7

La Forêt

Dans la montagne tout est solitaire,

On entend de bien loin l’écho des voix humaines,

Le soleil qui pénètre au fond de la forêt

Reflète son éclat sur la mousse vert.

 — G. MARGOULIES, 1948

(Margouliès, Anthologie raisonée de la littérature Chinoise)

[The Forest. On the mountain everything is solitary, / One hears from far off the echo of human voices, / The sun that penetrates to the depths of the forest / Reflects its ray on the green moss.]

Margoulies prefers to generalize Wang’s specifics: Deer Grove becomes, simply, The Forest; nobody in sight becomes the ponderous malaise of everything is solitary. In the second line he poeticizes the voices by having them come from far off. The French indefinite pronoun happily excludes the need for a narrator.