No se ve gente en este monte.
Sólo se oyen, lejos, voces.
Por los ramajes la luz rompe.
Tendida entre la yerba brilla verde.
— OCTAVIO PAZ,
(Paz, Versiones y Diversiones)
[In the Deer Park Hermitage. No people are seen on this mountain. / Only voices, far off, are heard. / Light breaks through the branches. / Spread among the grass it shines green.]
In the second edition of Versiones y Diversiones, his selected translations, Paz wrote:
The translation of this poem is particularly difficult, for the poem carries to an extreme the characteristics of Chinese poetry: universality, impersonality, absence of time, absence of subject. In Wang Wei’s poem, the solitude of the mountain is so great that not even the poet himself is present. After a number of attempts I wrote these four unrhymed lines: three with nine syllables each and the last with eleven.
Months later, reading some Mahayana texts, I was surprised by the frequency with which the Western paradise, domain of the Amida Buddha, is mentioned. I remembered that Wang Wei had been a fervent Buddhist: I consulted one of his biographies and discovered that his devotion for Amida was such that he had written a hymn in which he speaks of his desire to be reborn in the Western Paradise — the place of the setting sun . . .
This is nature poetry, but a Buddhist nature poetry: Does not the quatrain reflect, even more than the naturalistic aestheticism traditional in this kind of composition, a spiritual experience? Sometime later, Burton Watson, who knows my love for Chinese poetry, sent me his Chinese Lyricism. There I encountered a confirmation of my suspicion: for Wang Wei the light of the setting sun had a very precise meaning. An allusion to the Amida Buddha: At the end of the afternoon the adept meditates and, like the moss in the forest, receives illumination. Poetry perfectly objective, impersonal, far from the mysticism of a St. John of the Cross, but no less authentic or profound than that of the Spanish poet. Transformation of man and nature before the divine light, although in a sense inverse to that of Western tradition. In place of the humanization of the world that surrounds us, the Oriental spirit is impregnated with the objectivity, passivity and impersonality of the trees, grass and rocks, so that, impersonally, it receives the impartial light of a revelation that is also impersonal. Without losing the reality of the trees, rocks, and earth, Wang Wei’s mountain and forest are emblems of the void. Imitating his reticence, I limited myself to lightly changing the last two lines:
No se ve gente en este monte.
Solo se oyen, lejos, voces.
La luz poniente rompe entre las ramas.
En la yerba tendida brilla verde.
[No people are seen on this mountain. / Only voices, far off, are heard. / Western light breaks through the branches. / Spread over the grass it shines green.]
Paz drops empty from the first line; in the second, like Margouliès (#7) and Rexroth (#11), he makes the voices far off. His third line, though not strictly literal, may be the most beautiful of all the versions: replacing the abstract light enters the forest with the concrete and dramatic light breaks through the branches — the light almost becoming the sudden illumination, satori of Wang’s Chan (Zen) Buddhism. In the fourth line, the moss has become grass, no doubt because the Spanish word for moss, musgo, is unpleasantly squishy. (How mossy — soft and damp — is the English moss!)
What is missing from these lovely third and fourth lines is the cyclical quality of the original. Wang begins both lines with to return: taking a specific time of day and transforming it into a moment, frozen in its recurrence, that becomes cosmic. Reading the image as a metaphor for illumination, the ordinary (sunset in the forest) represents the extraordinary (the enlightenment of the individual) which, in terms of the cosmos, is as ordinary as sunlight illuminating a patch of moss.
An endless series of negations: The mountain seems empty (without people) because no one’s in sight. But people are heard, so the mountain is not empty. But the mountain is empty because it is an illusion. The light from the Western Paradise, the light called shadow falls.
[See Paz’s afterword for his third version of the poem.]