A Note on Translation

Home , Heroic verse, Mo (Chinese zoology)

Reading literature in translation is a pleasure on which it is fruitless to frown. The purist may insist that we ought always read in the original languages, and we know ideally that this is true. But it is a counsel of perfection, quite impractical even for the purist, since no one in a lifetime can master all the languages whose literatures it would be a joy to explore. Master languages as fast as we may, we shall always have to read to some extent in translation, and this means we must be alert to what we are about: if in reading a work of literature in translation we are not reading the “original,” what precisely are we reading? This is a question of great complexity, to which justice cannot be done in a brief note, but the following sketch of some of the considerations may be helpful. One of the memorable scenes of ancient literature is the meeting of Hector and Andromache in Book VI of Homer’s Iliad. Hector, leader and mainstay of the armies defending Troy, is implored by his wife Andromache to withdraw within the city walls and carry on the defense from there, where his life will not be con stantly at hazard. In Homer’s text her opening words to him are these: daimo´ nie, fui´sei se to`so`n meńo␵ (daimonie, phthisei se to son menos). How should they be translated into English? Here is how they have actually been translated into English by capable translators, at various periods, in verse and prose: 1. George Chapman, 1598: O noblest in desire, Thy mind, inflamed with others’ good, will set thy self on fire. 2. John Dryden, 1693: Thy dauntless heart (which I foresee too late), Too daring man, will urge thee to thy fate. 3. Alexander Pope, 1715: Too daring Prince!... For sure such courage length of life denies, And thou must fall, thy virtue’s sacrifice. 4. William Cowper, 1791: Thy own great courage will cut short thy days, My noble Hector. . . 5. Lang, Leaf, and Myers, 1883 (prose): Dear my lord, this thy hardihood will undo thee.... 6. A. T. Murray, 1924 (prose): Ah, my husband, this prowess of thine will be thy doom.... 7. E. V. Rieu, 1950 (prose):

