Do Red Pine’s translations of the Mountain Poems of Stonehouse say what Stonehouse wrote? Partially. Do I think I could do better? Overall, probably not. In a few cases, yes. Does it matter? Yes.

My approach to this project, assessing the translations, has been flawed from the start. What I wanted to do and what I did, was to read the Stonehouse poems using Red Pine’s translation as a pony. I was not especially interested in reading Red Pine’s translations as original English poetry. I wanted to see how he understood each poem in order to better understand it myself. In other words, I wanted to focus on the original, not on picking apart his translation. But I veered off course and ended up focused as much on how he translated something as on how I understood the Chinese.

For me, an example of the kind of translation and explanation that best leads to insight into the original is Peter A. Boodberg’s “Cedule” on Wang Wei’s Deer Wattle. Philologically, Red Pine’s translations and notes are not in the same league as Boodberg’s but they no doubt were never intended to be. Boodberg wrote for the benefit of students and teachers of Chinese, whereas I imagine Red Pine is writing for the benefit of lovers of poetry, especially of the style of translation that arose on the U.S. West Coast, especially in the Pacific Northwest, in the 1960s and 70s : simple language, sparse diction, straight talk, “shit on shingle Bob”, “Gary Snyder zen”.  As a contribution to this “school of thought”, Red Pine’s work is superb and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

AFAIK, no other translator’s work on traditional Chinese poems is comparable to Boodberg’s. But it takes a long time to produce. If you are dealing with the Chinese master poets, spending a month on two or three poems is not too much. As an amateur, with other things taking up big chunks of time, I’m lucky if I can hack out a crude imitation, some would say caricature, of a Boodberg Cedule on a short poem in less than a month. So to give each of the 184 Mountain Poems and 70 Gathas in The Zen Works of Stonehouse the “Boodberg treatment” would take between seven and twenty-one years, not a rate of production that can support a family, or even buy beer. Professor Boodberg, a full-time professional, ended up with only nineteen or twenty of these poem-based Cedules himself.

I’m correcting course here. If I blog again about Stonehouse, I’ll focus on my interpretation of the original poems. When Red Pine’s translation or notes adds to my understanding, or offers an appealing solution to a translation problem, I’ll try to remember to mention it.

Today is the day to plant blueberry roots.

Red Pine’s The Zen Works of Stonehouse, Book One: Mountain Poems

Poem #1: **** (4 STARS)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
L1. 吾家住在 霅溪西。 My home is located west of Rainy River,
L2. 水滿天湖 月滿溪。 Water fills Sky Lake, the moon fills the rivers.
L3. 未到盡驚 山險峻。 En route you’re full of fear— the mountain’s arduous heights;
L4. 曾來方識 路高低。 Finally here, you understand— the state of the road.

L5. 蝸涎素壁 粘枯殻。 Snail trails over the rustic wall, stuck dried shells;
L6. 虎過新蹄 印雨泥。 A tiger passes, new tracks, stamped in rainy mud.
L7. 閒閉柴門 春晝永。 Barred shut the stick gate, spring days last and last,
L8. 青桐花發 畫胡啼。 The Phoenix trees burst into bloom, and cicadas cry.

(Ver. 01, Translated by Jon Babcock.)

Sometimes I refer to individual characters by Line and Character number. E.g., L1.7 is the last character in the 1st line, ‘west, vesper‘, xi 西.

Another example, L1.5 is the 5th character in the 1st line, ‘zhá‘ 霅, which has meanings associated with thunder, lightning and especially rain and the sounds of rain as well as being a place name.

Note that the caesura in each line is indicated by a blank space. The degree of coupling that occurs between the syntactic units immediately before and after the caesura varies widely, from loose, as a semicolon, a colon or even a period in English, to as tight as a hyphen in a compound English word.

The first thing that strikes the eye in the first couplet is the preponderance of graphic depictions of water or rain. Five instances of the “water” classifier, ‘aqueous-aquatic’, the word ‘water’ itself, and one instance of the “rain” classifier, ‘ombrological-ombrophoric’. As mentioned above, L1.5 zhá‘ 霅 connotes thunder, lightning, rain and rain sounds. Although its primary intended meaning is no doubt as a placename, the Zha River, these secondary meanings also play a role. ‘River’ or ‘creek/stream’ 溪 is repeated, L1.6 and L2.7. And so is ‘fill/full’, mǎn 滿 L2.2 and L2.6, which also has the “water” classifier. A rainy season comes to mind, and a quick Net check of the climate in Zhejiang puts it at late spring. I’m hoping to find a more precise translation of zhá of Zha (or Sha?) River; “Rainy River” is kind of a cop out.

L2: After studying L2 a long time, I returned to pretty much the same interpretation as Red Pine has.

L2, pre-caesura: But what I would have liked to highlight is the relationship between form and emptiness. From the perspective of one mind (water), emptiness (the sky) can be seen in the form of a tiny spot on earth (a lake). This is like the line “Here, O Shariputra, …whatever is emptiness, that is form…” And form (a lake) can be seen in emptiness (the sky), which reminds us of the line “…whatever is form, that is emptiness…” [The Heart Sutra, Buddhist Wisdom Books, Edward Conze, p81.]

L2, post-caesura: Here where I (Stonehouse) am at, in my dwelling place, my home, perfect wisdom (the moon) fills the rivers, the streams, the water, the one mind.

So I was playing with alternate wordings such as:

Water gives full rise to sky & lake; moonlight gives full rise to streams of water.

But “gives full rise to” doesn’t quite convey what I want in English, and going further, with “brings into being” or “creates”, although clearer, implies an alien (to Chinese Buddhism at least) system of causality. “Fulfills” almost works, if you think of it as “fulfills the potential for existence of”, but who does? So I left it at a simple “fills” and hoped the implied Buddhist meaning will seep through somehow: The mind xīn 心 gives rise to Sky Lake (where I, Stonehouse, live) and wisdom míngzhì 明智 fills the mind.

L3 and L4 are similar to Red Pine’s. Same interpretation, I think. As usual, there is no personal pronoun in the Chinese. I thought of using “one” as “one is full of fear”, and “one understands” because I wanted to include Stonehouse, because I think besides the obvious he is saying that only after SOMEONE has actually walked the walk, traveled the path, will he/she truly understand what the state of mind suggested by the opening couplet is all about.

In the first couplet of the second quatrain, L5 and L6, I’ve tried to put back some words that Red Pine seems to have left out. And in the second couplet of the second quatrain, in L7, I take an opposite view of the old homemade gate, thinking that Stonehouse had it ‘closed’, ‘not open’, during the rainy season. (In Chinese opposite interpretations such as this are not as rare as one might think.)

At L8, the last line, I have been unable to determine what L8.5 and L8.6 mean, so especially in light of the final character L8.7, 啼, ‘cry’, ‘call’ have followed Red Pine with ‘cicadas’. The Phoenix tree or Paulownia Tree or Kiri Tree blossoms and spring is complete, soon followed by the cicadas announcing the rainy season’s end. I hope someone who has actually lived in western Zhejiang can set me straight about this seasonal interpretation.