After the publication of this essay, along with Paz’s afterword, in the Mexican magazine Vuelta, the editors received a furious letter from a professor at the Colegio de México, charging me with nothing less than “crimes against Chinese poetry.” Among those criminal acts was the “curious neglect” of “Boodberg’s cedule.”
The cryptic reference, I later discovered, was to Cedules from a Berkeley Workshop in Asiatic Philology, a series of essays privately published by Peter A. Boodberg in 1954 and 1955. Boodberg was of Russian nobility, was exiled to Manchuria and later the United States after the revolution, and became a beloved and eccentric professor of Chinese at the University of California. (Gary Snyder was one of his students.) He died in 1972.
The relevant essay, “Philology in Translation-Land,” is 1½ pages long. It begins:
Recent readings in translations of Tang quatrains have left us immersed in deep sadness in the face of the lack of philological acumen, the critical shallowness, and the self-centered irreverence towards great poetry exhibited by would-be competent writers seeming unable to resist the lures of precocious publication.
Boodberg complains that “all translators known to me (including, alas, modern Chinese and Japanese authors) betray their listless misconception of the whole poem” by failing to recognize that shang, usually translated as above, on [top of], top, can also mean, when pronounced in a different tone, to rise or ascend.
This usage is now rare, and was more common in Wang Wei’s time. But for those who doubt the accuracy of poetry translated by poets rather than scholars, it should be noted that Octavio Paz, in his latest version of the poem, apparently intuitively divined this reading and translated the word as asciende.
Boodberg ends his “cedule” with his own version of the poem, which he calls “a still inadequate, yet philologically correct, rendition of the stanza (with due attention to grapho-syntactic overtones and enjambment)”:
The empty mountain: to see no men,
Barely earminded of men talking — countertones
And antistrophic lights-and-shadows incoming deeper the deep-treed grove
Once more to glowlight the blue-green mosses — going up
(The empty mountain . . .)
To me this sounds like Gerard Manley Hopkins on LSD, and I am grateful to the Furious Professor for sending me in search of this, the strangest of the many Weis.
[1986]