On the empty mountain, seeing no one,
Only hearing the echoes of someone’s voice;
Returning light enters the deep forest,
Again shining upon the green moss.
—RICHARD W. BODMAN & VICTOR MAIR, 1994
(Mair, The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature)
This translation by two Sinologists plays on a combination of gerunds and present participles. The first couplet, though perhaps too passive, neatly avoids the problem of the absence of personal pronouns in Chinese, and no one / someone’s emphasizes the parallelism in the original. But, by the third and fourth lines, it becomes overdone. The combination of the inversion of Again shining — which Snyder (#19) had done — and the use of upon for on makes it sound more like premodern poeticizing than Snyder’s version. Translation is always dependent on the smallest words.