19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei
From the Mother Tongue Liberation & Defiance collection.
Nominated by Entrepreneur, Provocateur, and Raconteur Kevin Slavin |
"We imagine translation as transferring a finely defined proposition from one linguistic scheme to another, and this of course is bullshit; the proposition isn’t being delivered by language, it’s built by language. The scrutiny of seeing one Chinese poem translated 19 ways makes this clear, and points to much broader implications of the premise." |
A close, witty study of multiple translations of a single four-line poem by Tang-dynasty poet Wang Wei, revealing how translation choices open different shades of sense and style. As Octavio Paz writes in the afterword, “Eliot Weinberger’s commentary on the successive translations of Wang Wei’s little poem illustrates, with succinct clarity, not only the evolution of the art of translation in the modern period but at the same time the changes in poetic sensibility.”
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