Lu Chai

[seekingferret]

This is from a book I have called 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, edited by Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz. The book features an 8th Century Chinese poem called "Lu Chai" by Wang Wei, commonly translated into English as "Deer Park" or something along those lines. It then includes 19 different translations of the poem along with explorations of the differences between the translations.



My favorite translation, though, belongs to editor and Literature Nobelist Octavio Paz.

En la Ermita del Parque de los Venados

No se ve gente en este monte.
Sólo se oyen, lejos, voces.
Por los ramajes la luz rompe.
Tendida entre la yerba brilla verde.

And here's a good one in English, by Burton Watson

Deer Fence

Empty hills, no one in sight,
only the sound of someone talking;
late sunlight enters the deep wood,
shining over the green moss again.

ETAAnd just for marina, a French translation by G. Margouliès

La Forêt

Dans la montagne tout est solitaire,
On entend de bien loin l'écho des voix humaines,
Le soleil qui pénètre au fond de la forêt
Reflète son éclat sur la mousse vert.

Comments

[dhobikikutti]

Non English translation plus the English one! ::pumps fist in air::

[seekingferret]

:-) My book also has a couple of translations into French, but my French isn't good enough for me to evaluate them, sadly.

[marina]

POST THEM THOUGH! Some of us are better with Mandarin/English/French than with Spanish :p

[seekingferret]

Fine, are you happy now? :-P

[marina]

:D IT'S SO PRETTY. I get to go over the Mandarin and go "oooh yes, that's how I'd translate that!"

Seriously this is language geekery HEAVEN.

[seekingferret]

If you like this, I really, really recommend the book.

[inner_v0ice]

Oh my gosh, this is far too awesome! My Spanish is conversational and my French reading comprehension is via Spanish cognates, so I can't evaluate the sound of the poetry, but just looking at the different word choices is fascinating!
Also for instance comparing the level of detail/explicitness that the translator chooses: "voces" versus "someone talking" versus "voix humaines"...I see the character 人 in the Chinese, which sort of implies to me that "voix humaines" is the closest literal translation...? (Yeah, I have a hanzi/kanji vocabulary of like...10 characters, haha...)

And the one that I can appreciate aesthetically, in English, is beautiful. I love the whole scene described, but especially love the two middle lines--"only the sound of someone talking; late sunlight enters the deep wood"--they appeal so much to the senses.

Also, I searched for the book on Amazon, expecting a price like $30 or something (I am broke and that price would break my heart), and found that it's selling for LESS THAN $10?? Oh man, I am totally getting it.

[inner_v0ice]

(Also, hi there! Sorry I couldn't help with your good_ficday fic. School ate my brain...)

[seekingferret]

I think my favorite thing about both that particular English and Spanish translation (I can't speak for the Chinese original or the French translation) is the lack of any presence of agency. Paz achieves it through the Spanish impersonal voice, while Watson does it mostly by barely using verbs at all. It's this scene where you kind of feel like any human intrusion at all would ruin the moment.

That sensation is why I chose these translations over others, many of which clumsily introduce a first person narration or something else that compromises the aloneness.

And yes, the book is awesome and even though it's pretty damned short, totally worth the 7 bucks or so I paid for it.

[inner_v0ice]

Ooooh, I didn't notice that about the English and Spanish translations, but now that you mention it--you're right! And you're so right about the effect it produces, too--the only human presence in those versions is the distant voices, no narrator.

"Dans la montagne tout est solitaire" also strikes me as a beautiful way to put it, but again, I don't actually speak French. :P

The book sounds absolutely perfect to me; I'm the kind of geek who enjoys reading Ralph Hexter's line-by-line commentary on Fitzgerald's translation of the Odyssey as much as, if not more than, actually reading Fitzgerald's translation itself. (now that's sad.)