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show how closely Snyder follows the Chinese caesura
scheme.
Snyder’s translation:
The Yang family had a girl
just come grown;
Reared deep in the inner-apartments,
men didn’t know of her.
(The Gary Snyder Reader 549)
Verbatim translation:
Yang chia yu nü // ch’u chang ch’êng
Yang family has daughter // just grow up
yang tsai shên kuei // jên wei shih
rear in deep women’s quarter // people not get know
In other renderings, Snyder shows the caesura
with an additional typographical space. For example,
“Ch’un wang” (Chüan T’ang Shih 224, chüan 2402)
by Tu Fu (712–770) is a five-character poem in which
the caesura is situated right after the second character;
in “Spring View” (The Gary Snyder Reader 542),
Snyder employs the scheme of typographical space,
following the pattern of “two characters // three
characters” by placing an additional typographical
space between the two units.
Verbatim translation:
kuo p’o // shan ho tsai
nation broken // mountain river remain
ch’êng ch’un // ts’a mu shên
city spring // grass woods deep
Snyder’s translation:
This nation is ruined, but mountains and rivers remain.
This spring the city is deep in weeds and brush.
While one is reading Snyder’s translation, the
breaking of the line or the additional typographical
space will prolong the pause and as a result create a
strong sense of rhythm. As free verse has been the
major English poetic form since the beginning of
twentieth century, many English and American poets
also attempted experiments, notably e. e. cummings
and William Carlos Williams, among others, but there
has never been one who adopts the Chinese metrical
patterns so thoroughly as Snyder does.
When Snyder translated the “Cold Mountain
Poems,” he already retained the Chinese linguistic /
poetic mode of repeated words. These 17 renderings
of T’ang poetry also make such an attempt, but with
more moderation. In the following couplet of “Long
Bitter Song,” Snyder presents the repeated words
ch’ih ch’ih (literally “slow slow”) while changing
kêng kêng (literally “bright bright”).
Verbatim translation:
ch’ih ch’ih chung ku ch’u yeh ch’ang
slow slow bell drum beginning night
long
kêng kêng hsing ho yü shu
t’ien
bright bright star river about
breaking day
(the Milky Way)
Snyder’s translation:
Slow, slow, the night bell
begins the long night,
Glimmering, fading, the Milky Way,
and day about to dawn. (The Gary 532)
If Snyder reproduces the repeated-words pattern
while translating kêng kêng — the phrase
“glimmering, glimmering” being juxtaposed with
“glow, glow” in the same syntactical position — the
English couplet would sound rigid and awkward.
Here, Snyder replaces one “glimmering” with
“fading”; this alteration adds to the dynamism and
logicality of the imagery, for at dawn the stars in the
Milky Way always blink and fade. From this example,
we learn that Snyder sometimes refrains from going
too far in his experiments, and the effect of dynamism
and the logicality of English poetic language often act
as censor in his mind.
In these 17 T’ang poems, Snyder, following the
Chinese syntax, often omits the subject, verb, and
article. However, he already adopted these Chinese
grammatical modes in the “Cold Mountain Poems”
and in his own poetry. What is worth noticing is one
among the seventeen poems that presents an ingenious
usage of punctuation and typographical space: the
quatrain “River Snow”(Snyder, The Gary 543)
(“Chiang-hsüeh”) (Chüan T’ang Shih 352, chüan
3948) by Liu Tsung-Yüan (773–819). Snyder’s
rendering of the last two lines reads:
A single boat — coat — hat — an old man!
Alone fishing chill river snow.
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