On Translation

Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Arthur Sze’s “Residence on Earth” appears in the July/August 2019 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.

On June 20 and 21, 2019, I visited Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. The first evening I read from my new book of poetry, Sight Lines, and the next afternoon I gave a talk, “The Zigzag Way,” on Chinese poetry. I prepared a handout with six poems I had translated from Chinese into English. The focus was on modern and contemporary Chinese poetry, but I included one poem to illustrate classical poetry. Years ago, as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, my translation of this poem by Du Fu, titled “Return to Qiang Village” was one of the first I ever did:

Shaggy red clouds in the west—
the sun’s foot is down to level earth.
By the wicker gate, sparrows are chirping.
The traveler returns from over a thousand li.

Wife and children panic at my presence,
quieted, they still wipe tears.
In this age of turmoil, I floated and meandered.
A miracle of chance to return alive!

Neighbors crowd the fence tops
and also sigh and sob.
In the deep night, we are again holding candles,
facing each other as in a dream.

When I think about literary translation, I think about its necessity and also its impossibility. Literary translation provides a way to understand and honor literature of another culture and time that can speak to our own, deepening our experience of the world. We can experience the worldview, imagination, and emotions of writers and compare and contrast their worlds to ours. We can learn philosophy, history, politics, and mastery of language through translation; yet translation is impossible because it’s impossible to carry over the precise experience of any poem in a given language.

When I think about what is lost in this translation, I’m immediately struck by the first line. In the Chinese, the opening five characters are:

shaggy  craggy  /  red   cloud/s  west

You read the first two characters, pause, then read the next three characters. The opening two adjectives, “shaggy” and “craggy,” have the mountain radical on the left side of the character. With this repeating radical, there’s an expectation of something rock-like; with the caesura, there’s a bit of tension; then a reader discovers that what’s shaggy and craggy is not firm and rock-like but actually clouds at sunset. This undercutting of expectation and tension between appearance and reality runs through the poem, culminating when the speaker is reunited with his wife and children—this poem was written in 757 CE, after a period of civil war—and the reality of the situation is undercut at the end: it’s as if it is all a dream.

I’m not going to discuss the poem in more depth, but, in looking at this translation forty-eight years after I made it, I realize I learned my craft through translation. Character by character, line by line, poem by poem, I struggled with how ancient poems were composed, and making translations forced me to become a better reader as well as a better writer. In hindsight, I think I considered how repeating radicals in a Chinese poem were like repeating phrases with incremental shifts, and this kind of subtle variation led me to explore how poems could be layered.

A specific example of layering in Sight Lines occurs in the repetition of the line, “a man who built plutonium triggers breeds horses now.” The line first appears as a one-line non-sequitur on page forty-eight. There’s no explanation of where this line comes from; it is a one-line poem that moves across the blank space of an entire page and is complete in itself. As such, it describes how a man has switched from making something used in nuclear weaponry to something constructive, breeding horses. But when the line reappears on page fifty-three in the title poem, the repetition reveals another layer to the meaning of the line by showing that the one-liner is not a complete poem in isolation, but, rather, is part of a much larger continuum in space and time. The opening seven lines to “Sight Lines” are:

I’m walking in sight of the Río Nambe—

salt cedar rises through silt in an irrigation ditch—

the snowpack in the Sangre de Cristos has already dwindled before spring—

at least no fires erupt in the conifers above Los Alamos—

the plutonium waste has been hauled to an underground site—

a man who built plutonium-triggers breeds horses now—

no one could anticipate this distance from Monticello—

In the larger context, the plutonium can now be located at Los Alamos National Laboratory. And the mention of plutonium in the line before the one-liner brings in historical context. A wildfire once threatened Los Alamos and forced the evacuation of the city, but the past is only hinted at through negation—no fires are currently erupting. As a precaution against future fires, the plutonium waste has been relocated (not made less toxic), and a man who worked in that industry has shifted his creative energy from working at the lab to breeding horses. With the subsequent line, the man working in nuclear weaponry is seen in a historical context going back to Jefferson and Monticello, where no one from Jefferson’s time could have anticipated how this country has evolved from the days of the Founding Fathers.

Over the years I also learned, through translation of classical and modern Chinese poetry, how active juxtaposition could be essential to my writing. Before making any literary translations from the Chinese, I had to start with careful consideration of Chinese linguistics and how the Chinese language is built on juxtaposition. (For instance, if you write the character “sun” and then, to the right, write the character “moon,” you create the character “bright.”) The juxtapositions inside of characters, and then the juxtapositions inside of lines, and between lines in classical Chinese poetry led me to experiment with making juxtaposition an active, generative principle in creating my own poems in English. If you look again at the opening seven lines to “Sight Lines,” each line has its own integrity: each line is end-stopped with a dash and could be moved to another location without compromising the integrity of what that line says. Yet each line in the poem is carefully juxtaposed to the previous line. The first line picks up a word from the title; each line of the poem picks up a word or words from the previous line (the word “no” in line seven is picked up from the word “now” in line six), and, at the end, the last line has a word that is picked up in the title. The structure of the poem embodies line and circle. The form is my invention, and I don’t think I could have created it without years of experience translating Chinese poetry.

In advocating for poets to practice the art of translation, I will even go so far as to say that one can learn a lot by translating from a language one does not know or barely knows, if one has appropriate help from a speaker and from notes. I frequently think of the Italian phrase, traduttori/traditori, translators/traitors, as an appropriate warning. Yet, how much Chinese did Pound know when he translated the poems that comprise Cathay?

In 2007, while in Rotterdam for Poetry International, I translated some poems by K. Michel, a Dutch poet. Another Dutch poet, Rob Schouten, read the poems aloud so I could hear the sound and rhythm of the originals, and he went through several of them, phrase by phrase. I worked up drafts and even asked K. Michel himself about aspects of the poem. I went through many drafts before this translation, titled “Transverse,” was published in Field, and I often come back to it.

One night sixteen seasons long
he hears himself continuously

squatted in front of a footpath signpost
by the railing of a ferry
at a juncture in a subway corridor
and always under the stars

with a head in his head
thinking “where am I?”

An artichoke has a heart but no direction
A helicopter has a destination but no destiny

“I,” one letter, one shoot
of a larger, chaotically branching word

Where there is shade, growing wildly
in moist woods kilometers long
mycelium randomly
sticks up its head in the form of mushrooms

Startled, bewildered
upwardly dropped parachutists

Once Polynesians used
to chart their way in the Pacific
maps made of thin sticks
that closely resemble bamboo poles
climbing beans are loosely tied to

And Canadian Indians carved wooden coastal maps
that look like Bavarian corkscrews

Depending on the legend key
in short anything can be a map:
hand palms, irises, birthmarks
and the branch-like shapes in sheets
of a crumpled bed

So it happens when the sleeper
has finally shaken awake
long after awakening
“where are you?” is the question

The disorientation of the speaker is how I sometimes feel as a translator. Disorientation, the losing of one’s bearings, is, for example, an essential part of the visionary journey in Dante’s The Divine Comedy. It involves confronting your own limited understanding. It forces you to suspend your own judgment of where you are in place and time, and it gives you the possibility of re-envisioning and experiencing things “for the first time.” Eventually, after repeated readings, and after repeated drafts of making a translation, the poem reveals itself. This “final” translation, imperfect and provisional at best, opens new doors of perception and experience for readers. And for the writer, translation quickens their care for language and reminds us that a poet is a maker.