Wrap Up of the Mountain Poems Translations in Red Pine’s Stonehouse

Book One: Mountain Poems of The Zen Works of Stonehouse contains 184 poems, in both Red Pine’s translations and the Chinese originals. So far I’ve compared Red Pine’s translation of 43 of these to the Chinese, about a quarter of the total.

Red Pine has a real knack for English which elicited many a smile of appreciation from this crotchety old man. He never adds words. His translations are a pleasure to read. If I were to give a “star rating” to his translations of the Mountain Poems, it would certainly not be a one or two. Based on the 43 poems I’ve read, it’d probably be 3.5 stars. This assessment may change after studying the other 141 translations..

In 1954, Professor Peter A. Boodberg had this to say about the state of translation of Chinese poetry: “Recent readings in translations of T’ang quatrains have left us immersed in deep sadness in the face of the lack of philological acumen, the critical shallowness, and the self-centered irreverence towards great poetry exhibited by would-be competent writers seeming unable to resist the lure of precocious publication.” Cedules From A Berkeley Workshop 005-540810. I wish I could say this has changed in the fifty years since, but in my view it hasn’t, particularly on points one and three. In fact, a small book on the very poem Boodberg used as a prime example of the sorry state of translation then, Wang Wei’s Deer Wattle, includes nineteen translations which, with possibly one partial exception, exhibit the “lack of philological acumen” and “irreverence” the good Professor bemoaned. See Note 1.

Strictly speaking Boodberg’s criticism doesn’t apply to the Mountain Poems in Red Pine’s Stonehouse because they are from the Yuan Dynasty, four hundred years after the Tang, most of the poems are not quatrains, and as far as I know no one ever said the poems of Stonehouse were “great poetry”. The last point especially lends credence to Red Pine’s approach. In other words, maybe Stonehouse threw in extraneous words to fill out the line, or added a weak word just to make it rhyme, whether out of carelessness or a lack of poetic skill or for another reason. Maybe he was not careful with his specific choice of characters and a translator needn’t take his word choice seriously either. Maybe he ignored poetic tradition on purpose. Perhaps Stonehouse’s poems don’t deserve careful philological analysis; maybe it would only misconstrue them. These are possibilities. We would have to look at Red Pine’s translations of the crème de la crème of a thousand years of poetry, to see how he fares there— to his translation of the Qian Jia Shi千家詩, Poems of the Masters, and more recently, to The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu 韋應物. But even a guy like me, an amateur who never read Stonehouse before, when looking at his translation of a poem after reading the original, wonders why certain things were skipped. If the goal was to use the poems as springboard for a new poetic creation, a self-standing English poem inspired by the Chinese, then it is simply a question of how much you like the result, and there is no need to worry about the original. However, Red Pine’s Stonehouse is billed as translation and that’s how I treat it.

I may be off base here, but sometimes I have the feeling he fits into admirably laconic English the modern colloquial baihua (白 話) translation of the poem rather than dealing directly with the original. Baihua translations, along with translations into current Japanese, are extremely useful for getting an idea what the poet meant and for background material. But at the end of the day, I think a translator is obligated to wrestle with the original, and Red Pine no doubt does. Nevertheless, to me at least, big things occasionally appear to be missing.

For the most part, I’m just going to bullet-point some of the gaps I see. And I am eager to revise my views if someone can point out how my interpretation is impossible or unlikely, or how Red Pine’s English already sufficiently implies what I think is missing. This would be especially useful because, for several decades now, I’ve pursued my interest in Chinese poetry alone, far away from face-to-face discussion with contemporary native speakers of Chinese, academic or amateur, and out of contact with academe.

(For fun, I rate each poem on a scale of one to five stars, like a movie review. Take these with a grain of salt, of course.)

Note 1: 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, by Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz, Asphodel Press, 1987. I have been happy to see that in a one-page Postscript to the current edition, Eliot Weinberger does discuss Peter A. Boodberg’s Cedule 005-540810 on the subject of this poem and provides Boodberg’s translation of the poem. Hooray! Of the translation Weinberger says, “To me this sounds like Gerald Manley Hopkins on LSD.” Seems he considers it the strangest of the many ways to translate the poem. To me, it is also the closest to what the poem actually says, love it or not.

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

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

I’ll start adding comments on and alternate translations of individual poems in the next post.