Jack Kerouac, Wang Wei, and Ezra Pound

One of my favourite scenes in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums is where Ray – a proxy for Kerouac himself, and Japhy – a character inspired by Gary Snyder, the poet and scholar, are discussing Chinese poetry. Japhy is reading a poem to Ray:

‘Climbing up Cold Mountain path, Cold Mountain path goes on and on, long gorge choked with scree and boulders, wide creek and mist-blurred grass, moss is slippery though there’s been no rain, pine sings but there’s no wind, who can leap the world’s ties and sit with me among white clouds?’

‘Wow.’

‘Course that's my own translation into English, you see there are five signs for each line and I have to put in Western prepositions and articles and such.’

‘Why don't you just translate it as it is, five signs, five words? What's those first five signs?’

‘Sign for climbing, sign for up, sign for cold, sign for mountain, sign for path.’

"Well then, translate it “Climbing up Cold Mountain path.”’

‘Yeah, but what do you do with the sign for long, sign for gorge, sign for choke, sign for avalanche, sign for boulders?’

‘Where's that?’

‘That's the third line, would have to read ‘Long gorge choke avalanche boulders.”’

‘Well that's even better!’

"Well yeah, I thought of that, but I have to have this pass the approval of Chinese scholars here at the university and have it clear in English."

‘Boy what a great thing this is,’ I said looking around at the little shack, ‘and you sitting here so very quietly at this very quiet hour studying all alone with your glasses…’[1]

It’s a scene I keep returning to. Ray’s excitement comes through so well, the challenges of translation ring true, and, like a lot of Kerouac’s best moments, it has a bubbling sense of optimism and wonder. Any time I’m trying to translate Chinese poetry, this scene is distantly echoing in my head.

I recently read a Chinese poem which led me down a surprisingly long rabbit-hole as I tried to understand it.

‘Peach blossom after rain…’

Peach blossom after rain
Is deeper red;
The willow fresher green;
Twittering overhead;
And fallen petals lie wind-blown
Unswept upon the courtyard stone.

Anon, Tang Dynasty, in Lyrics from the Chinese, translated by Helen Waddell. Appears in Spring: A Folio Anthology, edited by Sue Bradbury.

As with many English translations of Chinese or Japanese poetry, this has a sparse, haiku-esque feel. Someone cynical might argue this has the unfortunate effect of making every poem sound the same, but I like it.

I was a bit surprised though, to see how cleanly she’d made it rhyme – normally a huge challenge for these translations, as the Kerouac extract implies. So I decided to find the original. This was not as easy as I thought – the Tang dynasty was famous for their poets, and searching for anonymous Tang poems featuring peach blossoms did not work.

After doing some more online searches in English, I found out that Waddell’s description of the author as anonymous was not entirely accurate, in that, the poem was in fact written by the very well-known Tang poet Wang Wei (王维), who lived from 701-761.

This made it easier to, with some help, finally find the original:

王维的《田园乐》七首之六的意境：

桃红复含宿雨，柳绿更带春烟。
花落家童未扫，莺啼山客犹眠。

My (direct but much less poetic) translation

Wang Wei’s Pastoral Songs, Sixth of Seven

The red peach blossom holds last night’s rain
The green of the willow carries Spring’s mists
The fallen petals have not been swept by the house’s servant boy
The warblers are singing, but the mountain dwelling guest is still asleep.

A Chinese to Chinese explanation I found online gave the following:

红红的桃花瓣上还含着昨夜的雨珠，雨后的柳树萦绕在 的烟雾之中。
昨夜被雨水打落下来的满地花瓣，家童还没有打扫，黄莺啼鸣，山客还在酣眠。[2]

“The red peach blossom petals still contain last night’s rain, after the rain the willow trees are encircled by the morning’s mist, the petals that were dislodged by last night’s rain lie [scattered] all over the floor, the house servant still has not yet done the sweeping – the oriole is cawing, crying out, but the mountain guest is still fast asleep.”

