Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated by Eliot Weinberger, Octavio Paz ISBN: 0-918825-14-8 Publisher: Moyer Bell Ltd Pub. Date: June, 1987 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.8 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Amazing wee book
Comment: I checked the book out of the local library a couple of weeks ago and have not stopped reading it since. The library volume is due back, so I just purchased it. My only complaint is that the last poem is Gary Synder's from 1978. I would like to see Mr Weinberger reissue the volume with latter translations such as Arthur Sze or Sam Hamill. And if any one is looking for a most needed project, a translation of all of Wang Wei's Wang River poems.
Rating: 5
Summary: Nothing is more difficult than simplicity
Comment: Poetry, said Robert Frost, is what gets lost in translation.
Poetry, says Eliot Weinberger in the introduction to this small volume, is that which is worth translating.
Both, of course, are right. That is what I like about poetry. It tolerates different points of view, a multitude of interpretations. A poem, or its translation, is never 'right', it is always the expression of an individual reader's experience at a certain point in his or her life: "As no individual reader remains the same, each reading becomes a different - not just another - reading. The same poem cannot be read twice."
"Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated" contains a simple four-line poem, over 1200 years old, written by Wang Wei (c. 700-761 AD), a man of Buddhist belief, known as a painter and calligrapher in his time. The book gives the original text in Chinese characters, a transliteration in the pinyin system, a character-by-character translation, 13 translations in English (written between 1919 and 1978), 2 translations in French, and one particularly beautiful translation in Spanish by Octavio Paz (1914-1998), the Mexican poet who received the 1990 Nobel Prize for literature. Paz has also added a six-page essay on his translation of the poem.
Wang Wei's poems are fascinating in their apparent simplicity, their precision of observation, and their philosophical depth. The poem in question here is no exception. I would translate it as:
Empty mountains
I see no one
but I hear echoes
of someone's words
evening sunlight
shines into the deep forest
and is reflected
on the green mosses above
Compared to the translations of Burton Watson (1971), Octavio Paz (1974), and Gary Snyder (1978), this version has a number of flaws. My most flagrant sin is the use of a poetic first person, the "I", while the original poem merely implies an observer. The translation reflects what I found most intriguing in the original text. First of all, the movement of light and sound, in particular the reflection of light that mirrors the echo of sound earlier in the poem. Secondly, the conspicuous last word of the poem: "shang"; in Chinese it is a simple three-stroke character that today means 'above' (it is the same "shang" as in Shanghai ' the city's name means literally 'above the sea').
This is a very simple poem. The simplicity is deceptive, though. What looks very natural, still wants to make a point. The point is that looking is just one thing, but being open to echoes and reflections is what really yields new and unexpected experiences. Wang Wei applies the "mirror" metaphor in a new way in his poem. This metaphor was very popular in Daoist and Buddhist literature, and says roughly that the mind of a wise person should be like a mirror, simply reflective and untainted by emotion. Wang Wei seems to have this metaphor in mind when he mentions echoes and reflections in his poem. A Buddhist or a Daoist, for that matter, would also recognize the principle of "Wu Wei" (non-action) here: nothing can be forced or kept, everything simply "falls" to you and will be lost again. In this sense, a person cannot "see" (as in the activity of seeing); a person can only be "struck" by the visible (as in being illuminated - the "satori" of Zen Buddhism).
"Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei" is a light, unscholarly book - and I mean this as a compliment. It is a pure pleasure to read the different translations together with Weinberger's lucid comments. Weinberger has a wonderful sense of humor to accompany his analytical mind; and he is allergic to pomposity. He enjoys mocking the pompous. This is what he has to say about one translator's misguided efforts to rhyme Wang Wei's poem: "line 2 ... adds 'cross' for the rhyme scheme he [the translator] has imposed on himself. (Not much rhymes with 'moss'; it's something of an albatross. But he might have attempted an Elizabethan pastoral 'echoing voices toss' or perhaps a half-Augustan, half-Dada 'echoing voices sauce')."
In the translation of Chinese poetry, as in everything, Weinberger notes, nothing is more difficult than simplicity.
Simplicity is particularly difficult for certain academics, it seems. A professor, who had read Weinberger's comments on Wang Wei's poem in a magazine, furiously complained about the "crimes against Chinese poetry" Weinberger had allegedly committed by neglecting "Boodberg's cedule." Weinberger later discovered that this cryptic reference was to a series of essays privately published by professor Peter A. Boodberg in 1954 and 1955 entitled "Cedules from a Berkeley Workshop in Asiatic Philosophy" ('cedule' is an obscure word for 'scroll, writing, schedule'). "Boodberg ends his 'cedule' with his own version of the poem, which he calls 'a still inadequate, yet philologically correct, rendition ... (with due attention to grapho-syntactic overtones and enjambment)':
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...)
To me this sounds like Gerard Manly Hopkins on L S D, and I am grateful to the furious professor for sending me in search of this, the strangest of the many Weis."
Rating: 5
Summary: An Amazing Look At the Relative Human Mind
Comment: The multiple translations of Wang Wei's poem are a door into the incredible spectrum of human thinking. This small delicate poem and its translations show how culture, translation and individual thinking change a work of art. I found myself writing a "translation" of the poem to discover yet another prismatic dimension of this jewel of a poem.
 |
Title: Poems of the Masters : China's Classic Anthology of T'ang and Sung Dynasty Verse by Red Pine, Wang Wei, Li Bai, Tu Fu, Wang Po, Ou-yang Hsiu, Su Shi ISBN: 1556591950 Publisher: Copper Canyon Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
 |
Title: The Late Poems of Meng Chiao by Meng Chiao, David Hinton ISBN: 0691012369 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 23 December, 1996 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
 |
Title: The Heart of Chinese Poetry by GREG WHINCUP ISBN: 038523967X Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 16 September, 1987 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
 |
Title: Five T'ang Poets (Field Translation Series) by David Young, Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Li Ho, Li Shang-Yin ISBN: 093244055X Publisher: Oberlin College Press Pub. Date: March, 1990 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
 |
Title: Crossing the Yellow River : Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese (New American Translations: 13) by Sam Hamill, W. S. Merwin ISBN: 1880238985 Publisher: Boa Editions, Ltd. Pub. Date: 01 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
