China and the West

Letter from Witter Bynner to Miss MacKinnon ; Santa Fe, July 20 (1931).
[Fir-flower tablets by Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough].
The third question is more difficult. I should say, first of all, that I consider my method more faithful to the balanced meaning of the original than Mrs. Ayscough's method. Suppose, for instance, the radical meaning of composite English words were translated into a for¬eign tongue—suppose "extravagant terms" were translated "beyond- straying terms" or "at daybreak" "when the day cracked"—then you might have a literal translation of what, in English, correspond to a combination of root strokes in a Chinese character; but the meaning and stress of the word in its context would be distorted and swollen beyond the intent of the author. It is true that a Chinese scholar pleasingly feels in an ideograph the two or three roots that make the meaning. It is true also that a Western scholar feels, say, in a word made from Greek or Latin the interesting original courtship of images which have quieted into a final everyday marriage of meaning. The Chinese character for "quarrel" indicates two women under one roof; but imagine translating it that way. Equally absurd is it to say "upper and lower garments" when the character, though literally conveying that, means "clothes."
I made my translations from literal texts given me by Dr. Kiang —or my other Chinese friends. Their phrases were often, of course, odd and tickling to the fancy. My constant effort, however, was to I let detailed fancy go, for the sake of the imagination behind the poem—to find as nearly as I could, the exact English equivalent of, the Chinese word—the real rather than the literal translation—that I is if "literal translation" means translating parts of words and then | binding the parts of words into phrases rather than translating the customary finished meaning of the composite word. In a way, I was lucky in not knowing the Chinese language. A moderate knowledge might have tempted me astray from poetry into etymology.
My first interest in Chinese poetry came from Chinese friends whom I met in California during 1917 and 1918. With their help I translated "ancient" poems (mostly from the Confucian "Book of Poetry", I believe) which appear in my "Canticle of Pan" (Knopf). In 1918, Dr. Kiang (on the faculty of the University of California, as I was) initiated me deeper into the realm, and ever since then I have been working with him on "The Jade Mountain", which the Chinese call "modern" poetry. Before that, in 1916, on my first trip to China, I had been drawn to its poetry by stanzas written on the earliest acquired of my collection of Chinese paintings. Some day I shall translate those inscriptions.