#mayhuang

Introduction (abridged)         

The bolded poems are the ones I will discuss today.                       

The nine poems I chose to translate for this portfolio reflect the ways I have been introduced to poetry, as well as the kind of poems that speak to me as a writer who is interested in work that is inherently ‘bilingual,’ influenced by both English and Chinese language and culture. The portfolio begins with classical poems that I read as a child and concludes with contemporary poems that I will likely encounter most in the future as I engage with Hong Kong’s contemporary literary landscape. In between are works that reveal literary exchange and influence transpiring between Chinese and English poetic traditions. The range of poems posed formal and stylistic challenges that deepened my understanding of translation—in theory and in practice.

The portfolio is organized somewhat chronologically: it begins with two classical Chinese poems from the Song Dynasty, “Staying in the Bo Xian Temple on a Snowy Night” by Su Shi (the one after which I was named) and Partridge Sky by Li Qingzhao. It then segues into “Waiting for you, in the rain” by Yu Guangzhong, a Taiwanese poet who studied in the U.S. and incorporated elements of Western poetry into Chinese poems written with a classical undercurrent.

The three pieces that follow were written by authors who were significantly influenced by the work of Western poets; Zhai Yongming was heavily influenced by Sylvia Plath, Zang Di wrote “The Society of Digging into Fresh Soil” as an elegy to Seamus Heaney, and Ya Xian wrote “Chicago” based on Carl Sandburg’s poem of the same name. 

The next two translations are of Chinese poems that were written in Western forms, an Italian sonnet by Feng Zhi and a sestina by contemporary Hong Kong poet Zhong Guoqiang. I finally conclude the portfolio with “Mosquitoes,” another work by Zhong Guoqiang, ending on a note close to home.

_____________________________________________

1) 雪夜獨宿柏仙庵

蘇軾 晚雨纖纖變玉霙，小庵高臥有余清。 夢驚忽有穿窗片，夜靜惟聞瀉竹聲。 稍壓冬溫聊得健，未濡秋旱若為耕。 天公用意真難會，又作春風爛漫晴。

Staying in the Bo Xian Temple on a Snowy Night

Su Shi

Night rain turns into sleet, fine as jade while pure winds blow on temples aloft Suddenly, something pierces my window mid-dream, startling me awake Yet the only sound I hear in the quiet dark Is the bamboo leaves’ quick cascade Hardly past a winter cold myself, how will fields recover from the autumn draught? Heaven’s intents are hard to guess, For soon again the spring breeze will blow Color and brightness into our days.

2) The Society of Digging into Fresh Soil 

Zang Di —In Memoriam Seamus Heaney, 1939 – 2013 The Ireland I love. Far enough But never foreign. Every time I dig up the orchids of Ireland, my spade sinks into fresh soil, finding beautiful strength in lonely words. Deep green tips of leaves can sway an attentive heart. How might the stamen, swaying in the wind of our words, already the prisoner of poetry, look upon human life? Only the sweat of our brows can fill the pit We dig into the ground. And in this age of hardship only such a pit can deepen the trust between us. So pick up the phone and ring up your reflections— They have persisted for far too long In the scenery of scenery. Love is ice. If you do not believe me, give it a try. The last day of August went by like an elephant. Don’t look at me like that. I am now a blind man. A bottom line like this needs a blind man like me. Delmore Schwartz, after whom Bellow modeled Humboldt in Humboldt’s Gift, once said, with much sorrow— “For like a gun is touch.” The situation is indeed grim but you, who persisted in opening the forge’s oily shop curtain, taught me to strike like the hammer, to trust every touch.

3) Sonnet 25

Example of 1st stanza:  案頭擺設著用具， 架上陳列著書籍， 終日在些靜物裡 我們不住地思慮；

Àn tóu bǎi shè zhe yòng jù, jià shàng chén liè zhe shū jí, zhōng rì zài xiē jìng wù li wǒ men bù zhù dì sī lǜ;

Tools placed on a table top, Rows of books arranged on shelves, Such still life around ourselves All day long lost in thought; Speaking voices do not sing , Routine motions do not flow; Blankly ask how birds should know To soar by flapping wings. Only in the still of night Will bodies breathe meter and rhyme, Feel the air at play inside, Salt water play with blood inside— And maybe hear, in a dream, The sky and sea calling out our names?

