Immortal Spirit Roving Among the Mountains (by Bai Juyi)

One of the wonderful things about reading and translating Chinese poetry is coming to the realization that Tang poets at their best will be playful and teasing, taking delight in ambiguity and uncertainty, as any good artist should.  As the translator Red Pine explains it, there are as many possible translations of a classical Chinese poem as there are translators.  Word by word and line by line we are faced with choices and multiple meanings.  While every translator must make choices, we must also pay homage to ambiguity and try to preserve it, finding a way in our own words to maintain some of the liminality and magic of the original poem's conceit.

This short poem by Bai Juyi I translated this morning provides a good example of the beauty of the original poem's deliberate ambiguity and the consequent danger of a translation or reading in which the meaning is overdetermined.  The uncertainty Bai is playing with here is tied up in the phrase 出人间, which appears and the end of the poem's first line.  Departed from the human realm is how I've chosen to translate this phrase.  But what exactly does that mean?  Is this a poem about the bardo state and what happens to the human spirit after we die?  Or is it a poem about the contemplative state and what happens to our spirit as we seek detachment from the mundane realm of human affairs?  For me the magic of the poem lies somewhere in between -- the very place where the clouds continually well up and gather around the mountain it seems. 

Immortal Spirit Roving in the Mountains

Gloom takes hold

Settling around the heart

It’s the condition of those

Recently departed from

The human realm

A man feels bewildered

Strangely unsettled

Doubtful and detached

Not yet completely whole

Far from it in fact

Like the legion of clouds

That well up and gather

Around the mountain

游仙游山

白居易

暗将心地出人间

五六年来人怪闲

自嫌恋着未全尽

犹爱云泉多在山

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Written in Springtime Amidst the Fields (Wang Wei)

Here's a spring poem from one of my favorites, Wang Wei, celebrating the exhilaration we begin to feel, after a few hours of back-breaking toil, as we begin to clear the fields and lay the groundwork for a new season of growth.

Up on the rooftop in springtime

The turtledoves cry

Alongside the village

The apricot trees shimmer

In their curly white tresses

Swinging a small hatchet to clear

Away the proliferating weeds

Wielding a hoe to muck out

The clogged arteries of the spring

Each year the sparrows return

Knowing well their former nest

So an old man apprises

The tasks of the new year

Like facing a banquet

It’s impossible to resist such a feast

There’s no prospect of sadness

Even for the weariest guest

春中田园作

 王维

屋上春鸠鸣

村边杏花白

持斧伐远扬

荷锄觇泉脉

归燕识故巢

旧人看新历

临觞忽不御

惆怅远行客