“The ethics of translation : Gary Snyder and Chinese literature” (Publication, 2009)
Year
2009
Text
Tsai, Robin Cheng-hsing. The ethics of translation : Gary Snyder and Chinese literature. In : Ariel ; vol. 40, no 2-3 (2009).
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Type
Publication
Mentioned People (1)
Snyder, Gary
(San Francisco, Calif. 1930-) : Schriftsteller, Dichter, Professor of English, University of California Davis
[Reproduction of the texts with the permission by Gary Snyder, January 2013].
[Reproduction of the texts with the permission by Gary Snyder, January 2013].
Subjects
Literature : Occident : United States of America
/
References / Sources
Chronology Entries (3)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1950- |
Gary Snyder and China : general Quellen [Chinese and Buddhist literature]. Chang, Kwang-chih. The archaeology of ancient China [ID D13609]. Confucius. [Texts]. Elvin, Mark. The pattern of the Chinese past [ID D12822]. Fenollosa, Ernest. Epoch of Chinese and Japanese art [ID D5101]. Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry [ID D22141]. Frodsham, John D. The murmuring stream [ID D19382]. Gernet, Jacques. Daily life in China on the eve of the Mongol invasion. (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1962). Grousset, René. The empire of the steppes. (New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 1970). Kahn, Paul. The secret history of the Mongols : the origin of Chinghis Khan : an adaptation of the Yuan ch'ao pi shih. (Berkeley, Calif. : North Point Press, 1984). Karlgren, Bernhard. Glosses on the Book of odes [ID D3516]. Laozi. Dao de jing. Marco Polo. The travels. (New York, N.Y. : Penguin, 1958). Needham, Joseph. Science and civilisation in China. Payne, Robert. The white pony [ID D32201]. Pound, Ezra. [Translations of Chinese poetry]. Fairbank, John K. ; Reischauer, Edwin O. East Asia [ID D8482]. Hawkes, David. Chu ci : the songs of the South [ID D14573]. Sherman, E. Lee ; Wen, Fong. Streams and mountains without end. In : Artibus Asiae (1976). Siréen, Osvald. The Chinese on the art of painting [ID D29304]. Sowerby, Arthur de Carle. Nature in Chinese art. (New York, N.Y. : John Day, 1940). Ssu-ma Ch'ien. Records of the grand historian [ID D10059]. Su, Tung-p'o [Su, Shi]. Su Tung-p'o : selections from a Sung dynasty poet [ID D10954]. Sullivan, Michael. On the origins of landscape representation in Chinese art. In : Archives of the Chinese Art society of America ; vol. 7 (1953). Sze, Mai Mai. The way of Chinese landscape painting. (New York, N.Y. : Vintage, 1959). Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. [Texts]. Tang shi san bai shou du ben. [300 Tang poems]. 唐詩三百首讀本 Tuan, Yi-fu. China. (Chicago, Ill. : Aldine, 1970). Waley, Arthur. [Translations of Chinese poetry]. Watson, Burton. Chinese lyricism [ID D10951]. Yoshikawa, Kôjirô. An introduction to Song poetry [ID D10945]. Zhuangzi. [Works]. Sekundärliteratur 1972 Wand, David Happell Hsin-fu [Wang, David Rafael] : Gary Snyder found in classical Chinese poetry in translation a sense of the harmony of man and nature 'better and to me more accurate than anything in English or Western poetry tradition'. Being a mountain-climber, Snyder finds a spiritual affinity with the Chinese landscape poet Xie Lingyun. He also admires Wang Wei and Yuan Zhen. Snyder finds no simple rule or rules for translating Chinese poetry. Being a Buddhist like Wang Wei and Wei Yinwu and being steeped in the tradition of China, whose culture he has studied, he is adequately trained to be their interpreter. Believing fully that 'whatever is or ever was in any other culture can reconstructed from the unconscious through [Zen] meditation. Snyder subscribes to the theory that a poet is a medium through whom other voices or spirits would distill and speak. Being thoroughly immersed in the translation and explication of Chinese poets as Han Shan, Wang Wei and Wei Yingwu, he penetrated into the essence of these classical Chinese poets and emerges as their twentieth-century American medium. Totally identified with them in his Zen outlook and sensibility, he not only lends the Chinese poets his voice but also fuses with them so skillfully as to make us wonder if he were their poetic reincarnation. With his Taoist-Zen orientation, Snyder believes only in the constancy of flux. Just as the Taoists believe that water is the highest good, because it is characterized by eternal fluidity, Snyder subscribes to no fixed principle about prosody, but tacitly agrees that organicity and spontaneity are the bases of satisfactory rhythm in poetry. As the rhythm of the Chinese poems is totally incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with the sound pattern and tonal variations of the Chinese language, a knowledge of Chinese prosody might have contributed to Snyder's use of syllabic count and stress patterns in some of his short poems. Snyder has learned a lesson from classical Chinese poets. And this lesson can by summarized as : make the poem as compressed as possible and omit all words that do not absolutely contribute to the image. 