Poetry, perhaps more than other forms of oral and written expression, is intended to convey the immediate moment — the idea and experience — that triggered it in the mind of the one conceiving it. The language — the forms, sounds, rhythms, and images — embodies the mental realm of the poet, what he or she is seeing, feeling, conceptualizing, along with the connections between external and internal realities of individual experience. The translation of poetry must communicate all this in the sounds and images of the new language: It must perceive the experience of the poet (thought, emotion, environment; the cultural and social milieu, etc., that constitute the mental landscape at hand) and make it tangible through the linguistic resources of the translator’s experience, identity, and language. Though applicable to translation from any language, I will focus on my familiarity with the work of translating from the classical Chinese.

When I began my study of the Chinese classic poets, the first thing I noticed was the wide range of treatment the poems were given. They ranged from literal renderings (like Burton Watson and Red Pine/Bill Porter) to a very free style that ignored the original line structures (Ezra Pound and David Hinton). But in every case, what stood out to me, was that as accurate as the translations might have been, what I was reading was prose — clearly the original was a poem but the results I was reading lacked the poetic “luster” of the poet. And so I began to explore translation of poems into poems.

My first objective was to recognize that the poems move from mind to mind: The mind of classical Chinese poets through the poetic exigencies of American English and my own indulgence and appreciation of natural images and emotional nexus to convey the subjective and perceptive experience of the original poet in poetic forms familiar to me and so to speakers of English. It meant understanding the poem being translated from the standpoint of the original poet: What was he or she seeing, feeling, remembering —from experience and from the extensive literary and cultural environment that preceded that moment of insight and expression. This latter element is both invaluable to the meaning being conveyed to the original audience of readers, and one rather illusive to one not familiar with the vast record of poetic mastery that the scholar-officials and others drew upon from their studies as naturally as breathing. Images became shorthand for deep (and often political) significations. The more I read, the more I appreciated this reservoir of image and emotional connection that had deepened over several dynasties and corresponding centuries of culture.

So I began to see, as I endeavored to make the classics come alive in new poems, that the task was filled with surprise and treasures. One of my favorite experiences, about three years into my work, was the discovery of allusion to two Tang poets in a Joseon (Korean) poet’s famous poem written many centuries later. And this kind of insight enriches the study and appreciation of these thinkers and writers for us, as it must have for their contemporaries. So a challenge in translation is to acknowledge these connections within the content of the poem, and save the details for notes elsewhere: It must be specific enough that its antecedents are discoverable, but occasionally include clarifying references where this can be achieved within the poetic form.

With these factors in mind — the aesthetics of the poems and their cultural milieu — the translations must weigh the nuances, associations, movement of sound, and other subjective poetic elements spontaneously available to the translator and consider how these can be used to express the other poet’s experience and meaning. By using the sounds of English — the alliteration, assonance (or ‘vowel harmony’), and simplified line breaks, for instance — we can at least approximate the lyric quality of the original as well as make plain the descriptive elements. It is also possible to simplify the syntactic forms of English to approximate the couplet structure of the originals and so show the parallels that were intended as part of the poet’s meaning. These elements combined and applied uniquely to each poem helps realize the goal of understanding its content and purpose.

The following is a poem by the woman poet Zhu Shu-zhen (Wade-Giles romanization: Chu Shu-Chen).  This poem caught my eye through the use of the term zhào  — a basket for catching fish — which intensifies the whole image in the first line. Open lattice windows are common, especially on hot days, and bamboo leaves moving in a soft breeze would make added shadows, as this poem, translated by Red Pine {aka, Bill Porter} in his volume “Poems of the Masters” [Copper Canyon Press: 2003. pp. 284-285] who merely says: “Swaying bamboo shadows shade my secluded window.”  Even the image of “basket” is mild, given the ominous implication of being trapped in her isolated rooms by custom (and no doubt) jealousy, as other of her poems suggest. Poetically, we have no equivalent term in English, so had to make do with basket, but “weaving” strengthens the visual and semantic impact.  The freedom of the birds, flying off ‘two by two’ form the contrast in the second half of the first couplet. The pinyin romanization (toned)  is given to suggest the sound patterns of the original. The title in Chinese implies just the quick look outside which gave rise to the poem, hence my subtitle “realization.” The visual impact of the complex characters is also striking, reinforcing the scene, opening up only in the last line.

?? ???
jí j?ng zh? shú zh?n

??????? zhú yáo q?ng y?ng zhào y?u chu?ng
??????? li?ng li?ng shí qín zào x? yáng

??????? xiè què h?i táng f?i jìn xù
??????? kùn rén ti?n qì rì ch? cháng

nearby scene (realization) — zhu shuzhen (fl. c. 1200)
—trans. by c. prismon-reed

the trembling bamboo weaves basket shadows
across the latticed window

two by two the birds fly off noisily
in the evening light

the downy white of a one-time sea of crab-apple blossoms
has disappeared

for someone enclosed and alone the changing of seasons
only means longer days

Done well, such transformation is seamless, and we are transported into the immediate cognitive and emotional experience of the original poet at the time the poem was first written. English is capable of refined use of image in a way that permits the original poem’s expression in situ as it were, and the reader familiar with the allusions will still be able to discern and appreciate these shared meanings in a new light. In some ways, this kind of translation involves a symbiotic relationship between the original and the new translation: It is organic, intrinsic, honest, whole.

A final note of interest is that the scholar-officials cultivated one or more of the artistic skills of music, painting and calligraphy as well as poetry, as an ongoing aspect integral to their role in the literati, and communications between one another commonly used poetic forms. This was not merely a matter of practicing these skills, but a declarative assertion of the writer’s belonging to the educated class. Such communications also were likely the result of a way of thinking, a way of cultivating his or her participation in the literary life of the country, and a means of contributing to future generations. Do we value this generally in our societies today?

To sum up, my approach to translations is this: What was the poet seeing, feeling, alluding to, and connecting together in the poem? What was in his or her heart and mind at the time the poem was written? Then having put myself into that same place as much as possible, to ask: How would the poet express that same poetic moment if he or she had been using my native language and had had access to its range of linguistic potential — syntax, vocabulary, and poetic forms? This approach leads to yielding mind to mind, and makes understanding both possible and a wonderful source of beauty.

c. prismon-reed has been writing in a ‘minimalist/imagist’ style since the mid-1960’s and holds an MA in English (Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville). She had a few haiku publish ‘a long time ago’ and more recently has had four poems selected for translation into Korean (PoemCafe Anthology #9 [c. 2011] and PoemCafe Quarterly, December 2014). Since about 2010 she has pursued independent study in classical Chinese poetry and began translating after seeing the potential of the master poets. Concurrently, she began studying traditional Chinese and Korean brush calligraphy, and translates and does calligraphy under the sobriquet: songlin <??> (Chinese) [songlim <??> (Korean)]. She continues to be interested in linguistics, poetics, and the phenomena of the natural world as a window to the expression and interrelationships of emotion, rationality, and humanism. Her first book of poetry was published in 2017: footsteps in the night sky; it includes pictures and other art as well as a collection of poetry written up to that time. Web page: zumapinepoetry.com.

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