Parsing Wang Wei’s Passing Scented Temple (2)

王維

過香積寺

不知香積寺

數裡入雲峰

古木無人徑

深山何處鐘

泉聲咽危石

日色冷青松

薄暮空潭曲

安禪制毒龍

In Parsing Wang Wei’s Passing Scented Temple (1) I offered an alternate interpretation of the pre-caesura part of lines five and six. I did this to show how to avoid the trap that I think previous translators have fallen into, namely to assume that the pre-caesura is the subject of a sentence, the word after the caesura is a transitive verb and the last two characters are the direct object of that verb.

Here is another look at lines five and six.

泉聲咽危石

日色冷青松

Let us swap each Chinese character with an English word to make it easier for those who don’t read Chinese. Remember that each character by itself does not contain any indication of its part of speech. So I’m already loading the dice a little by the choices I’ve made for each English word.

spring sounds swallow precipitous rocks

day/sun colors cool green pines

Translators (1) and (2) interpret this in the S-V-O pattern common in Chinese prose. But then you must ask: How do sounds swallow rocks? Translator (1) avoids the problem by translating ‘swallow’ as ‘scrape over’. But it is a stretch to make character 1.3 mean ‘scrape over’. I have found no evidence for this in the dictionaries. But even if you can come up with answers to these questions how do you deal with sunshine colors that ‘cool’ green pines? It would seem better to think of it the other way around, ‘pines shading sunlit hues’.

To get around these problems, it is better to follow the approach suggested by translator (4), a Japanese translation, which I read as “Sounds of the creek are damped down/ throttled down by the rocks.” And “Forms/colors of the sunlight are cooled down by the pines.” But the normal Chinese prose sentence pattern doesn’t allow this. The positions of ‘spring sounds’ and ‘precipitous rocks’ in the sentence would have to be swapped. There is no particle or inflection here that permits us to leave the word order as it is and construe it in the passive.

As I said in Parsing Wang Wei’s Passing Scented Temple (1), the solution lies in treating the two pre-caesura characters not as the subject of the sentence but as a Hypothematic, a frequently used device to introduce a sub-theme followed by a statement about that sub-theme.

As for the sounds of the creek, it is the precipitous rocks that are swallowing [them].
As for the forms of the sunlight, it is the deep-green pines that are cooling [them].

In paraphrase: [After the reverberations of the temple bell from an unknown location have died away] I hear the creek sounds, but I notice the creek and its sounds are being gulped down over the steep slabs of rocks. I see the various forms of the sunlight playing on the wooded banks and notice they are rendered cooler by the dark-greens of the pines.