What I have for you today is a new translation of a poem by Tu Fu, a contemporary of Li Po and equally famous and beloved in China. The pair of them were T'ang Dynasty (618-906 AD) superstars, which, by Chinese reckoning, was the beginning of the Early Modern Age.
There is a great deal of guesswork involved when translating from classical Chinese, much more so than when translating from Japanese, which at least has grammatical markers. The Japanese use "Kanji" (Chinese characters) in conjunction with two phonetical syllabaries, whereas the Chinese use only Kanji and depend on word order to supply grammar and syntax. You'll see what I mean as we move along.
I got talking about this poem with a Japanese colleague at my school who teaches "Classics" (i.e. Chinese and early Japanese literature) and it soon became apparent that the standard English translation -- the one that shows up on dozens of sites on the Internet; every single site, in fact! -- was putting an interpretation on this text that was aesthetically pleasing (Western-style) but in some ways very inaccurate. It didn't respect the deliberate use of repetitive words, for one thing, and introduced the simile of "spray from a waterfall" which simply doesn't exist in the original.
The title of the poem is "Tou-Kou" in the Japanese reading, or "Climbing Upwards" / "Ascending the Mountain".
To begin with, here's the standard translation:
In a sharp gale from the wide sky apes are whimpering,
Birds are flying homeward over the clear lake and white sand,
Leaves are dropping down like the spray of a waterfall,
While I watch the long river always rolling on.
I have come three thousand miles away. Sad now with autumn
And with my hundred years of woe, I climb this height alone.
Ill fortune has laid a bitter frost on my temples,
Heart-ache and weariness are a thick dust in my wine.
Actually, that's not so bad, unless you actually look at the Chinese. You can check out the original poem on the following website:
http://wengu.tartarie.com/wg/wengu.php?l=Tangshi&no=186
What is rather pleasing and innovative about this site is that you can pass your cursor over the Chinese characters and English translations will pop up. To save time, what you end up with is something like this:
Wind - sharp/cutting/biting - heaven - high - monkey(s) - cry - lament;
Lake - clear/pristine/pure - sand - white -bird(s) - fly - return/revolve ;
Without - boundary - falling - tree - mournful- mournful - down
Not - limit - long - river/waters - roll - roll - come;
10,000 - Ri - sad - autumn - always - made/constructed - guest;
100 - year(s) - many - illnesses - alone - climb - station;
difficult - disaster - bitter - hate - complicated - frost - temple/brow;
heavy rain - flood - new - stop/pause/settle/ -muddy/dusty - wine -cup.
I am not a Kanji scholar. I can read several hundred, both simple and difficult -- totally unsystematically -- plus, of course, the two phonetic scripts which are easy to learn. Perhaps I wish to avoid the shame of being totally illiterate in the society in which I live. They don't make things easy. I am below par since 900 Kanji is considered the borderline of functional literacy: 2000 + is normal. Japanese children learn Kanji from the age of 6 to 18 -- from First Year primary to high school graduation -- and have the benefit of matching what they learn to the spoken language which they use as a matter of course. Pity the poor foreigner, who is often completely at sea in this highly literate culture. This, I think, is where the Japanese would rather keep us -- at sea, or across the sea, or if the worst comes to the worst, deathly silent and under it. Acknowledging foreigners can still be rather fraught and tense and difficult. It can seem awfully funny to us. To them it's not.
Right, back to the poem. Here is my version:
Under a cutting wind from the open sky, monkeys are sadly keening,
Over clear lake waters, over white sands, the birds are flying home;
The autumn leaves come fluttering, fluttering down,
The never-ending river is flowing, flowing ....
Ten thousand leagues and the sadness of an autumn traveller:
A hundred years of sorrow attend me, as all alone I climb;
Misfortunes press down on me, frost clings upon my brow.
In this flood of weariness, disused, my wine cup gathers dust.
I have a sort of visual feel for this poem -- I think I can "see" what the guy is saying. Laugh away, but it can be spotted through the Kanji. All these poems are visual "events" and, it must be said, thank heavens for print which the Chinese invented, because brushwork upon a scroll might make these things collectors items but they also become nearly totally illegible!
I was trying to re-interpret Tu Fu and I don't really know if I got there. What I do know is that the "standard translation" all over the Internet is inaccurate and essentially out-of-tune with what he actually wrote more than 1300 years ago. My translation is open to query and criticism, naturally enough, but I just wanted to challenge the standard version.
Is Mise,
Brendan