A1 A2/ANOTE ON TRANSLATION

“Hector,” she said, “you are possessed. This bravery of yours will be your end.” 8. I. A. Richards, 1950 (prose): “Strange man,” she said, “your courage will be your destruction.” 9. Richmond Lattimore, 1951: Dearest, Your own great strength will be your death.... 10. Robert Fitzgerald, 1979: O my wild one, your bravery will be Your own undoing! 11. Robert Fagles, 1990: reckless one, Your own fiery courage will destroy you! From these strikingly different renderings of the same six words, certain facts about the nature of translation begin to emerge. We notice, for one thing, that Homer’s word meńo␵ (menos) is diversified by the translators into “mind,” “dauntless heart,” “such courage,” “great courage,” “hardihood,” “prowess,” “bravery,” “courage,” “great strength,” “bravery,” and “fiery courage.” The word has in fact all these possibilities. Used of things, it normally means “force”; of animals, “fierceness” or “brute strength” or (in the case of horses) “mettle”; of men and women, “passion” or “spirit” or even “purpose.” Homer’s application of it in the present case points our attention equally— whatever particular sense we may imagine Andromache to have uppermost—to Hec- tor’s force, strength, fierceness in battle, spirited heart and mind. But since English has no matching term of like inclusiveness, the passage as the translators give it to us reflects this lack and we find one attribute singled out to the exclusion of the rest. Here then is the first and most crucial fact about any work of literature read in translation. It cannot escape the linguistic characteristics of the language into which it is turned: the grammatical, syntactical, lexical, and phonetic boundaries that con- stitute collectively the individuality or “genius” of that language. A Greek play or a Russian novel in English will be governed first of all by the resources of the English language, resources that are certain to be in every instance very different, as the efforts with meńo␵ show, from those of the original. Turning from meńo␵ to daimo´ nie (daimonie) in Homer’s clause, we encounter a second crucial fact about translations. Nobody knows exactly what shade of meaning daimo´ nie had for Homer. In later writers the word normally suggests divinity, something miraculous, wondrous; but in Homer it appears as a vocative of address for both chieftain and commoner, man and wife. The coloring one gives it must therefore be determined either by the way one thinks a Greek wife of Homer’s era might actually address her husband (a subject on which we have no information whatever) or in the way one thinks it suitable for a hero’s wife to address her husband in an epic poem, that is to say, a highly stylized and formal work. In general, the translators of our century will be seen to have abandoned formality to stress the intimacy; the wifeliness; and, especially in Lattimore’s case, a certain chiding tenderness, in Andromache’s appeal: (6) “Ah, my husband,” (7) “Hector” (with perhaps a hint, in “you are possessed,” of the alarmed distaste with which wives have so often viewed their hus- bands’ bellicose moods), (8) “Strange man,” (9) “Dearest,” (10) “O my wild one” (mixing an almost motherly admiration with reproach and concern), and (11) “reckless one.” On the other hand, the older translators have obviously removed Androm- ache to an epic or heroic distance from her beloved, whence she sees and kindles to his selfless courage, acknowledging, even in the moment of pleading with him to be ANOTE ON TRANSLATION /A3 otherwise, his moral grandeur and the tragic destiny this too certainly implies: (1) “O noblest in desire, . . . inflamed by others’ good”; (2) “Thy dauntless heart (which I foresee too late), / Too daring man”; (3) “Too daring Prince! . . . / And thou must fall, thy virtue’s sacrifice”; (4) “My noble Hector.” Even the less specific “Dear my lord” of Lang, Leaf, and Myers looks in the same direction because of its echo of the speech of countless Shakespearean men and women who have shared this powerful moral sense: “Dear my lord, make me acquainted with your cause of grief”; “Perseverance, dear my lord, keeps honor bright”; etc. The fact about translation that emerges from all this is that just as the translated work reflects the individuality of the language it is turned into, so it reflects the individuality of the age in which it is made, and the age will permeate it everywhere like yeast in dough. We think of one kind of permeation when we think of the gov- erning verse forms and attitudes toward verse at a given epoch. In Chapman’s time, experiments seeking an “heroic” verse form for English were widespread, and accord- ingly he tries a “fourteener” couplet (two rhymed lines of seven stresses each) in his Iliad and a pentameter couplet in his Odyssey. When Dryden and Pope wrote, a closed pentameter couplet had become established as the heroic form par excellence. By Cowper’s day, thanks largely to the prestige of Paradise Lost, the couplet had gone out of fashion for narrative poetry in favor of blank verse. Our age, inclining to prose and in verse to proselike informalities and relaxations, has, predictably, produced half a dozen excellent prose translations of the Iliad but only three in verse (by Fagles, Lattimore, and Fitzgerald), all relying on rhythms that are much of the time closer to the verse of William Carlos Williams and some of the prose of novelists like Faulkner than to the swift firm tread of Homer’s Greek. For if it is true that what we translate from a given work is what, wearing the spectacles of our time, we see in it, it is also true that we see in it what we have the power to translate. Of course, there are other effects of the translator’s epoch on a translation besides those exercised by contemporary taste in verse and verse forms. Chapman writes in a great age of poetic metaphor and, therefore, almost instinctively translates his understanding of Homer’s verb fui´sei (phthisei, “to cause to wane, consume, waste, pine”) into metaphorical terms of flame, presenting his Hector to us as a man of burning generosity who will be consumed by his very ardor. This is a conception rooted in large part in the psychology of the Elizabethans, who had the habit of speaking of the soul as “fire,” of one of