4) Mosquitoes I don’t know when we began eating at the nearby restaurant not wanting to trouble mother on New Year’s and other family gatherings until the time we spent in the old house grew shorter and the mosquitoes swarming in from all directions grew fiercer, forming a herd, ready to risk everything, so close I could see the space between their fuzzy antenna and empty stomachs I slap, slap the empty air without pause. Mother goes about her daily chores, utterly indifferent to the house full of mosquitoes About time to go, mother. Massaging her belly, she walks out and says no, face dimmed by lamplight, because of an upset stomach Perhaps because, seeing the white hair on her temples, she ate some of the vermicelli left out since breakfast this afternoon Why wasn’t it warm why didn’t we microwave it before she took a bite? Mother stayed home on the night of the winter solstice, refusing our company I saw a sky of mosquitoes slowly, slowly land on walls of the old house, the kitchen counter, the chairs, the desks, the cups, the bowls, the chopsticks… Time belongs to them, now. Over the phone, father says don’t worry, Mother is asleep, and my head starts to ache on the West Rail Line As if I were in the old house with mosquitos invading my skull over and over, thin wings quivering at high frequency, piercing through a pain I had forgotten

案頭擺設著用具，

架上陳列著書籍，

終日在些靜物裡

            A “total translation” ultimately aims to carry over “words, sounds, voice, melody, gesture, event,” and more essential qualities of a poem. So what Rothenberg translates is not only the ‘words,’ of a poem, but also a sense of the “song and of the attitudes” it encapsulates.

            To account for all vocal sounds in the poems he was translating, Rothenberg would translate the music of the poetry “onto the page” (one can liken this to concrete poetry)—for instance, he spread out the letters of “HEH EH HEH” on the page to convey the slow regularity, deliberateness, repetition, and other lyrical qualities of a song-poem. Such a technique also points to Rothenberg’s project of getting “as far away” as he can from “writing"—he would sing his own words over a tape and replace the original poet’s vocables with sounds relevant to himself.

            Furthermore, his claim that "poets shape their worlds through their poems” says much about his project to translate in this “total” sense, translating not only the words of a poem but also the living situation and attitudes of the people who speak its language. For instance, he says that he can “hardly speak of the poetry without using words that would describe the people as well.”

            From my understanding, it seems that Rothenberg is translating context and experience, particularly the experience of musically interpreting a poem, at once.

For this exercise, I decided to also translate a song, so that I could experiment with translating music through poetry. I chose to translate three stanzas from Jay Chou’s “Common Jasmine Orange” (七里香) so that I could focus on translating closely in a ‘total’ sense (as opposed to tackling the entire song). 

Song: 1:23 -3:10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bbp9ZaJD_eA

雨下整夜

我的愛溢出就像雨水

院子落葉

跟我的思念厚厚一疊

幾句是非

也無法將我的熱情冷卻

妳出現在我詩的每一頁

雨下整夜

我的愛溢出就像雨水

窗台蝴蝶

像詩裡紛飛的美麗章節

我接著寫

把永遠愛妳寫進詩的結尾

妳是我唯一想要的了解

雨下整夜

我的愛溢出就像雨水

院子落葉

跟我的思念厚厚一疊

幾句是非

也無法將我的熱情冷卻

妳出現在我詩的每一頁

Rain falls all night   

my love pours out just like each drop, leaves

fall outside

piling up with my every thought, words

left and right

cannot cool the fire in my heart

on every page of my poem

you are a part

Rain falls all night   

my love pours out just like each drop, as

butterflies fly

on the windowsill like beautiful stanzas and

so I write

into the last lines of my poem

I will love you forever

you are the only one I want to know…

  Rain falls all night   

my love pours out just like each drop, leaves

fall outside 

______________________________________________________________

            In general, the line lengths and spacing I have adopted match the way Jay Chou sings the lyrics. The highlight of the song is the triumphant opening line of the chorus, “雨下整夜,” and I wanted to preserve that effect by also opening the song with four strong syllables (rain falls all night). The accented syllables (the 2nd and 4th) are the same ones stressed in the song.

