Meditation on the Road [3/6]: Follow-UP II

Six Wartime Sonnets (III)

Response to Comments
Part II

Loss & Gain through Translation

My interlocutor’s comments on Feng Zhi's Sonnet 6 and 2 highlight the colors blue and green.  This urges me to reconsider the loss and gain through translation.

A Blue Globe

Re Sonnet 6, my word choice of “globe” at the very end        

I feel that they through all time

Have been letting tears roll

Over a desperate globe.

inspired my responder to imagine:

Our tears become the ocean waters that give our globe the blue color that can only be seen from beyond the frame of the earth’s surface.

I love the image and completely empathize with him.  On the other hand, I must point out that Feng Zhi’s word choice in the Chinese original, yuzhou 宇宙, indicates a nuanced picture: the first character, yu, means spatial infinity; the second, zhou, means temporal eternity.  Hence the combination—universe or cosmos—creates a feeling of overwhelming vastness and perplexing vagueness.  In addition, yu 宇 and zhou 宙 in classical Chinese mean roof edge and roof beam that form a square rather than a round shape.

I choose “globe” over “universe/cosmos” because of two reasons: first, I wish to retain the rime between zhou宙 and the verb that ends the previous line, liu 流 (roll, flow).  Second, I wish to illustrate the circular transcendence—the endless ripple of observation beyond observation, frame beyond frame, life beyond life, world beyond world, and planet beyond planet. 

In comparison, my English translation rounds out the square corners of Feng Zhi's Chinese original and dyes it in ocean blue.

Green Hills

Re Sonnet 2, the ending of my translation

From the body of the music the sound falls.

What remains in the end is the body of the music:

Green hills ranged in silence.

yields the following response:

Green hills seem to bespeak the arrival of spring. The winter has passed, and the plants on the hills have put out new shoots. Some of these plants may be grass, others bushes or trees. Thus the tree that shed its leaves in autumn and stretched its trunk into the long cold dark night of winter has survived. It is no longer the same tree, of course, because now it consists of a host of leaves that did not exist last year. The hills, similarly, suggest a physical structure that has not itself changed, and yet the surface that we see of it is altogether new. The hills persist, but in a fresh mantle.

Again, I love all these refreshing ideas and, in particular, the affinity between “green hills” and “the arrival of spring.”  However, I have to admit that my translation, albeit literally ‘loyal,’ filters out a couple of connotations that are exclusively alive in the Chinese cultural context.

Feng Zhi’s original word choice, qingshan 青山, consists of the attribute “green” (qing) and the noun “hill” (shan); the combination of the two exemplifies “one plus one equals three”: besides “green hills,” qingshan also indicates, especially in Imperial China, the place where a tired, bored, disappointed, or disillusioned official wishes to spend the rest of his life as a hermit.  Qingshan, therefore, resembles the Peach Blossom Shangri-la and exemplifies the Chinese vision of Utopia—a land of solitude and serenity.  

Moreover, the phrase qingshan bulao 青山不老 (green hills never age)—or qingshan bulao lüshui changcun 青山不老 绿水长存 (green hills never age, green rivers always flow)—sprung from the Sanguo yanyi 三国演义 (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), one of the most prominent classical Chinese novels, implies nature’s persistence and endurance.  It accentuates the unchangeable aspect of green hills, whereas my interlocutor finds their “fresh mantle” more intriguing.

Regardless of Feng Zhi’s intention, these connotations immanent in qingshan evoke spontaneous responses in an educated Chinese audience.  I do not know whether and to what extent my responder’s free association is representative of the English-American reader; I nonetheless think there is an inevitable—although not inevitably essential—shift in point of view from the indigenous audience to the foreign reader.

The Reader’s Attitude

My interlocutor is multilingual and sensitive to language and music, yet he has no training in Chinese.   Every time he comments on my translation of Chinese poetry, he considers it an original English poem.  

Isn’t this in fact an innovative and productive attitude?