No sign of men on the empty mountain,
only faint echoes from below.
Refracted light enters the forest,
shining through green moss above.
— SAM HAMILL, 2000
(Hamill, Crossing the Yellow River)
Hamill, a poet with some knowledge of Chinese, follows Rexroth (#11) in reimagining the scene. The echoes are now faint and come from below, neither of which are in the Chinese. There is a difference between not seeing people and no sign of men. Is this really an untouched wilderness? Judging from (the copies of) Wang’s scroll painting, and the fact that the deer are enclosed, it is not.
Hamill is the first in English to use refracted for the light — Klöpsch (#20) has brechen — which is lovely, but does not indicate that it is sunset (and the word, of course, is a product of Western science long after Wang’s time). Like Snyder (#19), he places the moss above, but by having the light shining through the moss, he runs into the same problem as the Barnstones and Xu (#22): wrong moss.
Apart from Debon in German (#20), Hamill is the first to employ the form of the original, known as jueju (chüeh-chü), which unhelpfully translates as broken-off lines. (Even the formalist Seth doesn’t follow the form.) The jueju, which became popular in the Tang Dynasty, is a four-line poem with five characters per line, made up of two couplets. The couplets often, but not always, exhibit some kind of parallelism (in this poem, not see people / hear people, and the words for return at the beginning of both lines 3 and 4). Since it is composed of two discrete couplets, each a syntactical unit, it is not exactly a quatrain in the Western sense — Western quatrains have much more flexibility. Yet most translators present jueju poems as quatrains.