The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (5 page)

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

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:

and the second from James Wright:

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:

and

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, which 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.

Now what about “the urgent whir”? Isn't it mistranslating to add this image, using something that is simply an idiom? I don't think so. Idioms such as this add an idiosyncratic beauty to language, like the pillow talk of Japanese poetics or the kennings of Old English. A translation that rendered Beowulf's “whale path” as “the sea” would be a very dull translation indeed. The Chinese idiom suggests an image that is inherent in the language, much as “foot of
the mountain” bears a comparison, long forgotten, of the mountain to a human body.

This idiom allowed me entry to the poem behind the poem, to a sound that was also an action. I wanted to bring alive the complex image of the cricket wings shuttling like a cranky loom or lost in a whirring blur like a spinning wheel, so I had to analyze the phrase for what activated that metaphor: intermittency, quick action, noise. I imagined the blur of cricket wings rubbing themselves into song, and I imagined that song as both continuous and intermittent, both an act and a sound. The word “whir” suggested both the action of spinning—the insect's blur of wings—and the sound of that action:
whir.
I wanted a line that was musical throughout, wanted readers to sense the stuttering trochaic rhythm of a cricket's call (crick-et, crick-et) when they hear the line's rhyming, emphatic beat: “The urgent whir of crickets quickens.” I also liked the double meaning of “quickens,” which can make the line mean the cricket song comes alive, as if out of silence. This goes beyond the question of whether to be true to the letter or the sense; it's a question of being true to the spirit of the line, which is both image and song. Of course, in doing so I sacrificed other elements. For example, the third character,
, means “cry” but is constructed of the characters for “mouth”
and “bird”
, suggesting bird song. Certainly by emphasizing the weaving element with “whir” I sacrificed the sense of singing. Furthermore, I had to make a choice between two different readings of the line. The fourth character,
, means either “already” or “stop,” suggesting in context either that the cricket song pauses and then speeds up urgently, or that the cricket cry is already urgent. In this interpretive translation, I can't say that I truly got this line of Wang Wei's into English, but I do believe that I brought an analogous English poem to life—one closer to Wang Wei's imagination and to the imagination inherent in the Chinese language rather than one merely translated as “the cricket's sound is already hurried.”