Deep in the mountain wilderness
Where nobody ever comes
Only once in a great while
Something like the sound of a far off voice,
The low rays of the sun
Slip through the dark forest,
And gleam again on the shadowy moss.
— KENNETH REXROTH, 1970
(Rexroth, Love and the Turning Year)
The taxonomy of Chinese translators is fairly simple. There are the Sinologists, most of whom are incapable of writing poetry, because they know everything about the original language and not much about the language into which they’re translating. The few exceptions, such as Burton Watson and Arthur Waley, were well-read in — and part of the community of — contemporary English-language poetry. Then there are the poets: most know no Chinese, a few know some. Kenneth Rexroth belonged to this last category (along with Gary Snyder and the later Pound) — although this particular example is perhaps more “imitation” than translation.
Rexroth ignores what he presumably dislikes, or feels cannot be translated, in the original. The title is eliminated, and the philosophical empty mountain becomes the empirical mountain wilderness. Certain words and phrases are his own invention. One of them, where nobody ever comes leads him into a trap: he must modify the sound of a far off voice with something like, and it makes a rather klutzy fourth line. But this is clearly the first real poem of the group, able to stand by itself. It is the closest to the spirit, though not the letter, of the original: the poem Wang might have written had he been born a 20th-century American.
Rexroth’s great skill is apparent in three tiny gestures. In line 2, by using comes rather than the more obvious goes he has created an implicit narrator-observer (i.e., “comes here where I am”) without using the first person. Second, he takes an utterly ordinary phrase, once in a great while, and lets us hear it, for the first time, as something lovely and onomatopoeic. And third, Rexroth’s slip for Wang’s enter is perhaps too sensual — reminiscent of Sanskrit forest trysts — but it is irresistible.