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order and caesura, the frequency of which is simply
too high to be ignored. The mode of word order could
be illustrated by Snyder’s translation of two lines in
the “Autumn Evening” (The Gary Snyder Reader 541)
(“Ch’iu hsi,” Chüan T’ang Shih 524, chüan 6602) by
Tu Mu (803–852). A verbatim translation of these two
lines is provided here:
t’ien chieh yeh sê liang ju shuei
Heaven staircase night color cool like water
tsu k’an ch’ien niu chih nü hsing
Sit watch Herd Boy Weaving Maid stars
Here is Snyder’s rendering (The Gary Snyder Reader
541):
On the stairs of heaven night’s color
Cool as water;
She sits watching the Herd-boy,
the Weaving-girl, stars.
Other than the phrase “the stairs of heaven,”
which is arranged according to English grammar,
these four lines follow exactly the word order of the
Chinese original. For example, yeh sê (night color) is
rendered as “night’s color,” which is different from
the English usage of “the color of night”; the original
phrase yeh sê actually connotes “evening scene.”
Therefore, Snyder’s “night’s color” is a distortion as
well as an etymological restoration. Another imitation
of the Chinese word order is the phrase “the Herdboy,
/ the Weaving-girl, stars.” Here the word “stars”
is placed at the end of the poem like the original and
functions as an apposition. This word order stores a
surprise for an English reader, for not until reading the
very last word, “stars,” would she realize that she is
visualizing two stars (Aquila and Vega) in the sky
instead of two persons, the Herd-boy and the
Weaving-girl. The rendering of the last line can be
extolled as both ingenious and faithful.
In Snyder’s “Long Bitter Song,” there are lines
that follow exactly the word order of the original. For
example, Shu-chiang-shuei-pi-shu-shan-ch’ing is
rendered verbatim by Snyder into “Shu river waters
blue / Shu mountains green” (The Gary Snyder
Reader 551). These two lines totally subvert English
grammatical rules: the verb to be, preposition, and
punctuation are all omitted, for the English sentence
should read something like: “The river waters in Shu
are blue / [while] the mountains in Shu are green.”
Fortunately, Snyder did not render the entire poem
this way; otherwise it would be a disaster. Another
such line is hsi-tien-ying-fei-szû-ch’iao-jan, which
Snyder quite faithfully reproduced in its word order:
“Evening, palace, glow-worm flight / his thoughts
were soundless” (The Gary Snyder Reader 552). The
only deviation in meaning is the rendering of the
compound hsi-tien (literally “dusk palace hall”),
which envisions a palace hall in the evening twilight;
Snyder’s “evening” becomes a general time word, not
exclusively attached to the image of the palace hall.
However, even though Snyder’s rendering of these
two lines closely follows the Chinese word order, they
are grammatically sound because “Evening, palace,
glow-worm flight” can be seen as dangling words. I
think these two examples evidence Snyder’s attempt
to experiment with how far he can stretch the English
poetic language by employing Chinese syntactic
modes. The latter case is a success, for “his thoughts
are soundless” is an ingenious metaphor, a
synesthesia, not spelled out in the original, and,
together with this metaphor, the imagery of “Evening,
palace, glow-worm flight” can generate a mysterious
ambience and a sense of solitude that can be a
foreground for the emperor’s mental state.
In these 17 renderings, Snyder overtly adopts the
caesura scheme of Chinese classical poetry. In the
preface to his “Long Bitter Song,” he explains this
scheme: “This poem is in the seven-character line,
which gives it (in Chinese) the sort of rhythm: tum
tum / tum tum: tum tum tum. I have tried to keep to
this beat as far as possible in my translation” (The
Gary Snyder Reader 547). Snyder is quite right — this
scheme in Chinese classical poetry, with four
characters in front of the caesura and three characters
after it (or two characters in front and three after if it
is a five-character verse), actually divides the line into
two metrical parts as well as two semantic units. He
mainly employs two formal devices in English to
denote the caesura: the first is a lineation, and the
second is an additional typographical space. In “Long
Bitter Song,” Snyder employs the lineation scheme
throughout the poem to denote the 4/3 character
caesura in the Chinese original. A juxtaposition of
four lines from Snyder’s “Long Bitter Song” and a
verbatim translation of their Chinese original will
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