In the Translator's Workshop: Featuring Aaron Poochigian on Wang Wei’s “In a Retreat Among Bamboo”
- Aaron Poochigian
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
Amit Majmudar, George Steiner Editor for Poetry and Criticism
George Steiner wrote one of the most perceptive books we have on translation and based its title on one of our most profound parables on ambition and communication: After Babel. As a sometime translator myself, I know first hand the Babel-like misunderstandings that bedevil all those who would dismantle and rebuild a tower of words.
I am aware, accordingly, of the poet-translator’s background sense of the endeavor’s futility, one that writers have lamented for hundreds of years. In Don Quixote (quoted here in John Rutherford’s translation), the priest who helps burn Quixote’s books of chivalry remarks, “...He [the translator] left behind much of what was best in it, which is what happens to all those who try to translate poetry: however much care they take and skill they display, they can never recreate it in the full perfection of its original birth.”
As Cervantes notes, a translator’s problems compound specifically with poetry, so deeply dependent on nuances and idiosyncrasies in the language of its composition. Readers rarely learn about the “inside baseball” behind a translator’s choices and sacrifices, about dilemmas of etymology and connotation, about the slippages between counterpart, counterfeit words. In poetry translation, when it’s done correctly, no detail is too pedantic, no feature of syntax or diction is irrelevant, and no choice is trivial.
I reached out to poets who translate from languages or cultures far afield from English: Norse, Russian, Ki’che’ Maya (Castilian), Chinese, Sanskrit. I asked the poet-translators to focus on a line or stanza and share the nitty-gritty of moving poetry between the original and English. This series features the translators' mini-essays, showing us how much thought and hard work go into what poetry translators do.
Amit Majmudar
AARON POOCHIGIAN: On the Poetry of Wang Wei
The most commonly used translation of Wang Wei’s “In a Retreat Among Bamboo” is that of Witter Bynner:
Leaning alone in the close bamboos, I am playing my lute and humming a song Too softly for anyone to hear— Except my comrade, the bright moon.
Here is my translation:
Leaning alone against jam-packed bamboo,
I lightly strum my lute and hum a tune.
No man is in these woods, but I have you
to sing and play with, scintillating moon.
The first two lines of our translations are similar. One important difference is that, because the original is in five-character lines, I translate each into a pentameter, a line of five metrical feet. Though the original lines are strictly (yet effortlessly) formal, Bynner does not use any discernable metrical pattern in his English rendition.
It’s in the concluding two lines that our translations most diverge. Bynner doesn’t translate the word lín (“woods” or “forest”) in line three. That word is, I think, indispensable because it establishes a remote setting. The biggest difference between our translations is that I opt, in the closing two lines, for a direct address to the moon as a “you.” The Chinese does not specify person (first, second, third). Other translators go with a default third person—the moon as a “he” (or potentially a “she”). I went with “you” because it reinforces the intimacy between the speaker and the moon—the speaker addresses the moon as a companion.
In the final line, “to sing and play with” is my attempt to capture the word xiāng, which means “reciprocally” or “for each other.” The speaker and the moon are fellow musicians trading licks. They are “jamming” with each other. The adjective that Wang uses to describe the moon is míng. It can mean “bright” or “brilliant.” I went with “scintillating” because it can apply both to light and to conversation, as in “her wit was scintillating.” I like the double meaning because the moon is both the celestial body and Wang’s pal and playmate. It is personified to make up for the absence of literal humans.
Finally, I have preserved the original ABAB rhyme scheme, whereas Bynner uses no rhymes at all. Tang Chinese poems are highly musical. Quatrains such as this are like little music boxes. Translations that don’t preserve the rhymes always strike me as drab when compared with the originals. My translations of Chinese poems have all been attempts to capture their aural chimes and charms in English.
Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. A recipient of an NEA Grant in translation, he has published translations with Penguin Classics and W. W. Norton. His latest book American Divine, the winner of the Richard Wilbur Award, came out in 2021. His work has appeared in such publications as Best American Poetry, the Paris Review and POETRY.