            I also tried to make sure that the lines rhymed in roughly the same places as they do in the song. Because the singer segues from line 2 to 3 pretty smoothly, I conclude line 2 with “leaves” so that it creates an enjambment effect (I adopted the same tactic for lines 4 and 5, etc.). 

            There is a musical interlude that separates the final two stanzas, which I signified with ellipses and additional line breaks. To translate the chorus that returns after the interlude, I included only the first three lines, since rewriting the whole stanza would give the poem a ‘heavier’ feeling. After listening the song to this section, all you need is the familiar first couple of lines to recognize it as a recapitulation.

            Part of Rothenberg’s project regarding a “total translation” was to also convey a sense of the living attitudes of the people whose language he was translating, and that was something I tried to keep in the back of my mind when I was translating this song. I tried to internalize not necessarily the attitude of Taiwanese people ‘as a whole,’ but rather the kind of mindset a Jay Chou fan / contemporary music listener / teenager would have when listening to this song. Through this lens, I wrote lines like, “ I will love you forever / you are the only one I want to know,” which is typical of love song lyrics.

Outline how you think the metaphor is functioning, and why Benjamin used it—how it reflects the task of translation; what labor it seeks to describe or solicit. Then produce a translation that tries to use this metaphor as a guiding methodology

  In “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin writes about how translations reveal the “kinship of languages” because all languages supplement each other in their intentions. As translators, we want our translations to have an effect that echoes the intention of the original in a way that has less to do with ‘meaning’ and more to do with ‘language’ itself.

I found Benjamin’s metaphor of the original text and its translation as fragments “of a vessel” (81) particularly helpful in understanding what he considers to be the task of the translator. Instead of wanting to “communicate something” semantically, the translator should translate with the aim of bringing two languages into harmony. What is most important about the vessel made by the two languages is not the ‘meaning’ it might carry, but the construction of the vessel itself; when reading a translated work, one should always see the echo of the original. The vessel stays afloat because it is built from the fragments of two languages, strengthened by the “pure language” of “linguistic complementation.” So, I decided to incorporate Benjamin’s suggestion about copying syntax into my guiding methodology for translating the following poem from the Song dynasty. The goal was to achieve a sense of unfamiliarity that coexists with harmony, to move both the writer and the reader to a neutral space where they can be left in peace.                                                                                                                                           

鷓鴣天

  寒日蕭蕭上瑣窗，梧桐應恨夜來霜。

酒闌更喜團茶苦，夢斷偏宜瑞腦香。

秋已盡，日猶長，仲宣懷遠更淒涼。

不如隨分尊前醉，莫負東籬菊蕊黃。

Zhègū tiān hán rì xiāo xiāo shàng suǒ chuāng, wú tóng yīng hèn yèlái shuāng. Jiǔ lán gèng xǐ tuán chá kǔ, mèng duàn piān yí ruì nǎo xiāng. Qiū yǐ jìn, rì yóu zhǎng, zhòng xuān huáiyuǎn gèng qī liáng. Bùrú suí fēn zūn qián zuì, mò fù dōnglí jú ruǐ huáng.

    Partridge Sky

  Winter sun bleakly shines on the latticed window,

the parasol tree must resent last night’s frost

Wine after more favor brick tea’s bitterness,

dream snapped better suit camphor’s fragrance

Autumn is already ending, days feel long,

Zhong Xuan’s nostalgia drearier

Might as well vessel before inebriate,

Not disappoint the eastern bamboo fence’s yellow chrysanthemums

  Like last time, I used the prompt of the writing exercise to inspire a preliminary translation and then revised that translation to end up with something closer to what I would include in my final portfolio. While I tried to make poetic choices in the first draft (as opposed to the strict literalism of last week’s exercise), the rigidity of the syntax produced an almost Google Translate-like effect in the translation, skewing the meaning of several lines. Indeed, the 6th line actually signifies the opposite of what the author intends; she means to say that her nostalgia is drearier than that of Zhong Xuan, although the direct syntactical translation suggests the opposite.

