When I wrote:
> I always appreciate compliments from a real translator,
> however handicapped they may be by not knowing my original
I meant to suggest that if a genuine translator saw the liberties I take
with my originals, (s)he might be less flattering. I suspect it came over a
lot more bumptious than that, which would be entirely out of character. Of
course.
T
Thanks for those comments, Alison. There's a scholarly translation with
detailed commentary by Donal Holzman, Poetry & Politics: The Life & Work of
Juan Chi (CUP, 1976), while John Cayley's Wellsweep Press issued a
'literary' version by someone I can't remember sometime in the late 80s, I
think. The former is very worthy but far too stiff for my liking, whereas
the latter takes so many structural liberties as to render the poems totally
spineless. Do my prejudices show? I'm hoping it's another case of what
Rebecca suggested about Vallejo: the more considered workings the better. I
don't have a full set of the Chinese texts, but at this point I could only
bounce off them in spots anyway, so that doesn't matter. The originals are
famously susceptible to a variety of readings, from personal lyric to
political allegory arthritic with learned references. I'm trying to convey
my own sense of the raw excitement of the poems in the way a personal voice
seems to twist and writhe to be heard through all the Confucian cliches and
pathetic fallacies. The short line I'm using strikes me as quite American,
but I'm trying to preserve a dense, almost archaic, texture of grammar and
syntax; this is my way of registering the tensions I'm interested in. And
all the time, those beautiful clear images just keep coming; I just have to
make sure I don't get in their way . . .
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