the four temperaments as “fiery,” of even the more material bodily processes, like digestion, as if they were carried on by the heat of fire (“concoction,” “decoction”). It is rooted too in that characteristic Renaissance e´lan so unforgettably expressed in characters such as Tamburlaine and Dr. Faustus, the former of whom exclaims to the stars above: ...I,thechiefest lamp of all the earth, First rising in the East with mild aspect, But fixe`d now in the meridian line, Will send up fire to your turning spheres, And cause the sun to borrow light of you.... Pope and Dryden, by contrast, write to audiences for whom strong metaphor has become suspect. They therefore reject the fire image (which we must recall is not present in the Greek) in favor of a form of speech more congenial to their age, the sententia or aphorism, and give it extra vitality by making it the scene of a miniature drama: in Dryden’s case, the hero’s dauntless heart “urges” him (in the double sense of physical as well as moral pressure) to his fate; in Pope’s, the hero’s courage, like a judge, “denies” continuance of life, with the consequence that he “falls”—and here Pope’s second line suggests analogy to the sacrificial animal—the victim of his own essential nature, of what he is. To pose even more graphically the pressures that a translator’s period brings, con- A4/ANOTE ON TRANSLATION sider the following lines from Hector’s reply to Andromache’s appeal that he withdraw, first in Chapman’s Elizabethan version, then in Lattimore’s twentieth-century one: Chapman, 1598: The spirit I did first breathe Did never teach me that—much less since the contempt of death Was settled in me, and my mind knew what a Worthy was, Whose office is to lead in fight and give no danger pass Without improvement. In this fire must Hector’s trial shine. Here must his country, father, friends be in him made divine. Lattimore, 1951: and the spirit will not let me, since I have learned to be valiant and to fight always among the foremost ranks of the Trojans, winning for my own self great glory, and for my father. If one may exaggerate to make a necessary point, the world of Henry V and Othello suddenly gives way here to our own, a world whose discomfort with any form of heroic self-assertion is remarkably mirrored in the burial of Homer’s key terms (spirit, valiant, fight, foremost, glory)—five out of twenty-two words in the original, five out of thirty- six in the translation—in a cushioning huddle of harmless sounds. Besides the two factors so far mentioned (language and period) as affecting the character of a translation, there is inevitably a third—the translator, with a particular degree of talent; a personal way of regarding the work to be translated; a special hierarchy of values, moral, aesthetic, metaphysical (which may or may not be summed up in a “worldview”); and a unique style or lack of it. But this influence all readers are likely to bear in mind, and it needs no laboring here. That, for example, two translators of Hamlet, one a Freudian, the other a Jungian, will produce impressively different translations is obvious from the fact that when Freudian and Jungian argue about the play in English they often seem to have different plays in mind. We can now return to the question from which we started. After all allowances have been made for language, age, and individual translator, is anything of the original left? What, in short, does the reader of translations read? Let it be said at once that in utility prose—prose whose function is mainly referential—the reader who reads a translation reads everything that matters. “Nicht Rauchen,” “De´fense de Fumer,” and “No Smoking,” posted in a railway car, make their point, and the differences between them in sound and form have no significance for us in that context. Since the prose of a treatise and of most fiction is preponderantly referential, we rightly feel, when we have paid close attention to Cervantes or Montaigne or Machiavelli or Tolstoy in a good English translation, that we have had roughly the same experience as a native Spaniard, Frenchman, Italian, or Russian. But roughly is the correct word; for good prose points iconically to itself as well as referentially beyond itself, and everything that it points to in itself in the original (rhythms, sounds, idioms, wordplay, etc.) must alter radically in being translated. The best analogy is to imagine a Van Gogh painting reproduced in the medium of tempera, etching, or engraving: the “picture” remains, but the intricate interanimation of volumes with colorings with brushstrokes has disappeared. When we move on to poetry, even in its longer narrative and dramatic forms— plays like Oedipus, poems like the Iliad or the Divine Comedy—our situation as Eng- lish readers worsens appreciably, as the many unlike versions of Andromache’s appeal to Hector make very clear. But, again, only appreciably. True, this is the point at which the fact that a translation is always an interpretation explodes irresistibly on our attention; but if it is the best translation of its time, like John Ciardi’s translation of the Divine Comedy for our time, the result will be not only a sensitive interpretation ANOTE ON TRANSLATION /A5 but also a work with intrinsic interest in its own right—at very best, a true work of art, a new poem. In these longer works, moreover, even if the translation is uninspired, many distinctive structural features—plot, setting, characters, meetings, partings, confrontations, and specific episodes generally—survive virtually unchanged. Hence even in translation it remains both possible and instructive to compare, say, concepts of the heroic or attitudes toward women or uses of religious ritual among civilizations as various as those reflected in the Iliad, the Maha¯bha¯rata, Beowulf, and the epic of Son-Jara. It is only when the shorter, primarily lyrical forms of poetry are presented that the reader of translations faces insuperable disadvantage. In these forms, the referential aspect of language has a tendency to disappear into, or, more often, draw its real meaning and accreditation from, the iconic aspect. Let us look for just a moment at a brief poem by Federico Garcıá Lorca and its English translation (by Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili):

