Translating Du Mu: Part 3 (the Last)

To read Part 1 and Part 2, scroll down to the two previous blog postings.

After leaving my friends to play with Du Mu’s enigmatic translation for nearly a week, I sent an e-mail with Hun’s initial translation and also my first attempts at translating the poem.

Excerpt from “Jnabholz “to April, Sarah, and Jane, 10/28/08:

Mountain Journeys
Ascending the slant of a stony path on Cold Mountain,
There are peoples' homes where white clouds appear.
Halting the carriage, I sit to enjoy an evening of maple forests -
The frosted leaves are red as February flowers.
- by Du Mu 杜牧 (803-52)

山行
遠上寒山石徑斜，白雲生處有人家。
停車坐愛楓林晚，霜葉紅於二月花。

We [Hun and I] talked about many aspects of this attempt, especially the word "ascending," and how there was no subject with which it was attached and how, I thought, it gave the next line an ethereal feel. You assume that someone is ascending and telling you about it, but that's not what the grammar says. I pointed this out and Hun decided to change it, also considering that "ascending" sounded too spiritual. His next translation, I notice, substitutes "ascending" with "far up," which he says, is anyway, more accurate to the Chinese.* Plus now, there is no grammatical complication.

I immediately began working on my own attempt, initially starting by just changing one word here and there, and then inverting lines. The most productive thing that I began to do was change which thoughts were connected to which. By looking at the original, Hun said that the first two lines seem naturally connected, and I agreed, but then I wanted to see what it would be like without that connection. What if the poem was like a series of slides, line by line. Something like this:

Evening—stony paths climb up Cold Mountain,
Clouds are appearing near peoples’ houses.
I watch the forest from my halted carriage—
The frozen trees are red like March’s flowers.

To date, my last stopping point with the poem is posted below. I was getting too anxious about iambic pentameter and so I exploded it. Also, I do consider it important—but it's so damned hard to fit in—that part about sitting in a halted carriage. This next poem is sans that and some other liberties, trying to get at what I thought it was about:

Near human habitation,
Where stony paths climb up Cold Mountain
White clouds have appeared at evening.
I stop—the hills of frozen maples settle into my heart
They are as red as March’s flowers.

At this point, knowing by help of Hun’s translation the general intent of the poet, it was much easier to write coherent pieces. And, by token, there was a high investment in an accuracy of meaning, this time less ambiguously invented or implied. Scrutiny of detail was now even more essential. I enjoyed Jane’s observation in response to my latter poem. She wrote:

“I appreciate many of the liberties you took in your most recent version. I'm curious about your intention in the use of different tenses. It really separates, to me, the setting and the occurrence. And also the observer and his act of travel.

Near human habitation,
Where stony paths climb up Cold Mountain
White clouds have appeared at evening.
/////////
I stop―the hills of frozen maples settle into my heart
They are as red as March’s flowers.”

Unfortunately, I couldn’t give her a response as to why. Perhaps the shift in tense stemmed from my early sense of unease in the poem, a disembodied quality that floated and merged in and out of the landscape, along with the clouds that were, “producing.”

Accuracy of meaning also meant, to a degree, accuracy of details. And knowing little of the context of the poem, or poet, this was hard. April, after several new attempts at the poem, wrote, “I want to say bright as FLAMES or something... it's hard to fit in ‘springs first flowers’ or ‘March's flowers...’ do you know the names of any SPECIFIC red flowers that bloom in the spring over there??? I do kind of like to say ‘pass’ and ‘shrouds’ because they can both be deathly... like he's going up on this mountain to die... slightly overlooking the village...”

She continued: “I had to leave out carriage I felt... I guess I can't see what kind of carriage gets hauled up a stony mountain ‘path’ unless it's a palanquin, in which case maybe Du Mu was a rich old fart with slaves and the whole poem gives me the sense of condescension.”

Upon reflection now, I am struck that we both sensed some sort of ghastliness in the poem, AND that neither of us could fit "sit" into the poem. I wonder what romantic notion Du Mu was evoking for his audience—surely something that resonated with one of his own class who would also be spending his time in a “carriage.” I told April that I thought it was very important that he might just be a “rich old fart.” I wrote that I also, “have been discouraged because I haven't been able to fit the ‘sit’ character in, but I think it is an important part of the poem. You're passing along (much like us) in our own luxury or foreign-ness—so much as walking the earth in shoes—and then, when we least expect, beauty rears its head and we have just a second to pause and look at it.”

I think that shocking moment is one poetic revelation that has always hung in the leafy shadows of Fall—death lingers there, and when it extends its hand, it is halting and beautiful in the simultaneous death and resurrection it evokes (in other words, the dying leaves are “red like Spring’s flowers”). It reminds me of Keat’s famous “Ode to Autumn.” Despite a drastic difference in form and language, the two poets may not be so different in poetic perception and sensibility. Keat’s poem “Autumn,” is first evoked as an everlasting continuum of Summer.

The next stanza, becomes melancholic, the fields are reaped; he writes of the season, “Thou watchest the last oozings [of the cyder-press] hours by hours.” The last stanza, he passes on to Spring: “Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? / Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— / While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, / And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue.”

The observation that death is in Autumn is not new. The observation—or is it conviction?—that unbounded life is found also while the natural world is just decaying is less spoken, but perhaps present in both Keat’s and Du Mu’s poem. Approximately true, or not true at all, one still most likely sees Du Mu through poetic lenses from a different culture, with different poet fathers and mothers.

In the end, again, it is simply then a play with language and imagination, bringing our own sensibilities to what might have been an objective piece of writing. It is just our minds rearranging the phenomenon on the table. But then again—is it?

April - 11/5/08:

Far up the cold steep mountain path
near homes hung thick with clouds, I
love to stop and sit a while beside the
leafed fires. Maples blooming red as flowers
though cased in frosted shrouds.

Sarah - original attempt before ever seeing Hun’s translation:

come, travel far up the cold mountain along the stone path,
which slants beside white clouds.
nothing produced a sense of place, except being part of people's families.
please stop this carriage.
sit, love, under the maple forest on this night with the
frosted leaves of fall red like the second month's flowers.

Joe – present attempt:

Far up stony, mountain paths
dwellings are
arranged near whitened clouds.
I stop the carriage
to see the hills of frozen maples—
they are red like Spring’s first flowers.

*I want to point out here a difference between Chinese and English. The general statistic I hear, and read, is that most college graduate level Chinese have a vocabulary of about 6-8,000 characters. In English, I think the number is generally twice that. The simple fact of the matter is that the English language has a lot more commonly used words. In practical measures of translating into English, a translator will have a variety of words to choose from for any one character, each with different hints and flavors of connotation, whether helpful or a hindrance.