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Reading diary: Wang Wei
Mar. 16th, 2023 09:31 pm16/03/2023
Today I mostly read class exercises. However, I was nearly late to class because I really wanted to finish Everything For Everyone, which I love, and which ends strongly. And this evening I have read 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, by Eliot Weinberger, a very slender volume comparing a classic Chinese poem with sixteen English, French, and Spanish translations. (The other three ways are the original poem in its characters, transliteration, and literal translation; all told, the essay presents one fewer version of the poem than the original has characters - inexactly, since the French and Spanish translations are themselves then translated into English). This is a very good, brief book of history and poetry criticism.
I must immediately join in its spirit of finely-attentive nitpicking by saying that I disagree with its poor opinion of the G.W. Robertson. No, it doesn't sound as good aloud as some others, and I could go either way on the innovation of the third-person plural narrator – where Weinberger reads it as an unruly picnic's worth of 'we', I read it as the audience, the reader, and therefore close to the original poem's absence of person. But I can already feel that I might think about this a while and change my mind, because maybe reading an audience into the original poem's absence is anachronistic and unfaithful to its Buddhism. What I really object to is that Weinberger has not seen enough forest mosses and doesn't know they can be bulky, so objects to 'the top of the green moss is lit again.' I know nothing of the moss Wang Wei was writing about, but I have seen plenty of moss which the sun could have lit the top but not the bottom of, or the top but not the side of. So 'The top of the green moss is lit again' seems one of the better renderings of the last line that we've had in the book up until that point.
If you enjoyed the above paragraph then you should read 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, because this is what the book is, except better than I'm doing it and with more historical context.
Also, there is a whole second part to the book I haven't read yet called 'More Ways', which contains translations made since the book was published in the 80s, many of them in development of and argument with it. I look forward to reading this and approve of it as a thing for a book about translation to do.
(Do I especially like the poem? No. But I believe it is probably better read when less tired, and my own preference would be to be alone with a version of it I liked, or possibly this book, in some cool shade where water was falling, and probably without maple fudge, though I am very happy to have maple fudge for other reasons).
Today I mostly read class exercises. However, I was nearly late to class because I really wanted to finish Everything For Everyone, which I love, and which ends strongly. And this evening I have read 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, by Eliot Weinberger, a very slender volume comparing a classic Chinese poem with sixteen English, French, and Spanish translations. (The other three ways are the original poem in its characters, transliteration, and literal translation; all told, the essay presents one fewer version of the poem than the original has characters - inexactly, since the French and Spanish translations are themselves then translated into English). This is a very good, brief book of history and poetry criticism.
I must immediately join in its spirit of finely-attentive nitpicking by saying that I disagree with its poor opinion of the G.W. Robertson. No, it doesn't sound as good aloud as some others, and I could go either way on the innovation of the third-person plural narrator – where Weinberger reads it as an unruly picnic's worth of 'we', I read it as the audience, the reader, and therefore close to the original poem's absence of person. But I can already feel that I might think about this a while and change my mind, because maybe reading an audience into the original poem's absence is anachronistic and unfaithful to its Buddhism. What I really object to is that Weinberger has not seen enough forest mosses and doesn't know they can be bulky, so objects to 'the top of the green moss is lit again.' I know nothing of the moss Wang Wei was writing about, but I have seen plenty of moss which the sun could have lit the top but not the bottom of, or the top but not the side of. So 'The top of the green moss is lit again' seems one of the better renderings of the last line that we've had in the book up until that point.
If you enjoyed the above paragraph then you should read 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, because this is what the book is, except better than I'm doing it and with more historical context.
Also, there is a whole second part to the book I haven't read yet called 'More Ways', which contains translations made since the book was published in the 80s, many of them in development of and argument with it. I look forward to reading this and approve of it as a thing for a book about translation to do.
(Do I especially like the poem? No. But I believe it is probably better read when less tired, and my own preference would be to be alone with a version of it I liked, or possibly this book, in some cool shade where water was falling, and probably without maple fudge, though I am very happy to have maple fudge for other reasons).