¡Alto pinar! Cuatro palomas por el aire van. Cuatro palomas vuelan y tornan. Llevan heridas sus cuatro sombras. ¡Bajo pinar! Cuatro palomas en la tierra esta´n.

Above the pine trees: Four pigeons go through the air. Four pigeons fly and turn round. They carry wounded their four shadows. Below the pine trees: Four pigeons lie on the earth. In this translation the referential sense of the English words follows with remark- able exactness the referential sense of the Spanish words they replace. But the life of Lorca’s poem does not lie in that sense. It lies in such matters as the abruptness, like an intake of breath at a sudden revelation, of the two exclamatory lines (1 and 7), which then exhale musically in images of flight and death; or as the echoings of palomas in heridas and sombras, bringing together (as in fact the hunter’s gun has done) these unrelated nouns and the unrelated experiences they stand for in a sequence that seems, momentarily, to have all the logic of a tragic action, in which doves become wounds become shadows, or as the external and internal rhyming among the five verbs, as though all motion must (as in fact it must) end with estań. Since none of this can be brought over into another tongue (least of all Lorca’s rhythms), the translator must decide between leaving a reader to wonder why Lorca is a poet to be bothered about at all and making a new but true poem, whose merit will almost certainly be in inverse ratio to its likeness to the original. Samuel Johnson made such a poem in translating Horace’s famous Diffugere nives, and so did A. E. Housman. If we juxtapose the last two stanzas of each translation, and the corre- sponding Latin, we can see at a glance that each has the consistency and inner life of a genuine poem and that neither of them (even if we consider only what is obvious to the eye, the line-lengths) is very close to Horace: Cum semel occideris, et de te splendida Minos fecerit arbitria, A6/ANOTE ON TRANSLATION

non, Torquate, genus, non te facundia, non te restituet pietas. Infernis neque enim tenebris Diana pudicum liberat Hippolytum nec Lethaea valet Theseus abrumpere caro vincula Pirithoo.

Johnson: Not you, Torquatus, boast of Rome, When Minos once has ﬁxed your doom, Or eloquence, or splendid birth, Or virtue, shall restore to earth. Hippolytus, unjustly slain, Diana calls to life in vain; Nor can the might of Theseus rend The chains of hell that hold his friend.

Housman: When thou descendest once the shades among, The stern assize and equal judgment o’er, Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue, No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more. Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain, Diana steads him nothing, he must stay; And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain The love of comrades cannot take away. The truth of the matter is that when the translator of short poems chooses to be literal, most or all of the poetry is lost; and when the translator succeeds in forging a new poetry, most or all of the original author is lost. Since there is no way out of this dilemma, we have always been sparing, in this anthology, in our use of short poems in translation. In this Expanded Edition, we have adjusted our policy to take account of the two great non-Western literatures in which the short lyric or “song” has been the principal and by far most cherished expression of the national genius. During much of its history from earliest times, the Japanese imagination has cheerfully exercised itself, with all the delicacy and grace of an Olympic figure skater, inside a rigorous verse pattern of five lines and thirty-one syllables: the tanka. Chinese poetry, while somewhat more liberal to itself in line length, has been equally fertile in the fine art of compression and has only occasionally, even in its earliest, most experimental phase, indulged in verse lines of more than seven characters, often just four, or in poems of more than fifty lines, usually fewer than twenty. What makes the Chinese and Japa- nese lyric more difficult than most other lyrics to translate satisfactorily into English is that these compressions combine with a flexibility of syntax (Japanese) or a degree of freedom from it (Chinese) not available in our language. They also combine with a poetic sensibility that shrinks from exposition in favor of sequences and juxtaposi- tions of images: images grasped and recorded in, or as if in, a moment of pure perception unencumbered by the explanatory linkages, background scenarios, and other forms of contextualization that the Western mind is instinctively driven to establish. Whole books, almost whole libraries, have been written recently on the contrast of East and West in worldviews and value systems as well as on the need of each for the other if there is ever to be a community of understanding adequate to the realities both face. Put baldly, much too simply, and without the many exceptions and quali- ANOTE ON TRANSLATION /A7

fications that rightly spring to mind, it may be said that a central and characteristic Western impulse, from the Greeks on down, has been to see the world around us as something to be acted on: weighed, measured, managed, used, even (when economic interests prevail over all others) fouled. Likewise, put oversimply, it may be said that a central and characteristic Eastern counterpart to this over many centuries (witness Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, among others) has been to see that same world as something to be received: contemplated, touched, tasted, smelled, heard, and most especially, immersed in until observer and observed are one. To paint a bamboo, a stone, a butterfly, a person—so runs a classical Chinese admonition for painters— you must become that bamboo, that stone, that butterfly, that person, then paint from the inside. No one need be ashamed of being poor, says Confucius, putting a similar emphasis on receiving experience, “only of not being cultivated in the perception of beauty.” The problem that these differences in linguistic freedom and philosophical outlook pose for the English translator of classical Chinese and Japanese poetry may be glimpsed, even if not fully grasped, by considering for a moment in some detail a typical Japanese tanka (Kokinshu, 9) and a typical Chinese “song” (Book of Songs, 23). In its own language but transliterated in the Latin alphabet of the West, the tanka looks like this: kasumi tachi ko no me mo haru no yuki fureba hana naki sato mo hana zo chirikeru In a literal word-by-word translation (so far as this is possible in Japanese, since the language uses many particles without English equivalents and without dictionary meaning in modifying and qualifying functions—for example, no, mo, and no in line 2), the poem looks like this: haze rises tree-buds swell when snow falls village(s) without flower(s) flower(s) fall(s) The three best-known English renderings of this tanka look like this: 1. Helen Craig McCullough: When snow comes in spring— fair season of layered haze and burgeoning buds— flowers fall in villages where flowers have yet to bloom. 2. Laurel Rasplica Rodd and Mary Catherine Henkenius: When the warm mists veil all the buds swell while yet the spring snows drift downward even in the hibernal village crystal blossoms fall. 3. Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner: With the spreading mists The tree buds swell in early spring And wet snow petals fall— A8/ANOTE ON TRANSLATION