  Yet what preserving the syntax helped me retain in some cases was the brevity of the lines (e.g. “dream snapped better suit camphor’s fragrance”) and the sense of ambiguity we also touched on last time regarding Chinese poetry: poets construct lines mostly made up of verbs and nouns, leting the reader figure out how they connect. In my revised translation, there is an element of syntactical strangeness preserved in lines 3-6.

  However, I nonetheless chose to break Benjamin’s ‘rules’ in a number of places. For instance, I ‘corrected’ the semantic problem in the Zhong Xuan line by adding “I feel,” which also conveniently parallels “feel long” in the line below, creating rhyming sounds to compensate for the fact that I lost all the ending rhymes of the original in this translation (I couldn’t get over this, so I ended up producing a second revision that sort of rhymes). I also changed “vessel before inebriate” (to get drunk by downing the contents of a wine vessel) into “drown my sorrows,” which is an example of me moving the writer towards the reader instead of occupying that neutral space of ‘pure language’ in between. For workshop, I would be interested in hearing what people think about these decisions, as well as ways I could more poetically obscure or clarify meaning in further revisions.

  Partridge Sky (revision 1)

  The cold winter sun bleakly climbs the lattice window,

parasol trees must resent last night’s frost.

Bitter brick tea we always favor after drinking wine,

the camphor’s fragrance always sweeter

upon waking from interrupted dreams.

Drearier than Zhong Xuan’s longing I feel,

Now autumn is fading, and the days feel long.

I might as well drown my sorrows

to not disappoint the yellow chrysanthemums

growing on the eastern bamboo fence.

  Partridge Sky (revision 2 with rhymes)

  The cold winter sun bleakly climbs the lattice window,

parasol trees must resent last night’s frost.

After wine we always prefer bitter brick tea,

the camphor’s fragrance sweeter

upon waking from dreams lost.

Drearier than Zhong Xuan’s longing I feel,

As autumn is fading, and the days feel long.

I might as well drown my sorrows

to not let down the yellow chrysanthemums                   

that along the eastern bamboo fence still grow.

                                        After reading the non-rhyming version above and this rhyming one, which direction do you think I should continue revising in? There are some end rhymes in the latter that seem forced (I also almost wrote “chrysanthemums yellow”), but perhaps I could revise to make them seem more nuanced. Does adding rhymes make the poem seem trite?

    Week 8

  Outline how you think the metaphor is functioning, and why Benjamin used it—how it reflects the task of translation; what labor it seeks to describe or solicit. Then produce a translation that tries to use this metaphor as a guiding methodology

  In “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin writes about how translations reveal the “kinship of languages” because all languages supplement each other in their intentions. As translators, we want our translations to have an effect that echoes the intention of the original in a way that has less to do with ‘meaning’ and more to do with ‘language’ itself.

I found Benjamin’s metaphor of the original text and its translation as fragments “of a vessel” (81) particularly helpful in understanding what he considers to be the task of the translator. Instead of wanting to “communicate something” semantically, the translator should translate with the aim of bringing two languages into harmony. What is most important about the vessel made by the two languages is not the ‘meaning’ it might carry, but the construction of the vessel itself; when reading a translated work, one should always see the echo of the original. The vessel stays afloat because it is built from the fragments of two languages, strengthened by the “pure language” of “linguistic complementation.” So, I decided to incorporate Benjamin’s suggestion about copying syntax into my guiding methodology for translating the following poem from the Song dynasty. The goal was to achieve a sense of unfamiliarity that coexists with harmony, to move both the writer and the reader to a neutral space where they can be left in peace.

                                                                                                                                                     鷓鴣天

  寒日蕭蕭上瑣窗，梧桐應恨夜來霜。

酒闌更喜團茶苦，夢斷偏宜瑞腦香。

秋已盡，日猶長，仲宣懷遠更淒涼。

不如隨分尊前醉，莫負東籬菊蕊黃。

Zhègū tiān hán rì xiāo xiāo shàng suǒ chuāng, wú tóng yīng hèn yèlái shuāng. Jiǔ lán gèng xǐ tuán chá kǔ, mèng duàn piān yí ruì nǎo xiāng. Qiū yǐ jìn, rì yóu zhǎng, zhòng xuān huáiyuǎn gèng qī liáng. Bùrú suí fēn zūn qián zuì, mò fù dōnglí jú ruǐ huáng.

