I gave my eight grade class this Tang century poem by Liu Zongyuan (read top to bottom, right to left):
I suggested that when translating Chinese poetry it doesn't matter whether one has studied Chinese for 10 years or 2 months (they have studied Chinese for 4 months). As long as one has a dictionary and has translated all of the words, one has about all the information one needs. The syntax is largely based on word order, and otherwise there is no punctuation, no sense of time occurring, and, at least here, no clear speaker.
Here's the poem with the English definitions:
thousand/mountain/bird/fly/vanish
ten thousand/path/person/trace/extinguished
solitary/boat/cape/hat/fisherman
single/fishing/cold/river/snow
Some words are hard to translate into a single English definition. "Thousand" and "ten thousand" are counting terms, but here they can also mean, "myriad." The word translated above as "cape" actually specifically refers to the palm leaf raincoat that peasants wear, and the "hat" refers to the conical, bamboo leaf hat often associated with rice farmers. Furthermore, "mountain, bird, person, path" and other nouns, since they are described in characters, have no distinction of being plural or singular. Likewise "to fly" and "to fish" have no distinction of past, future, or present tense. The word that is translated above as "solitary" in its most literal sense means "orphan." "Fisherman" actually seems to mean "an old fisherman."
Also worth noting, since you do not have the phonetic translation of the poem, the last character in the first, second, and fourth line rhyme thus, "jue, mie, and xue." Solitary and single also rhyme, "gu and du".
Maybe you already have a sense of the poem. In class, we discussed how the first two lines mimic each other, most notably the first and last words ("thousand"/"ten thousand" and "vanish"/"extinguish"). However to compare each word in the first and second lines elicits some interesting contrasts. So "mountain" is lined up with "paths." I asked my students how many paths each mountain had. It took a while, but ten, right? It reminded me of "Loveliest of trees," the poem by A. E. Housman:
"Now of my three score years and ten
Twenty will not come again.
And take from seventy springs a score
It only leaves me fifty more.
"And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty years are little room.
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow."
Of the first verse quoted here, the first two lines can be described in this equation: (3 X 20 + 10) - 20. And the last two lines describes the same thing: 70 - 20 = 50. There is something absurd about having math in poetry. However, both poems perhaps push readers' sense of numerical abstraction to overlay their sense of beauty. The poet literally "abstracts" (lit. draws away) himself from the whole sensual experience, making the vision more pathetic and profound.
Continuing the comparison of words in the first two lines, "birds" are then associated with "people," and "fly" with "trace." Birds vanish from the skyline, and the tracks of people along trails disappear--the contrast comments on the phenomenon that birds in flight leave no trace (unlike humans when they walk), and also suggests that human footprints, symbolic of human activity, also vanish with no more lasting remnant than the paths of birds through the sky. It's very powerful to meditate simply on those first two lines. We start to notice that after giving us the image of birds flying, the poet takes that away from us--by the final word, "vanished." So there aren't birds there after all, it seems. This first line also suggests that the poet has been there awhile--long enough to have noticed the birds passing. And yet, now that one thinks of it, where did they go? Have even birds left this forbidding region? Secondly, the traces of people are disappearing. Perhaps readers can assume it is raining or snowing, obscuring all tracks.
Again "solitary" and "single" suggest another two line comparison, especially since these two words rhyme as well, as noted earlier. That means we have "boat" and "fishing" and then "cape/hat/fisherman" with "cold/river/snow." The last three lines could be thought of us "a cold river with snow" or "a cold river and snow." But if readers choose to strictly correlate it with "cape/hat/fisherman" perhaps it is also an adj./adj./n clause, as in "snow that is cold and in the river = cold, river snow." The three words, "cold" "river" and "snow" seem to me a heavy paring. There is no escaping the sense of coldness and dreary-ness. Now, because I'm thinking of the two lines as parallel, I can imagine the figure slumped over itself, the fisherman barely visible under his cape and hat, himself almost like just another pile of snow in the river.
Here is my translation*:
The birds flying have vanished beyond the mountains
No trace remains of man's footprints along the trails
An orphaned canoe, a straw hat and cloak
Someone fishes in the icy river
*It is notable to mention that Chinese is nearly always more brief than English. To write an English poem that suggests the succinctness of the Chinese poem one cannot comment on each character. For example I have no English corresponding term for 5 of the 20 characters in the poem, including "thousand," "ten thousand," "fisherman," "single," and "cold". However, I feel that I have not negated the sense that they lend to the poem. Canoe, which is anachronistic, was a compromise against "boat" because I didn't want it to rhyme with "cloak."