1986 Yip Wai-lim : It is no accident that Snyders early Amerindian studies, his love for Taoism and Chinese landscape poetry and his Ch'an Buddhist training all converge into one center of awareness where man becomes truly 'moral' by trusting his natural being and by 'following the grain'. The primitive mode of perception of nature was concrete, viewing things as holistically self-complete ; it was a state of total harmony between man and nature before polarization. The Taoist philosophy and esthetic at work in Chinese landscape poetry seeks the restoration of the original mode of perception, giving back to things their own status and their natural endowment and function, allowing them to emerge from their silent world as self-generating, self-conditioning, self-complete beings. In Snyder's paraphrase, this is 'the non-human, non-verbal world, which is the world of nature as nature is itself, before language, before custom, before culture. Ch'an Buddhism, which also give primacy to this world, attempts to teach man, through intuition and poetic flashes in the form of 'kung-an (koan), to live and function within nature's way ; to do this by a process of dispossessing the partial and reduced forms that intellectualization has imposed upon him and which has thus distorted his original commerce with nature's potentials. For Snyder, the underlying principle is the complete awareness of all the beings in Nature as 'self-so-complete' or 'tzu-jan' as the Taoists and the Chan Buddhists would say. It is upon this ground that a new humanism is to be built or rebuilt. 2007 Robin Chen-hsing Tsai : Snyder claims that Christianity desacralizes nature. His knowledge of nature, along with his life experience and proclivity toward direct action, leads to his dual vision of verse-making : 'A poet faces two directions : one is to the world of people and language and man and society, and the other is to the nonhuman, nonverbal world, which is nature as nature is itself, and the world of human nature – the inner world – as it is itself, before language, before custom, before culture'. From a Zen-Buddhist perspective, the poet is strongly convinced that 'the notion of emptiness engenders compassion. Snyder's idealization of the other stems from his deep involvement with the cultural other in/of Eastern thinking, including (Tibetan) Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen Buddhism (in China and Japan). He writes poetry so as to arouse our 'ecological consciousness' in response to the call of the other. Generall speaking, Snyder's notions of the other are threefold : 1) the human other ; 2) the nonhuman other ; 3) the 'other in the self' or ecological unconscious, 'the wild'. Snyder is both romantic and anti-romantic in his attitude toward 'freedom' in nature, in part because the art of the wild, being 'abyssal', 'disorderly', and 'chaotic'. He looks to the East for religious and cultural inspiration, hoping that the Zen Buddhist's conception of compassion will help achieve and East-West fusion. 2009 Robin Cheng-hsing Tsai : Gary Snyder was much influenced by the Beat generation and countercultural movement of the fifties and sixties, which closely linked anti-establisment politics with non-Western (especially Asian) religions and modes of thought. He attempts to sensitize us to the constant disruptions of our environment by rationalized, capitalist and essentially Western technology. Poet and translator as well as radical ecologist, anarchist-pacifist and Native American mythographer, Snyder was also a disciple of Confucianism, Daoism and Zen Buddhism. These cross-fertilizing influences form the basis of his eco-poetics. Snyder's translation of Chinese literature, in particular poetry and Buddhist scriptures, has been instrumental in (re)shaping his imagination of the local and the global. His interest in Asian texts and philosophies has been a crucial element in his expression of a transcultural, post-civilizational, post-human 'culture of wildness'. In Snyder's view, Western discourse of the human and social sciences has been uncritical of the centrality it has historically accorded to culture, civilization and man. A very important 'Other-culture' for Snyder is ancient China. In addition to its Daoist-Buddhist spiritual values, which recognize the vital importance and centrality of the earth in a way that the Western or Middle Eastern monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) do not. Chinese civilization has a very old writing system that includes historical, religious-philosophical and literary texts. This means that the rich ancient culture of China is readily 'translatable'. Snyder's literary and cultural translation of traditional Chinese literature, mostly classical poetry and Zen-Buddhist texts, helps Western readers to see that their horizon of expectations is too narrow and that they need a much wider and more encompassing cultural-environmental imagination. Snyder readily admits the enduring creative influence of Chinese landscape paintings on his imagination that began with the visit to the Seattle Art Museum. 