    Partridge Sky

  Winter sun bleakly shines on the latticed window,

the parasol tree must resent last night’s frost

Wine after more favor brick tea’s bitterness,

dream snapped better suit camphor’s fragrance

Autumn is already ending, days feel long,

Zhong Xuan’s nostalgia drearier

Might as well vessel before inebriate,

Not disappoint the eastern bamboo fence’s yellow chrysanthemums

  Like last time, I used the prompt of the writing exercise to inspire a preliminary translation and then revised that translation to end up with something closer to what I would include in my final portfolio. While I tried to make poetic choices in the first draft (as opposed to the strict literalism of last week’s exercise), the rigidity of the syntax produced an almost Google Translate-like effect in the translation, skewing the meaning of several lines. Indeed, the 6th line actually signifies the opposite of what the author intends; she means to say that her nostalgia is drearier than that of Zhong Xuan, although the direct syntactical translation suggests the opposite.

  Yet what preserving the syntax helped me retain in some cases was the brevity of the lines (e.g. “dream snapped better suit camphor’s fragrance”) and the sense of ambiguity we also touched on last time regarding Chinese poetry: poets construct lines mostly made up of verbs and nouns, leting the reader figure out how they connect. In my revised translation, there is an element of syntactical strangeness preserved in lines 3-6.

  However, I nonetheless chose to break Benjamin’s ‘rules’ in a number of places. For instance, I ‘corrected’ the semantic problem in the Zhong Xuan line by adding “I feel,” which also conveniently parallels “feel long” in the line below, creating rhyming sounds to compensate for the fact that I lost all the ending rhymes of the original in this translation (I couldn’t get over this, so I ended up producing a second revision that sort of rhymes). I also changed “vessel before inebriate” (to get drunk by downing the contents of a wine vessel) into “drown my sorrows,” which is an example of me moving the writer towards the reader instead of occupying that neutral space of ‘pure language’ in between. For workshop, I would be interested in hearing what people think about these decisions, as well as ways I could more poetically obscure or clarify meaning in further revisions.

  Partridge Sky (revision 1)

  The cold winter sun bleakly climbs the lattice window,

parasol trees must resent last night’s frost.

Bitter brick tea we always favor after drinking wine,

the camphor’s fragrance always sweeter

upon waking from interrupted dreams.

Drearier than Zhong Xuan’s longing I feel,

Now autumn is fading, and the days feel long.

I might as well drown my sorrows

to not disappoint the yellow chrysanthemums

growing on the eastern bamboo fence.

  Partridge Sky (revision 2 with rhymes)

  The cold winter sun bleakly climbs the lattice window,

parasol trees must resent last night’s frost.

After wine we always prefer bitter brick tea,

the camphor’s fragrance sweeter

upon waking from dreams lost.

Drearier than Zhong Xuan’s longing I feel,

As autumn is fading, and the days feel long.

I might as well drown my sorrows

to not let down the yellow chrysanthemums                   

that along the eastern bamboo fence still grow.

Strategic “ignorance” can be useful in translating culture concepts because it eliminates the cultural biases a native speaker of a particular language is liable to have. I believe most Chinese translators would have hesitated to make many of the creative choices Pound did, feeling like they would be betraying their mother tongue. When we played the exquisite corpse game during Week 1, I found myself more willing to be daring with languages I didn’t understand compared to those that I did. But as this week’s exercise showed me, a combination of both ignorance and attention to the various contexts of the original language can help a poem grow from revision to revision.

The poem I chose to translate, Ya Xian’s “Chicago,” conveys the poet’s distaste towards an industrializing city (as does Sandburg’s poem of the same name) through various metaphors and abstract language that is often disjointing and even violent. What he laments is not only the industrial bent of the city but also the effect such modernization has had on nature and human relationships.

The challenge of this translation was ensuring that a ‘literal’ translation of the poem did not result in a ‘bad’ translation—that is, a translation that reads clunkily and uninformedly misinterprets the source text. Conversely, a translation that literally interprets idioms and attempts to reproduce syntax can create valuable moments of ‘strangeness’ that hark back to the original version.