The most notable thing was that Waddell actually left out the last part of the poem completely, which changes the whole mood – when reading the original, I can imagine myself as this traveler, staying in a rural mountain home, half asleep, with this fresh spring scene unfurling around me.

She also adds in the lines ‘wind-blown’, ‘courtyard stone’, and ‘twitters overhead’, which don’t appear in the Chinese, though perhaps the latter is intended to evoke the warbler of the missing last stanza.

Despite how wildly different these translations are, and the rather great liberties Waddell took, I still enjoy her version – she still manages to capture a lot of the atmosphere. Still, from a very strict translation perspective, she doesn’t quite succeed. Chinese traditional translation requirements focus on three areas – the need to be faithful, expressive and elegant (信达雅), and Waddel’s translation falls down pretty heavily on the first of those.

I also discussed the poem with my wife, who pointed out several areas where I was missing whole areas of meaning and allusion, which I think are hard to spot for non-native speakers:

1: Spring’s mists (春烟) is not just the ‘foggy morning’ I had in mind, but also has connotations of something like ‘the smoke rising from the fires of a village’ – so even though the reference probably does mean foggy morning, it has this extra, cosy dimension.

2: The word used for servant boy (家童) evokes a specific kind of image – a kind of round-faced, rosy-cheeked child, with two short braids of hair in the old style, who has an innocence which goes well with the spring theme.

3: The mountain dwelling guest (山客) is also kind of ambiguous – it could be a visitor to the area, or a friend of the owner. It also strongly implies the writer of the poem himself.

Some time later,  I decided to see if I could find a more faithful English attempt, and discovered the modernist poet Ezra Pound had been preoccupied with Wang Wei and this very poem, publishing a beautiful translation of his own:

Dawn on the Mountain

Peach flowers turn the dew crimson,
Green willows melt in the mist,
The servant will not sweep up the fallen petals,
And the nightingales
Persist in their singing.

According to some excellent in-depth analysis by Zhaoming Qian, Professor Emeritus  at the University of New Orleans, prior to publishing the above version, Pound went through many drafts of the translation, and came to believe it was “untranslatable.”[3] One of his earlier drafts:

Peach flowers hold up the dew that shows crimson
The green willows belt in the smoke-mist,
             making lines in its denseness.
Servant has not swept up the fallen petals,
The guest of this mountain,
        sleeps through the nightingales noise.

Like Waddell, in the end Pound gives up on the last two lines for concision and directness, a sacrifice which Qian is a bit skeptical about.

A few other notes after reading Qian’s analysis:

· Qian makes a strong case for how Pound’s succinct, modernist style was influenced by Wang Wei.

· Qian translates the title (田园乐) of the suite of poems this Wang Wei poem comes from as Farm Field Pleasure, which seems accurate, but I prefer Pastoral Songs, even if it’s more of a stretch.

· Pound uses nightingale instead of warbler or oriole to translate 莺. All the dictionary entries I checked have warbler or oriole for this, but do note it can cover a lot of different birds, and 莺 is in fact the second character in nightingale (夜莺) so I am not sure which is right.  Nightingale fits more naturally into Western readers’ own cultural context I suppose.

Perhaps poems can’t ever be truly translated, and even the best result is something like a cover of a song by a band from a different genre. That can still be fun though, so if I was to take my own ideal translation, it would be heavily influenced by Pound’s, and go something like this:

Wang Wei’s Pastoral Songs – Sixth of Seven

Peach flowers turn the dew crimson,
Green willows melt in the smoke of spring
The servant boy has not swept the fallen petals,
The mountain guest sleeps through the warblers’ songs.

Here's the original again, to save on the scrolling:

王维的《田园乐》七首之六的意境：

桃红复含宿雨，柳绿更带春烟。
花落家童未扫，莺啼山客犹眠。

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[1] The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. Page 20-21

[2]小故事网（Short Stories）  http://www.xiaogushi.com/shici/gushidaquan/411557.html

[3] Qian, Zhaoming. "Ezra Pound's Encounter with Wang Wei: Toward the 'Ideogrammic Method' of The Cantos." Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 39.3 (1993): 266-282.