Sydney Roslin

Reading in Forms: Poetry

Wang Wei Assignment

1. I think that there was an understanding as time went on that the original poem was

not about any person in particular, but about the surrounding world. In that sense,

the presence of first person pronouns are more common in earlier translations such

as Fletcher’s “But whence is the echo of voices I hear?” (1919), Bynner and Kang-

Hu’s “And yet I think I hear a voice” (1929), Jenyns’ “But I hear the echo of voices.”

(1944), and Chen and Bullock’s “I meet no one” (1960). In contrast, later

translations tend to rely much more on the passive voice, such as Watson’s “Empty

hills, no one in sight,/only the sound of someone talking;” (1971) or Yip’s “no man is

seen,/But voices of men are heard.” (1972). On the other hand, the earlier poems all

try to observe a four line structure, while some of the modern translations try to

play with form in this way. The first translation in the book that is not a four line

poem is Chen’s and Bullock’s 1960 translation, and while many of the poems after

than observe the four line structure, Rexroth’s 1970 translation, McNaughton’s 1974

translation, and Snyder’s 1978 translation decide to break that form. The later

translations that do break form seem to do it to preserve a poetic intent, such as

McNaughton’s attempt to represent something pictorially, like the original poem did

on its landscape scroll, or play with the simplicity of the lines and the surrounding

world, like in Chen and Bullock’s splitting up of the lines to make the descriptions

seem shorter and simpler.

 2. I think the largest hurdle is the passivity of the poem. It has to feel personal while

describing the larger world around the author. I agree with the later translations

that using the first person is not the way to do this, since it is not something that

often shows up in Chinese poetry, but if the poem is merely descriptive without any

sense of being, it doesn’t fit with Wang Wei’s Buddhist influences. There is also the

issue of simplicity in the text, where a translator might be tempted to make the

words more poetic or complex to fit American poetry, but it seems that the original

poem itself is supposed to fit in more simple language, and the most effective

translations for me were the ones that did not go overboard in their poeticism.

There is also the idea of meter, which is a weird thing to translate from Chinese to

English as Chinese relies on the number of characters and arrangement of tones,

neither of which show up in English, and the fact that in Chinese rhyme is much

more common, which is difficult and limiting to replicate in English.

3. The mountain stands empty; no people in sight

Yet voices echo, sounds of conversation.

Sunlight returns to pierce the dark forest

Reflected in the green of the moss.

I really tried to keep my language simpler and cleaner, trying to avoid any complex

metaphors. I also tried to keep any first person out of it by making nature the subject of my

lines, “the mountain stands” or “sunlight returns”. I also kept the four line structure,

although I broke up the first two lights slightly with punctuation as a way to get straight to
the words I wanted to include without adding more connecting words. There were also

some words in the word-for-word translation that I wanted to include such as “reflected”

and “returns”, and I liked the idea of this situation in nature being a common occurrence,

with the voices always echoing and the sun always returning, even in the absence of human

beings. I didn’t attempt a rhyme scheme at all because I didn’t think it was needed, and I

really didn’t think about meter because it seemed like trying to squeeze it into a common

English meter wouldn’t be true to the original poem.