So, the way I approached this exercise was to take ‘literalism’ into account (I was definitely more conservative with syntax, though) before revising that first draft to end up with a translation that is inevitably informed by such a methodology but closer to a piece that I would include in my final portfolio.

Here is my first attempt: 

Chicago

“City of the Big Shoulders:  They tell me you are wicked” -       Carl Sandburg

In Chicago, we will use buttons to speak of love, ride machine birds to walk green, pick bellis perennis from billboards, below the railroad bridge lies desolate culture                  

From seventh street heading south, I know there is an equation hidden in your hair a rental car captured God’s starlight open both arms to breathe the fragrance of mathematics 

When all the beauty of autumn is electrolyzed kerosene and your debauchery are tightly stuck together my heart will be reduced to an elegy within a blast furnace

Sometimes at dusk timid angels beat their wings but their tender hands are snapped off by electric cables between smokestacks and smokestacks 

It is as if I were beyond the hibiscus flowers of China whistling by myself and fixing my tie, while thinking of my childhood home where a fox should be on a grassy slope                              

So, that night you became mine like a dizzy in cinders butterfly Yes, in Chicago,                      only butterflies are not made of steel                                  

When steam whistles ring a wolfish tune under the man-made pine tree in the garden whose velvet shawl has salvaged this coarse, this illiterate city… 

In Chicago, we will use buttons to write poems, ride mechanic birds to watch the clouds, mow oats from billboards, but have to think about laying out a laughable culture below that railway bridge that has attained desolation

1958

The literal translation was helpful on several levels because it informed a number of the creative choices I ultimately made in my second revision (below). For instance, “狼狽” describes a situation that is embarrassing, awkward, and perhaps even pathetic, but “狼” denotes ‘wolf,’ so I wrote, “ And when steam whistles ring a wolfish tune” in my literal translation. The ferocity and aggression that the wolf conveys seemed important to the poem, so I kept it in my revised draft by describing the whistle of the steam engine as a “wolf whistle” while representing the semantic meaning of 狼狽through “pathetic.”

Like how Pound plays with line breaks in Cathay, I also decided to make creative choices with line breaks in my revision, particularly in the fourth stanza, where it is ‘literal’ to break the line where the fingers “snap off,” and to also create a visual ‘break’ between the two smokestacks. Placing “lies desolate culture” below the “railroad station” line interprets ‘below in a literal, visual sense (whereas it is used metaphorically in the original; culture is not ‘literally’ lying below the bridge). Another change I made in my revision was to write “station” instead of “bridge” because “station” rhymes with “desolation” the way “文化” rhymes with “橋下” in the original couplet. I did the same thing with “aromatic mathematics” to imitate the rhyming couplet that 星光, starlight, and 芬芳, fragrance, form in the second stanza (but I will definitely work on revising this rhyme).

In the sixth stanza, “butterfly” is modified by a string of adjectives (“a dizzy in cinders butterfly”), but the sentence is so drawn out that my instinct was to ‘fix’ it in the revision by placing butterfly first: “a butterfly, dizzy in cinders.” But I decided that I could keep the literal ‘dizziness’ of the sentence and keep “butterfly” at the end of the line by inserting the word “astray” at the beginning and translating the line as, “Astray among cinders like a dizzy butterfly.”

Here is my second revision:

Chicago 

“City of the Big Shoulders:  They tell me you are wicked” -       Carl Sandburg

In Chicago, we will make love by pressing buttons, ride mechanic birds into the spring green, pick bellis perennis from billboards, and lay out a culture of desolation below a railroad station 

Heading south from seventh street, I know there is an equation hidden in your hair a rental car stole the light of God’s star spread your arms and breathe aromatic mathematics

When all the beauty of autumn is electrolyzed, kerosene and your debauchery locked in a tight embrace, my heart will be reduced to an elegy inside a blast furnace. 

Sometimes at dusk, timid angels beat their wings but their tender hands are snapped off by electric cables between smokestack and smokestack 

It is as if I were far away from China and its hibiscus flowers, whistling by myself and fixing my tie, while thinking of my childhood home the fox upon our grassy slope                              

So you became mine that night, Astray among cinders like a dizzy butterfly Yes—in Chicago,                   only butterflies are not made of steel