Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

will represent the first reading in the literal translationand present the complementary reading in my discussion:Tui hsüeh ??chan k’u tuo hsin kuei ? ? ? ?ch’ou yin tu lau weng ? ? ? ? ?luan yün ti po mu ? ? ? ? ?chi hsüeh wu hui feng ? ? ? ? ?p’iao qi tsun wu lü ? ? ? ? ?lu ts’un huo ssu hung ? ? ? ? ?shu chou hsiao-hsi tuan ? ? ? ? ?ch’ou tso cheng shu k’ung ? ? ? ? ?Facing SnowBattle cries, many new ghosts;[In] sorrow chants [poetry], [a] lone old man.Chaotic clouds founder [in the] thinning twilight;Urgent snow dances [in the] swirling wind.[The] ladle [lies] discarded, [the] wine-jar withoutgreen;[The] brazier remains, [but the] fire [only] seemsred.[From] many provinces, news [is] cut off;[In his] sorrowful seat, just writing [in the] air.The poem opens as if in the middle of a battle, butby the end of the line, it is clear that the opening phraseforms the predicate of an inverted sentence, and thus thecries are not those of the combatants but their ghostshaunting the battlefields. Adjusting the translationaccording, we can see that the two lines of the coupletnot only are syntactically parallel but also form a nearlyperfect row of binary oppositions.[Over] battle-[fields] cry many new ghosts;[In] sorrow recites [poetry, a] lone old man.But here we can also see that we need not abandonour initial impression of the opening phrase, forboth the cries of the combatants and those of theghosts are alive in the memory or imagination of thesolitary man chanting poetry in the room that, onlynow, we realize is the real setting of “Facing Snow.”The next couplet follows a similar pattern, for it toobegins with a view of the world outside, followed bya line that abruptly constricts our visual perspectiveeven as it enlarges our understanding of what we haveseen. But here the “thickening of significance” issymbolic, for as Stephen Owen has pointed out, thecouplet’s opening phrases can be read in politicalterms: i.e., “clouds of rebellion” and “snow of war’salarums.” 31 The third couplet, which returns us to thetableau vivant of the “lone old man,” also enlargesour understanding of the situation by focusing ourattention, much as Rexroth’s version did, to the signsand symbols of the man’s insolvent state. The closingcouplet gives us our final view of the conditions outside,returning us to the constricted world of the “loneold man,” who is now “writing [in the] air.” Thisphrase requires a gloss, for it is a literary allusionmeaning “idly writing in air” but it also contains apun. The character “to write” (shu) was commonlyused in the T’ang dynasty as a word for “mail,” andthe character meaning “air” (k’ung) also means“empty,” which suggests that what the old man iswriting in the air are the letters he is unable to writebecause of the disruptions in communication mentionedin the previous line. This complementary reading(“now letters [are] empty”) brings the line intoconformity with both the rules of the lü-shih form andTu Fu scholarship, which has long assigned this poemto the late autumn or early winter of 756, when thepoet was trapped in the capital city of Ch’ang-an afterit had fallen in the An Lu-shan Rebellion and wasunderstandably anxious to hear word of the imperialcourt, which had fled into exile, and to write to hisfamily, which was then living in an adjoiningprovince. Something like “tracing empty letters in theair” would suggest this interpretive possibility.Returning to Hinton’s version of this poem, we cansee that, once again, Weinberger’s “reliable scholar” haschosen to disregard the rhetorical development of hissource by commenting on the significance of the scenebefore he has fully presented it. His rendering of the firstcouplet completely dismantles the battlefield setting andreduces the vivid cries of the “new ghosts” to a merepotential for mourning and the recitations of “the griefsungman” to a nominal modifier that leaves him with(literally) nothing to do even as it leaves us needlesslyconfused about what was “sung” and who was doing thesinging. His rendering of the next couplet scrambles thewords so that the metaphoric significance of the panoramais all but lost. While “A Ladle/ Lies besides this jardrained of emerald/ Wine” is nicely melodic, it has asumptuousness that seems far removed from the anxiousimpoverishment conveyed by his source. The referenceto “green” may be to an exotic wine, but it is far more48 Translation Review