 version is touted by Weinberger as the first true “poem” in the collection, although he suggests the poem remains something “Wang might have written had he been born a 20th century American”:

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 rays of the sun

Slip through the dark forest,

And gleam again on the shadowy moss.

Some attempts seek concision, others add needless extra words, bulk up descriptions, fool around with tense. G. W. Robinson adds additional spectators to Wang Wei’s solitary vista, creating “we hear” out of whole cloth, a plurality indicated nowhere in the original version, leading Weinberger to wickedly quip, “he makes it a group, as though it were a family outing”.

The strongest of the nineteen offerings on display are those by Octavio Paz and Gary Snyder, and one cannot help but note that these two individuals, along with Rexroth, are all poets first, scholars and translators second, if at all. Snyder’s 1978 version is especially wonderful, perhaps a reflection of the poet’s own love for and familiarity with the forest. This most Zen of the original Beat poets, after all, has spent much more time in the East and among the trees than he has in academia, boasts a dharma name (Chofu, “Listen to the Wind”), and has received the Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Grand Prize. No passive slummer in Eastern thought, it is Snyder’s immersion in and respect for non-Western worldviews that undoubtedly help make his attempt at Wang Wei the most satisfactory. “Every word of Wang has been translated,” Weinberger praises, “and nothing added, yet the translation exists as an American poem”:

Empty mountains:
no one to be seen.
Yet – hear –
human sounds and echoes.
Returning sunlight
enters the dark woods;
Again shining
on the green moss, above.

The few wonderful touches that Snyder adds firmly imprint the poem with his own individuality – that is to say, this is undoubtedly Snyder’s poem – yet his additions add nothing that were not at least implictly already in place. Weinberger draws attention to Snyder’s method of avoiding “I hear” or “we hear,” phrases that are nowhere in the original text yet difficult to avoid in English. Snyder’s solution? “Yet – hear - / human sounds and echoes”, a masterful touch that places the moment firmly in the here and now, yet sidesteps the pitfall of naming indivual narrative voices. Snyder likewise acknowledges the dual meanings of many Chinese characters by translating a single character as two possible variations – “human sounds and echoes,” for example, the first version to select both “sounds” and “echoes” rather than choosing one. Once Snyder does so, we cannot help but ask, “Well, why not?”

Snyder’s poem is placed last, and by the time the reader reaches this point, one cannot help but marvel at the sheer variation of approaches attempted on this humble four-line poem. Even more surprising, however, are the number of versions which fail utterly as either poems or as a representation of Wang Wei’s artistry. Or both. Weinberger’s commentary throughout the book is informed, erudite, witty and at times delightfully nasty (and is there anything quite so gleefully bloodthirsty as somebody tearing somebody else’s poem to shreds?), never more so than in a postscript alluding to a letter from a furious professor, charging Weinberger with “crimes against Chinese poetry” due to his “curious neglect” of a 1955 translation of “Deer Park” by one Prof. Peter A. Boodberg. This version is ghastly, outrageous, and worth reprinting in its entirety, if only to marvel at the result:

The empty mountain: to see no men,
Barely earminded of men talking – countertones,
And antistrophic lights-and-shadows incoming deeper the
deep-treed grove
Once more to glowlight the blue-green mosses – going up
(The empty mountain…)

I’m tempted to insert “barely earminded” and “antistrophic lights-and-shadows” into my working vocabulary. “To me,” Weinberger simply notes, “this sounds like Gerard Manley Hopkins on LSD”.

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So, then – a book-length exploration of attempts at translating a twelve-hundred year old four-line poem. To me, it seems as fine an example as any of the beautiful and at times fruitless struggle to help others grasp the beauty and meaning of words uttered by wise elders in a tongue not one’s own.