So even my ﬂowerless country village Already lies beneath its fallen ﬂowers.

The reader will notice at once how much the three translators have felt it desirable or necessary to add, alter, rearrange, and explain. In McCullough’s version the time of year is affirmed twice, both as “spring” and as “fair season of . . . haze”; the haze is now “layered”; the five coordinate perceptions of the original (haze, swelling buds, a snowfall, villages without flowers, flowers drifting down) have been structured into a single sentence with one main verb and two subordinate clauses spelling out “when” and “where”; and the original poem’s climax, in a scene of drifting petallike snowflakes, has been shifted to a bleak scenery of absence: “flowers have yet to bloom.” The final stress, in other words, is not on the fulfilled moment in which snow flowers replace the cherry blossoms, but on the cherry blossoms not yet arrived. Similar additions and explanations occur in Rodd and Henkenius’s version. This time the mist is “warm” and “veil[s] all” to clarify its connection with “buds.” Though implicit already in “warm” and “burgeoning,” spring is invoked again in “spring snows,” and the snows are given confirmation in the following line by the insistently Latinate “hibernal,” chosen, we may reasonably guess, along with “veil,” “all,” “swell,” “while,” “crystal,” and “fall” to replace some of the chiming internal rhyme in the Japanese: ko, no, mo, no, sato, mo, zo. To leave no i undotted, “crystal” is imported to assure us that the falling “blossoms” of line 5 are really snowflakes, and the scene of flowerlessness that in the original (line 4) accounts for a special joy in the “flowering” of the snowflakes (line 5) vanishes without trace. Brower and Miner’s also fills in the causative links between “spreading mists” and swelling buds; makes sure that we do not fail to see the falling snow in flower terms (“wet snow petals”), thus losing, alas, the element of surprise, even magic, in the transformation of snowflakes into flowers that the original poem holds in store in its last two lines; and tells us (somewhat redundantly) that villages are a “country” phenomenon and (somewhat surprisingly) that this one is the speaker’s home. In this version, as in the original and Rodd and Henkenius’s, the poem closes with the snow scene, but here it is a one-time affair and “already” complete (lines 4 and 5), not a recurrent phenomenon that may appear under certain conditions anywhere at any time. Some of the differences in these translations arise inevitably from different trade- offs, as in the first version, where the final vision of falling snow blossoms is let go presumably to achieve the lovely lilting echo and rhetorical turn of “flowers fall in villages / where flowers have yet to bloom.” Or as in Rodd and Henkenius’s version, where preoccupations with internal rhyme have obviously influenced word choices, not always for the better. Or as in all three versions, where different efforts to remind the reader of the wordplay on haru (in the Japanese poem both a noun meaning “spring” and a verb meaning “swell”) have had dissimilar but perhaps equally indif- ferent results. Meantime, the immense force compacted into that small word in the original as both noun and verb, season of springtime and principal of growth, cause and effect (and thus in a sense the whole mighty process of earth’s renewal, in which an interruption by snow only foretells a greater loveliness to come) fizzles away unfelt. A few differences do seem to arise from insufficient command of the nerves and sinews of English poetry, but most spring from the staggering difficulties of respond- ing in any uniform way to the minimal clues proffered by the original text. The five perceptions—haze, buds, snowfall, flowerless villages, flowers falling—do not as they stand in the Japanese or any literal translation quite compose for readers accustomed to Western poetic traditions an adequate poetic whole. This is plainly seen in the irresistible urge each of the translators has felt to catch up the individual perceptions, as English tends to require, in a tighter overall grammatical and syntactical structure than the original insists on. In this way they provide a clarifying network of principal and subordinate, time when, place where, and cause why. Yet the inevitable result is ANOTE ON TRANSLATION /A9 a disassembling, a spinning out, spelling out, thinning out of what in the Japanese is an as yet unraveled imagistic excitement, creating (or memorializing) in the poet’s mind, and then in the mind of the Japanese readers, the original thrill of conscious- ness when these images, complete with the magical transformation of snow into the longed-for cherry blossoms, first flashed on the inward eye. What is comforting for us who must read this and other Japanese poems in translation is that each of the versions given here retains in some form or other all or most of the five images intact. What is less comforting is that the simplicity and sudden- ness, the explosion in the mind, have been diffused and defused. When we turn to the Chinese song, we find similarly contesting forces at work. In one respect, the Chinese language comes over into English more readily than Japa- nese, being like English comparatively uninflected and heavily dependent on word order for its meanings. But in other respects, since Chinese like Japanese lacks dis- tinctions of gender, of singular and plural, of a and the, and in the classical mode in which the poems in this anthology are composed, also of tenses, the pressure of the English translator to rearrange, straighten out, and fill in to “make sense” for his or her readers remains strong. Let us examine song no. 23 of the Shijing. In its own Chinese characters, it looks like this:

