Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

Facing SnowEnough new ghosts to mourn any war.And a lone old grief-sung man. Clouds atTwilight’s ragged edge foundering, windBuffets a dance of headlong snow. A ladleLies beside this jar drained of emeraldWine. The stove’s flame-red mirage lingers.News comes from nowhere. I sit here,Spirit-wounded, tracing words onto air. (98)Hinton’s enjambment is no less aggressive thanRexroth’s but seems to have little rhyme or reason. Hisfirst break, after “Clouds at,” followed by the syntacticallyconvoluted “Twilight’s ragged edge foundering,” predisposesus to misread the enjambed word “wind” as averb rather than the noun it is. But once we have realizedour mistake and reread the line, the awkwardness andinconsistency of the comma leaves us pausing in wonderat his “style-sheet.” Why not a period as with all theother sentences? And why bump “A ladle” back to thefourth line instead of leaving it where it belongs? Thisviolates the structural symmetry of the couplets.Although it does give him a slanted end-rhyme with“emerald” in the next stanza, stacking four weak endrhymesin succession (“at,” “wind,” “ladle,” and “emerald”)draws far more attention to the effort than to theeuphony. Ironically, if it was, in fact, rhyme Hinton wasafter, he would have been better off had he foregoneenjambment altogether, for this alone would have yieldedhim a nice half rhyme (“man” and “wine”) to link thefirst and third couplets and a far more satisfying fullrhyme (“nowhere” and “air”) for his closing couplet thanthe half rhyme he gets from bumping “I sit here” up tothe end of the seventh line.But Hinton’s version does not stand up well againstRexroth’s even at the level of content, for his libertieswith the sense and syntax of his source text tend toobscure rather than illuminate the poem. Perhaps inanticipation of this complaint, Weinberger argues that“Hinton has attempted to recreate some of the density ofclassical Chinese, without resorting, as some others havedone, to a pidgin English”; this as a challenge to the“reigning style — forged by Rexroth, Snyder, and[Burton] Watson — which assumes that the Chinesedirect apprehension of the real world must be presentedin direct, conversational speech” (xxv). Although theChinese poems are not conversational, Hinton’s “density”bears little resemblance to that of his Chinese sourcesand, despite Weinberger’s reassurances to the contrary,some of the translator’s versions do verge at times on asort of elevated pidgin, as we can see from the closingcouplet of his translation of this Li Po poem:Wandering Ch’ing-ling Stream in Nan-yangI hoard the sky a setting sun leavesand love this cold stream’s clarity:western light follows water away,rippled current a wanderer’s heart.I sing, watch cloud and moon, emptysong soon long wind through pine. (88)To be sure, classical Chinese poetry has an enviableconcision, in part because the Chinese language has nocase, number, or gender, but also because the classicalpoets often dispensed with pronouns, prepositions, andother function words required in modern English.Nonetheless, most of the T’ang poems translated byHinton, even those by Tu Fu, who has a reputation fordensity, are surprisingly easy to understand because ofthe simplicity of the poetic lexicon and the structuralsymmetry of their forms. Their density is experiencednot as a semantic or syntactical complexity that resistsinterpretation but as a gradual thickening of significanceas relatively simple lines open up to complementaryreadings or enlarge the implications of what came before.But rather than take this on faith, let us look at theChinese source for the Tu Fu poem that Hinton andRexroth translated via a word-for-word translation. Ishould point out, however, that many Chinese words canserve equally well as nouns, verbs, or other parts ofspeech, depending on their relationship to other words inthe sentence, and, in the absence of inflection and manyfunction words essential in English, have a grammaticalmobility that is impossible to convey in English, whichtends to fix words into specific grammatical categories.Fortunately, the strict rules of the lü-shih form, whichrequire every line of the poem to be end-stopped, with acaesura or grammatical break after the second character,and each pair of lines in every couplet to be syntacticallyparallel and semantically antithetical, make the grammaticalrelationships fairly obvious even when the lines areinverted. Nonetheless, a few of the phrases, such as thefirst, are open to more than one reading, wherein liessome of the poem’s semantic complexity. In such cases, ITranslation Review 47