Through the deep wood, the slanting sunlight
Casts motley patterns on the jade-green mosses.
No glimpse of man in this lonely mountain,
Yet faint voices drift on the air.
— CHANG YIN-NAN & LEWIS C. WALMSLEY, 1958
(Wang Wei, Poems, trans. Chang & Walmsley)
Chang and Walmsley published the first book-length translation of Wang Wei in English, but unfortunately their work bore little resemblance to the original.
In this poem, the couplets are reversed for no reason. The voices are faint and drift on the air. The mountain is lonely (a Western conceit, inimical to Wang’s Buddhism, that empty = lonely) but it’s a decorator’s delight: the moss is as green as jade and the sunlight casts motley patterns.
It is a classic example of the translator attempting to “improve” the original. Such cases are not uncommon, and are the product of a kind of unspoken contempt for the foreign poet. It never occurs to Chang and Walmsley that Wang could have written the equivalent of casts motley patterns on the jade-green mosses had he wanted to. He didn’t.
In its way a spiritual exercise, translation is dependent on the dissolution of the translator’s ego: an absolute humility toward the text. A bad translation is the insistent voice of the translator — that is, when one sees no poet and hears only the translator speaking.