Paz Octavio - Nineteen ways of looking at Wang Wei: (with more ways)

also by Eliot Weinberger

FROM NEW DIRECTIONS

An Elemental Thing

The Ghosts of Birds

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Two American Scenes (with Lydia Davis)

What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles

Works on Paper

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Poetry is that which is worth translating.

For example, this four-line poem, 1200 years old: a mountain, a forest, the setting sun illuminating a patch of moss. It is a scrap of literary Chinese, no longer even pronounced as its writer would have spoken it. It is a thing, forever itself, inseparable from its language.

And yet something about it has caused it to lead a nomadic life: insinuating itself in the minds of readers, demanding understanding but always on the readers own terms provoking thought, sometimes compelling writing in other languages. Great poetry lives in a state of perpetual transformation, perpetual translation: the poem dies when it has no place to go.

The transformations that take shape in print and not in the minds of readers that take the formal name of translation, become their own beings, set out on their own wanderings. Some live long and some dont. What kind of creatures are they? What happens when a poem, once Chinese and still Chinese, becomes a piece of English, Spanish, French poetry?

The poem is by Wang Wei (c. 700761), known in his lifetime as a wealthy Buddhist painter and calligrapher, and to later generations as a master poet in an age of masters, the Tang Dynasty. The quatrain is from a series of twenty poems on various sights near the Wang (no relation) River. The poems were written as part of a massive horizontal landscape scroll, a genre he invented. The painting was copied (translated) for centuries. The original is lost, and the earliest surviving copy comes from the 17th century: Wangs landscape after 900 years of transformation.

In classical Chinese, each character (ideogram) represents a word of a single syllable. Few of the characters are, as is commonly thought, entirely representational. But some of the basic vocabulary is indeed pictographic, and with those few hundred characters one can play the game of pretending to read Chinese.

Reading the poem left to right, top to bottom, the second character in line 1 is apparently a mountain; the last character in the same line a person both are stylizations that evolved from more literal representations. Character 4 in line 1 was a favorite of Ezra Pounds: what he interpreted as an eye on legs; that is, the eye in motion, to see. Character 5 in line 3 is two trees, forest. Spatial relationships are concretely portrayed in character 3 of line 3, to enter, and character 5 of line 4, above or on (top of).

More typical of Chinese is character 2 of line 4, to shine, which contains an image of the sun in the upper left and of fire at the bottom, as well as a purely phonetic element key to the words pronunciation in the upper right. Most of the other characters have no pictorial content useful for decipherment.