My First Translated Poem

Deer Grove

by Wang Wei

Unpeopled, unseen mountain

Echoing with distant voices, pierced

By us returning to its depths,

Casting our refulgent selves

In spots on blue-green lichen.

* * * * *

Monday's SLU Speaker Series event brought poet and translator Aditi Machado to speak about the art of translation. She began her talk with a fifteen-minute exercise. The twenty or so ERDCC prisoners in attendance were given a 1,250-year-old poem by the Buddhist painter and calligrapher Wang Wei, then encouraged to try our hand at translating it. (We also got a crib, as, unsurprisingly, there were no readers of classical Chinese among us.) What's interesting is that even Wang Wei's original, painted on a massive horizontal scroll, has been lost to time. The earliest copy of his poem that still exists is from the seventeenth-century, itself no doubt changed many times over those 900 years. The poem's still alluring to many translators, who keep reinterpreting it in fresh ways. I understood its voice as belonging to the collective of rays of a setting sun. Others at the event adopted the perspective of the vacant mountain. One guy who'd been watching too much History Channel interpreted it as an account of alien abduction. There was much to discuss.

My relationship with translation is fraught and complex and very, very Western. I have a craving for certainty, for fidelity, for empirical, inarguable, capital-T Truth. I want the original. I want to download Wang's intentions and thoughts into my head, uncompressed and ultra high-res. As such, I want the impossible. People misunderstand and reinterpret everything, even in their own language, even in their own time. So how can anyone read a translation and say that they've experienced a particular work? No language equates to another on a one-to-one basis. There can be no "true" translation of a work, only approximations, interpretations, which are filtered through other minds before getting scrambled and remixed in our own.

The very popular Penguin Classics translations of books are so often read because they're uncontroversial, not necessarily good. The average reader doesn't become aware of the translator's role, of the tremendous difference he or she makes in a given text, until sampling multiple translations of the same title. I've read three different versions of Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (including Penguin's), but it was the gorgeous one by Catherine Liu that brought me genuine delight. Reading a work of literature in translation is like looking at a painting through someone else's prescription eyeglasses — maybe it'll speak to you, maybe it won't.

Regardless, I brought my translation of Wang back from the event to rework it a little more. This version won't win any awards, but I felt that my experience creating it, and what I learned from doing so, was worth sharing.