![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/wang-wei.jpg\")
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19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei\u00a0<\/em>by Eliot Weinberger <\/p>\n Eliot Weinberger takes big strides across literary history in his genuinely breathtaking short work, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei<\/em>, tracking translations of a short ancient Chinese poem from the publication of Ezra Pound\u2019s Cathay in 1915 to Gary Snyder\u2019s translations in the late \u201970s. This new edition from New Directions Publishing includes an addition Weinberger wrote this past year, covering more recent efforts by sinologists in the twenty-first century in English, French, and German.<\/p>\n The poem in question is Wang Wei\u2019s \u201cDeer Park,\u201d written sometime in the 700s CE. For reference, here is Gary Snyder\u2019s translation, which fittingly is the last of the original 19 ways:<\/p>\n Empty mountains; <\/p>\n Weinberger makes short work of the early twentieth-century practices of versifying the poems, rendering them in eloquent nineteenth-century language, and \u201cimproving\u201d the original with unwarranted additions. Most of the translations reviewed are torn to bits in the space of a few paragraphs, or less. For instance, his evaluation of Liu\u2019s 1962 verse translation: \u201c. . . the first two lines heave, the third gasps, and the fourth falls with a thud on the rhyming mossy ground.\u201d Weinberger tears apart \u201cthe corset of traditional verse forms,\u201d allowing the very intentional style of the Chinese to show itself.<\/p>\n But he also turns an equally sharp and penetrating critical eye to more modern attempts. He is attentive enough to the imagery to point out, for example, that a fair few recent translators have rendered the poem inaccurately by imagining the wrong species of the moss in the fourth line.<\/p>\n A single word\u2014such as zhao, \u201creflected,\u201d or shang, \u201cabove\u201d\u2014is refracted between poems through the whole study, its varying English glosses held up against the image constructed by Wang\u2019s original. The reader thus spends most of the book in Wang\u2019s place, standing in the empty mountains, straining to hear the faint echoes of the original, and analyzing each translation as though examining a patch of moss from different angles in the light of the setting sun.<\/p>\n Weinberger easily grasps, over the course of this history, the essential elements of Wang Wei\u2019s original poem: namely, the long-established Chinese propensity for parallelism, and the Buddhist idea of emptiness. Not very difficult to take cognizance of, but equally easy to miss; and those who do miss it are rightly panned as unfaithful to the original. For anyone with some Chinese reading ability, it is shockingly, visibly apparent which translations are close to the original and which aren\u2019t, which is part of what makes this work so powerful and persuasive.<\/p>\n It becomes clear that it is American modernism, characterized by \u201cabsolute precision, concision, and the use of everyday speech,\u201d which is best suited to classical Chinese poetry in its deliberate simplicity. Hence the success of the translations of Burton Watson and Snyder (above), the tacit \u201cwinners\u201d of Weinberger\u2019s wide-ranging judgment.<\/p>\n Ever conscious of the Buddhist thrust of Wang\u2019s poem, Weinberger turns out a very Buddhist conclusion: \u201ctranslation is dependent on the dissolution of the translator\u2019s ego.\u201d This work is surely the manifesto of the modern\u2014silent\u2014translator.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei\u00a0by Eliot Weinberger Translated by Various 64 pgs. | pb |\u00a09780811226202 | $10.95 New Directions Publishing Reviewed by Russell Guilbault Eliot Weinberger takes big strides across literary history in his genuinely breathtaking short work, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, tracking translations of a short ancient Chinese […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":401092,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[1646],"class_list":["post-305376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305376"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":401102,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305376\/revisions\/401102"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/401092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nTranslated by Various<\/strong>
\n64 pgs. | pb |\u00a09780811226202 | $10.95
\n<\/strong>New Directions Publishing
\nReviewed by Russell Guilbault <\/strong><\/p>\n
\nno one to be seen.
\nYet\u2014hear\u2014
\nhuman sounds and echoes.
\nReturning sunlight
\nenters the dark woods;
\nAgain shining
\non the green moss, above.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n