Eleven lines in all, each line having four characters as its norm, the poem seemingly takes shape around an implicit parallel between a doe in the forest, possibly killed by stealth and hidden under long grass or rushes (though on this point as on all others the poem refuses to take us wholly into conﬁdence), and a young girl possibly “ruined” (as she certainly would have been in the post-Confucian society in which the Shijing was prized and circulated, though here again the poem keeps its own counsel) by loss of her virginity before marriage. In its bare bones, with each character given an approximate English equivalent, a translation might look like this: wild(s) is dead deer white grass(es) wrap/cover (it). is girl feel spring. ﬁne man tempt (her). woods is(are) bush(es), underbrush. 5 wild(s) is dead deer. white grass(es) bind bundle. is girl like jade. slow slow slow. not move my sash. 10 not cause dog bark.

Lines 1 to 4, it seems plain, propose the parallel of slain doe and girl, whatever that parallel may be intended to mean. Lines 5 to 8 restate the parallel, adding that the girl is as beautiful as jade and (apparently) that the doe lies where the “wild” gives way to smaller growth. If we allow ourselves to account for the repetition (here again is a Western mind-set in search of explanatory clues) by supposing that lines 1 to 4 A10/ANOTE ON TRANSLATION signal at some subliminal level the initiation of the seduction and lines 5 to 8, again subliminally, its progress or possibly its completion, lines 9 to 11 fall easily into place as a miniature drama enacting in direct speech the man’s advances and the girl’s gradually crumbling resistance. They also imply, it seems, that the seduction takes place not in the forest, as we might have been led to suppose by lines 1 to 8, but in a dwelling with a vigilant guard dog. Interpreted just far enough to accommodate English syntax, the poem reads as follows: 1. Wai-lim Yip: In the wilds, a dead doe. White reeds to wrap it. A girl, spring-touched. A ﬁne man to seduce her. In the woods, bushes. 5 In the wilds, a dead deer. White reeds in bundles. A girl like jade. Slowly. Take it easy. Don’t feel my sash! 10 Don’t make the dog bark! Interpreted a stage further in a format some have thought better suited to English poetic traditions, the poem reads: 2. Arthur Waley: In the wilds there is a dead doe, With white rushes we cover her. There was a lady longing for spring, A fair knight seduced her.

In the woods there is a clump of oaks, 5 And in the wilds a dead deer With white rushes well bound. There was a lady fair as jade. “Heigh, not so hasty, not so rough. “Heigh, do not touch my handkerchief. 10 “Take care or the dog will bark.” Like the original and the literal translation, this version leaves the relationship between the doe’s death and the girl’s seduction unspecified and problematic. It holds the doe story in present tenses, assigning the girl story to the past. Still, much has been changed to give the English poem an explanatory scenario. The particular past assigned to the girl story, indeterminate in the Chinese original, is here fixed as the age of knights and ladies; and the seduction itself, which in the Chinese hovers as an eternal possibility within the timeless situation of man and maid (“A fine man to seduce her”), is established as completed long ago: “A fair knight seduced her.” A teasing oddity in this version is the mysterious “we” who “cover” the slain doe, never to be heard from again. Take interpretation toward its outer limits and we reach what is perhaps best called a “variation” on this theme: 3. Ezra Pound: Lies a dead doe on yonder plain whom white grass covers, A melancholy maid in spring ANOTE ON TRANSLATION / A11

is luck for 5 lovers Where the scrub elm skirts the wood be it not in white mat bound, As a jewel ﬂawless found dead as a doe is maidenhood. 10 Hark! Unhand my girdle knot. Stay, stay, stay or the dog may 15 bark.

