Empty mountain: no man is seen,
But voices of men are heard.
Sun’s reflection reaches into the woods
And shines upon the green moss.
— WAI-LIM YIP, 1972
(Wang Wei, Hiding the Universe, trans. Yip)
Yip is a critic who has written brilliantly on the importance of Chinese poetics to 20th-century American poetry. As a translator he is less successful, perhaps because English is apparently his second language. (It is rarely possible, though many try, to translate out of one’s natural language.) Thus the strangeness of no man is seen and the oddly anthropomorphic reaches into.
Like Burton Watson (#12), Yip follows Wang’s repetition of person in the first two lines (though his persons are men) and presents six English words per line for the Chinese five. But unlike Watson and the other translators, Yip actually gives us less than the original — leaving out deep and again.
In a later version of this translation, published in his anthology Chinese Poetry, Yip clipped the first line to the almost pidgin Empty mountain: no man.