2009 Joan Qionglin Tan : Snyder developed his ecopoetic way by absorbing a variety of influences from global subcultures : American Indian culture, Hinduism, Japanese haiku, Japanese Nô plays, Chinese classical poetry, Chinese landscape painting, and different branches of Buddhism. His works cover Indian Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Huayan Buddhism, Chan Buddhism and Rinzai Zen, whereas his daily practice is 'zazen' ('sitting in meditation') as a Zen practitioner. What he adopted in his poetry is consistent with his belief that 'poetry also exists as part of a tradition'. In his eyes, 'the collective unconscious' and 'cultural history' are embedded in 'the language' of a tradition. Snyder's 'cultural unconscious' refers to the active interaction in translation he created between his mountain experiences on the coast of western America and Han Shan's seclusion in the costal mountain ranges of eastern China. Chinese landscape paintings, Ezra Pound's ideogrammic method and Zen practice gave Snyder an impetus to study Chinese culture and Buddhism. As a teenager Snyder was greatly influence by his first viewing of Chinese landscape paintings at the Seattle Art Museum. He was surprised to find en echo in his soul when confronted by the Chinese depiction of the world in the painting. The same empathy for nature in his own aesthetic sensibilities prefigures his later choice of the Chinese tradition in his poetry. Snyder's interest in Chinese poetry is inseparable from his belief in Mahayana Buddhism. His enthusiasm for Mahayana Buddhism reflects his respect for primitivism and priorities he expressed in his poetry. He found that Chan and Chan poetry suited him because they express the ineffable 'dao in 'koans' and transparent images. Snyder articulates his own unique manifesto of ecopoetry in the hope of legitimating right understanding, right speech and right action. The idea is publicly expressed from the angle of Buddhist environmentalism with an imperative voice through the poem. As a poet in contemporary times, Snyder believes that one should have a right understanding of the relationship between man and nature. In this place, plants, animals, land and planets are in a harmonious and ecological balance. |
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| 2 | 1996 |
Snyder, Gary. Mountains and rivers without end [ID D29321]. Endless streams and mountains. Ch'i shan Wu Chin Clearing the mind and sliding in to that created space, a web of waters streaming over rocks, air misty but not raining, seeing this land from a boat on a lake or a board slow river, casting by. The path comes down along a lowland stream Slips behind boulders and leafy hardwoods, Reappears in a pine grove, no farms around, just tidy cottages and shelters, gateways , rest stops, roofed but unwalled work space, - a warm damp climate; a trail of climbing stairsteps forks upstream. Big ranges lurk behind these rugged little outcrops – these spits of low ground rocky uplifts layered pinnacles aslant, flurries of brushy cliffs receding, far back and high above, vague peaks. A man hunched over, sitting on a log another stands above him, lifts a staff, a third, with a roll of mats or a lute, looks on; a bit offshore two people in a boat. The trail goes far inland, somewhere back around a bay, lost in distant foothill slopes & back again at a village on the beach, and someone's fishing. Rider and walker cross a bridge above a frothy braided torrent that descends from a flurry of roofs like flowers temples tucked between cliffs, a side trail goes there; a jumble of cliffs above, ridge tops edged with bushes, valley fog below a hazy canyon. A man with a shoulder load leans into the grade. Another horse and a hiker, the trail goes up along cascading streambed no bridge in sight – comes back through chinquapin or liquidambars; another group of travelers. Trail's end at the edge of an inlet below a heavy set of dark rock hills. Two moored boats with basket roofing, a boatman in the bow looks lost in thought. Hills beyond rivers, willows in a swamp, a gentle valley reaching far inland. The watching boas has floated off the page. At the end of the painting the scroll continues on with seals and Poems. It tells a further tale : '- Wang Wen-wei saw this at the mayor's house in Ho-tung Town, year 1205. Wrote at the end of it, 'The Fashioner of Things has no original intentions Mountains and rivers are spirit, condenses.' '…Who has come up with these miraculous forests and springs ? Pale ink on fine white silk.' Later that month someone named Li Hui added, '…Most people can get along with the noise of dogs and chickens; Everybody cheerful in these peaceful times. But I – why are my tastes so odd? I love the company of streams and boulders.' T'ien Hsieh of Wei-lo, no date, next wrote, '…the water holds up the mountains, The mountains go down in the water…' In 1332 Chih-shun adds, '…This is truly a painting worth careful keeping. And it has poem-colophons from the Sung and the Chin dynasties. That it survived dangers of fire and war