Notes

[1] Meng Hao-ran, trans. Paul Kroll; text from Sunflower Splendour: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry, ed. Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo (Garden City, N.Y., 1975), p. 92. Comepare Meng Hao-jan (Boston, 1981), p. 71; and perhaps compare too a finely skilled original English poem by a Scottish poet:

Gigha

That firewood pale with salt and burning green

Outfloats its men who waved with a sound of drowning

Their saltcut hands over mazes of this rough bay.

 

Quietly this morning beside the subsided herds

Of water I walk. The children wade the shallows.

The sun with long legs wades into the sea.

W.S. Graham, New Collected Poems, ed. Matthew Francis (London, 2004), p. 82; first collected in The White Threshold (London, 1949) [Gigha is the name of an island]. Here is another, much less assured version of Meng Hao-ran's poem, by an American translator usually much more adept:

Overnight on Abiding-Integrity River

I guide the boat in, anchor off island mist.

It's dusk, time a traveler's loneliness returns.

Heaven settles far and wide into the trees,

And on this clear river, a moon drifts near.

David Hinton (trans.), The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan (New York, 2004), p. 49. Note that this translator has recognised and inserted a blank line-space between the first two lines and the final couplet; a space also recognised by the contemporary calligrapher Ge Hong-zhen of Suzhou:

There are translations of this same poem by William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder, none as good as Paul Kroll's: see The New Directions Anthology of Chinese Poetry, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York, 2003), and http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16442.

[2] I give here a further example of translation finding this intensely poetical quality by radical omission, this time an early poem of very deep insight by Che Qian-zi, as translated by Jeff Twitchell:

Late Autumn in Suzhou

Hands begin to feel cold

A bucket of water carried upstairs

Shadow always in front of me

Darkness drops like a stone

Che Qian-zi, Chinese original text first collected in Yuanyang: Zhongguo yuyan shipai (Nanjing/Suzhou, 1990 [1992]), p. 20; this translated text from Original: Chinese-Language Poetry Group (Brighton, 1994), p. 17.

[3] Remembering the dictum of the Austrian-French writer Manès Sperber (1905-84): "Auch wer gegen den Strom schwimmt, schwimmt im Strom" (Even the one who swims against the stream, swims in the stream); compare qinggao, 'noble-minded, unwilling to swim with the tide'.