Here too the present is pushed back to a past by the language the translator uses: not a specific past, as with the era of knights and ladies, but any past in which contemporary speech still features such (to us) archaic formalisms as “Unhand” or “Hark,” and in which the term “maid” still signifies a virgin and in which virginity is prized to an extent that equates its loss with the doe’s loss of life. But these evocations of time past are so effectively countered by the obtrusively present tense throughout (lines 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 15) that the freewheeling “variation” remains in this important respect closer to the spirit of the original than Waley’s translation. On the other hand, it departs from the original and the two other versions by brushing aside the reticence that they carefully preserve as to the precise implications of the girl- deer parallel, choosing instead to place the seduction in the explanatory framework of the oldest story in the world: the way of a man with a maid in the springtime of life. What both these examples make plain is that the Chinese and Japanese lyric, how- ever contrasting in some ways, have in common at their center a complex of highly charged images generating something very like a magnetic field of potential meanings that cannot be got at in English without bleeding away much of the voltage. In view of this, the best practical advice for those of us who must read these marvelous poems in English translations is to focus intently on these images and ask ourselves what there is in them or in their effect on each other that produces the electricity. To that extent, we can compensate for a part of our losses, learn something positive about the immense explosive powers of imagery, and rest easy in the secure knowledge that translation even in the mode of the short poem brings us (despite losses) closer to the work itself than not reading it at all. “To a thousand cavils,” said Samuel Johnson, “one answer is sufficient; the purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside.” Johnson was defending Pope’s Homer for those marks of its own time and place that make it the great interpretation it is, but Johnson’s exhilarating common sense applies equally to the problem we are considering here. Literature is to be read, and the criticism that would destroy the reader’s power to make some form of contact with much of the world’s great writing must indeed be blown aside.

MAYNARD MACK

Sources Brower, Robert H., and Earl Miner. Japanese Court Poetry. Stanford: Stanford Uni- versity Press, 1961. The Classic Anthology Deﬁned by Confucius. Tr. Ezra Pound. New Directions, 1954. A12/ANOTE ON TRANSLATION