makes it even rarer.' In the mid-seventeenth century one Wang To had a look at it: 'My brother's relative by marriage, Wên-sun, is learned and has good taste. He writes good prose and poetry. My brother brought over this painting of his to show me...' The great Ch'ing dynasty collector Liang Ch'ing-piao owned it, but didn't write on it or cover it with seals. From him it went into the Imperial collection down to the early twentieth century. Chang Ta-ch'ien sold it in 1949. Now it's at the Cleveland Art Museum, Which sits on a rise that looks out toward the waters of Lake Erie. Step back and gaze again at the land. it rises and subsides – ravines and cliffs like waves of blowing leaves – stamp the foot, walk with it, clap turn, the creeks come in, ah strained through boulders, mountains walking on the water, water ripples every hill. – I walk out of the museum – low gray clouds over the lake – Chill March breeze. Old ghost ranges, sunken rivers, come again stand by the wall and tell their tale, walk the path, sit the rains, grind the ink, wet the brush, unroll the broad white space: lead out and tip the moist black line. Walking on walking, Under foot earth turns. Streams and mountains never stay the same. Note : A hand scroll by this name showed up in Shansi province, central China, in the thirteenth century. Even then the painter was unknown, 'a person of the Sung Dynasty.' Now it's on Turtle Island. Unroll the scroll to the left, a section at a time, as you let the right side roll back in. Place by place unfurls. ……… Hsüan Tsang went to India 629 AD returned to China 645 with 657 sûtras, images, mandalas, and fifty relics – a curved frame pak with a parasol, embroidery, carving, incense censer swinging as he walked the Pamir the Tarim Turfan the Punjab the doab of Ganga and Yamuna, he carried 'emptiness' He carried 'mind only' Vijnaptimâtra The humpbacked flute player Kokop'ele His hump is a pack. ............. The humb-backed flute player Shooting the Hundred-Pace Rapids Su Tung P'o saw, for a moment, It all stand still. "I stare at the water : It moves with unspeakable slowness". ……….. Sekundärliteratur 1999 Anthony Hunt : Gary Snyder told Katherine McNeil that "Mountains and rivers is a title for a number of Chinese landscape paintings. One is by the Yuan dynasty painter Xuben, whose work inspired me. I'm writing about the complementarity of mountains and rivers, but that's really the planet, taking that on." The Cleveland scroll is an unsigned handscroll done in ink and slight coloring on silk with nine colophons that provide information about the work's early history. Forty-eight seals of collectors, including eight belonging to Liang Qingbiao (1620-1691), give further evidence of the transmission of the scroll from the 1340s on ; but it is now thought by several eminent authorities to be more likely to date around 1150. Snyder draws attention to the scroll's anonymity in a note that concludes the first section of his poem 'the painter was unknown, a person of the Sung dynasty'. The misty painted Chinese mountains seen by Snyder in Seattle are 'real' on several levels : in a generic sense they appear to him a true reflection of the kind of mountains with which he grew up, the verifiable Cascade and Olympic ranges. Yet the mountains painted by the Chinese artist were not the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, but in their carefully drawn verisimilitude they are a real image of those Chinese mountains. These are mountains that Snyder feels are 'magical and difficult, the routes are not clear, yet they are passable'. After the Yuan dynasty, Snyder theorizes that 'painting kept love of nature alive' for a civilization that was 'living more in cities and farther from the hills'. At times, Snyder walks the spaces of the landscape painting as if they were actually under his feet ; the trails of the painting are maplike in his mind. At other times, his understanding moves outside the painting as he coolly becomes critical of its style or of the civilization that style reveals. And then there are the times when he clearly imagines going 'beyond' into the spaces farther than the spaces of the painting, into 'visionary timeless lands of mountain rocks and air-mist-breath and far calm vistas'. Snyder has painted numberless little travelers across the scroll of his poetic landscape. Some are historical, while some are mythical or legendary ; some are ghostly ; many are human, and many more are animal. 'Fellow travelers in the scroll' as Snyder said, 'are the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, bears, and elderly farm woman, wild sheep, the female Buddha Tira, woodrats, Coyote, Raven, macaque monkey, the poet Su Shi, the Ghost Dance prophet Wovoka, and many others'. Snyder's concept of space always includes the possibility of Buddhist enlightenment. 2000 Robert Kern : Snyder pays tribute to certain teachers – those, for example, from whom he learned the discipline of the calligrapher's and painter's brush and pen, a discipline that becomes and important motif in the poem. He also acknowledges the importance to him of certain experiences, primarily of wilderness landscapes – mountains and rivers, in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere – but also of representations of such landscapes, particularly in Asian art, encountered in books and museums. It was in Asian paintings that he became aware of 'the energies of mist, white water, rock formations, air swirls – a chaotic universe where everything is in place'. In this way, his direct experience of the natural world seems to have merged with what he saw in artistic representations of it, and a similar merging of nature and culture takes place in the poem. Another key element that animates the poem is Zen Buddhism. Instead, as the title of the book in its several variations suggests, it is Asian landscape paintings, and especially hand scrolls, that provide Snyder with his most immediate structural format. Such paintings, as Snyder points out, are 'not fully realized until several centuries of poems have been added'. The sections of 'Mountains and rivers' are contributions to the realization of the paintings that the book as a whole evokes, and one of Snyder's metaphors for producing them derives from the techniques of Asian painting. 2009 Joan Qionglin Tan : After his return to America, Snyder visited some museums and a Chinese Song dynasty landscape painting entitled 'Streams and mountains without end' in Cleveland inspired him to us it with the similar title 'endless streams and mountains' in the opening poem of his book. Snyder made a series of long walks from different directions : a cultural walk through Chinese landscape scroll painting and through Native American lore, a physical walk through the real mountainous landscapes of China, Japan, India and North America, and a mental walk through Buddhist ideas, rituals and histories. Following natural boundaries, he made a great effort to explore the notions of origins and destinations through an extended meditative practice focusing upon the theme of 'walking on walking'. This project is an extended act of spiritual exploration and orientation through which Snyder hopes to create a set of guiding principles for a modern culture potentially set adrift from a sense of location or direction. Snyder gives the reader the best endnote pertaining to his deep sympathy for mountain practice. It covers a wide range : from his early mountaineering to his part-time work in the mountains ; from his Zen practice to his building a house in the foothills ; from his learning 'East Asian landscape painting as a meditative exercise' to his observation of Chinese landscape paintings in the museums ; and from his translation of Chinese poetry to his watching the Japanese Nô play 'Yamamba' (Old mountain woman). Snyder explains that he obtained this sense from the discernable natural energy of fluidity in Eastern Asian landscape paintings, such as mists, water, rocks, and clouds. In the Chinese tradition, these natural energies refer to the 'yin' and 'yang', a balanced dynamic force in nature. 2009 Robin Cheng-hsing Tsai : In Mountains and rivers without end Snyder's cultural translation of Chinese literature, art and painting, resonates with Chinese motifs that help us to experience non-duality. In these exo-poetic figures, symbols, emblems or motifs, the real and virtual, profane and sacred, eye and gaze are juxtaposed in such a way what the polar ends are brought together. Snyder's translation of nature from the original Chinese texts expresses an insight that is both immanent and transcendent. The first poem 'Endless streams and mountains' is the gateway to the rest of the work. 'Ch'i Shan Wu Chin' is a Chinese landscape painting. Hsüan Tsang : Snyder tells the saga of the seventh-century Chinese monk Hsüan Tsang. In Snyder's hands, Hsüan Tsang and Kokop'ele are bringers of new ideas, appearing multifariously as culture 'carriers' or translators, journeyers and tricksters. Unlike Hsüan Tsang, who is mor of an ascetic, Kokop'ele is a bringer of sun and rain for good crops and a fertility god. |
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| 3 | 2007 |
Snyder, Gary. Back on the fire : essays. (Emeryville : Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007). "We study the great writings of the Asian past so that we might surpass them today. We hope to crate a deeply grounded contemporary literature of nature that celebrates the wonder of our natural world, that draws on and makes beauty of the incredibly rich knowledge gained from science, and that confronts the terrible damage being done today in the name of progress and the world economy." Robin Cheng-hsing Tsai : Snyder summarized the three directions of his poetic project as : embracing environmental imagination/poetics ; declining environmental aesthetics and eco-philosophy ; and rejecting environmental racism. |
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Cited by (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2000- | Asien-Orient-Institut Universität Zürich | Organisation / AOI |
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