Kokinshu¯ : A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern. Tr. Laurel Rasplica Rodd and Mary Catherine Henkenius. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Kokin Wakashu¯ : The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry. Tr. and ed. Helen Craig McCullough. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985. Legge, James. The Chinese Classics. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960. Waley, Arthur. 170 Chinese Poems. New York, 1919. PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Aeschylus: Agamemnon and Eumenides from THE ORESTEIA, by Aeschylus, translated by Robert Fagles. Copyright ᭧ 1966, 1967, 1975 by Robert Fagles. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. Akhenaten: Hymn to the Sun from ANCIENT EGYPTIAN LITERATURE: AN ANTHOLOGY, translated by John L. Foster. Copyright ᭧ 2001. By permission of the University of Texas Press. Selec- tions from LOVE SONGS OF THE NEW KINGDOM, translated from the Ancient Egyptian by John L. Foster. Copyright ᭧ 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974. By permission of the author and the University of Texas Press. Selections from ANCIENT EGYPTIAN LITERATURE: AN ANTHOLOGY translated by John L. Foster. Copyright ᭧ 2001. By permission of the University of Texas Press. Aristophanes: Lysistrata from ARISTOPHANES: FOUR COMEDIES, edited by William Arrowsmith and translated by Douglass Parker. Copyright ᭧ 1969. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, The University of Michigan Press. Aristotle: Selections from POETICS, translated by James Hutton. Copyright ᭧ 1982 by W. W. Norton & Company. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. The Bhagavad-Gı¯ta¯: Selections from THE BHAGAVAD-GI¯TA¯ , translated by Barbara Stoler Miller, copyright ᭧ 1986 by Barbara Stoler Miller. Used by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Catullus: Selections from POEMS OF CATULLUS, translated by Charles Martin (pp. 4, 7, 10, 14, 51, 59, 107, 109, 112–113, 120–124, & 146). Copyright ᭧ 1989. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Chuang Chou: Excerpts from THE COMPLETE WORKS OF CHUANG TZU, translated by Burton Wat- son. ᭧ 1968 Columbia University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Classic of Poetry: Selections from AN ANTHOLOGY OF CHINESE LITERATURE: BEGINNING TO 1911 by Stephen Owen, Editor & Translator. Copyright ᭧ 1996 by Stephen Owen and The Council for Cultural Planning and Development of the Executive Yuan of the Republic of China. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Confucius: Selections from THE ANALECTS, translated by D. C. Lau. Copyright ᭧ 1979 by D. C. Lau. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Euripides: Medea from THE GREAT PLAYS OF EURIPIDES by Euripides, translated by Rex Warner, copyright ᭧ 1958, renewed 1986 by Rex Warner. Used by permission of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. MEDEA by Euripides translated by Rex Warner published by Bodley Head. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited. Gilgamesh: THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH: AN ENGLISH VERSION by N. K. Sandars (Penguin Classics 1960, second revised edition 1972) copyright ᭧ N. K. Sandars, 1960, 1964, 1972. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Homer: Selections from THE ILIAD by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles, copyright ᭧ 1990 by Robert Fagles. Introduction and notes copyright ᭧ 1990 by Bernard Knox. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. Homer: THE ODYSSEY, translated by Robert Fitzgerald. Copyright ᭧ 1961, 1963 by Robert Fitzgerald. Copyright renewed ᭧ 1989, 1991 by Benedict R. C. Fitzgerald on behalf of the Fitzgerald children. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. The Interior Landscape: Selections by A. K. Ramanujan from THE INTERIOR LANDSCAPE: LOVE POEMS FROM A CLASSICAL TAMIL ANTHOLOGY, Indiana University Press, 1967. Reprinted by permission of Molly A. Daniels Ramanujan. The Ja¯taka: The Hare’s Self-Sacrifice and The Monkey’s Heroic Self-Sacrifice from JA¯ TAKA TALES, translated by H. T. Francis and E. J. Thompson. Copyright ᭧ 1957 by Jaico Publishing House. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press. The Cheating Merchant from THE JA¯ TAKA OR STO- RIES OF THE BUDDHA’S FORMER BIRTHS, translated by E. B. Cowell. Reprinted by permission of North Point Press. The Maha¯bha¯rata: Excerpts from THE MAHA¯ BHA¯ RATA, translated by Chakravari Narasimhan. ᭧ 1965 Columbia University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. The Assembly Hall from THE MAHA¯ BHA¯ RATA, edited and translated by J. A. B. van Buitenen. Copyright ᭧ by the University of Chicago. Reprinted by University of Chicago Press. Ovid: Excerpts from THE METAMORPHOSES OF OVID: A NEW VERSE TRANSLATION, English translation copyright ᭧ 1993 by Allen Mandelbaum. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc. Petronius: Dinner with Trimalchio from THE SATYRICON, translated by J. P. Sullivan. Copyright ᭧ by J. P. Sullivan. Reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates Limited. Ssu-ma Ch‘ien: From Historical Records: Biography of Bo Yi and Shu Ch‘i, translated by Stephen Owen; from Historical Records: Letter in Reply to Jen An, translated by Stephen Owen; from Historical Records: The Prince of Wei, translated by Stephen Owen; and from Biographies of the Assassins: Nieh Cheng, translated by Stephen Owen from AN ANTHOLOGY OF CHINESE LITERATURE: BEGINNINGS TO 1911 by Stephen Owen, Editor & Translator. Copyright ᭧ 1996 by Stephen Owen and The Council for Cultural Planning and Development of the Executive Yuan of the Republic of China. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. The Ra¯ma¯yanfi aofVa¯lmı¯ki: Excerpts from CONCISE RA¯ MA¯ YANfi AOFVA¯ LMI¯KI by Swami Venkates- ananda. Reprinted by permission of the State University of New York Press ᭧ 1988, State University of New York. All rights reserved. Sappho: Selections from GREEK LYRICS, edited and translated by Richmond Lattimore. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press.

A13 A14/PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sophocles: Antigone and Oedipus the King from THREE THEBAN PLAYS by Sophocles, translated by Robert Fagles, copyright ᭧ 1982 by Robert Fagles. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. Virgil: Selections from THE AENEID by Virgil, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, copyright ᭧ 1980, 1982, 1983 by Robert Fitzgerald. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.