Idiomatic

 I think A.C. Graham's Poems of the Late T'ang is a landmark of a sort. It was reprinted as a New York Review of Books classic. I return constantly to this book with renewed interest. 

I do wonder about the rather unidiomatic quality of the English:

Sadness at the hairs in the mirror is new no longer,

The stains of my coat are harder to brush away.

I waste my hopes by river and lakes, a fishing rod in the hand

Which screens me from the Western sunlight as I look towards Ch'ang-an. 

Nothing says "translation" like translationese, or phrases that sound like an attempt to get at something in the original by twisting around the target language. But the twisting here has nothing to do with the original, I would hazard to guess. A lot of it is in the little words, like the and my, that aren't even in the original, and in the capricious use of singular / plural nouns.  

The first line sounds bizarre, but the second sounds normal, though we don't typically brush a stain away on clothing.

 The translator wants to avoid the first person pronoun in the first line, but not in the second. Why? The idea seems to be that, looking in the mirror, I'm no longer surprised by the white hair of the man I see there. Why is the word hair in the plural? (Chinese doesn't have number in nouns.) Why "river and lakes" instead of "river and lakes"?  Is there just one river and multiple lakes? That seems oddly specific. Why "the hand" rather than "my hand" or 'in hand"?  I have a hard time picturing how a fishing rod, typically a thin object, can shade one's eyes from the bright sunset. The verb screen suggests an object of a different shape. "I waste my hopes" is not horrible, but not particularly idiomatic either.  

There is no consistent voice that emerges, no consistency in stylistic choices. 

Sunflower Squalor

 My aunt and her collaborator used this title to refer to Sunflower Splendor.  This is a 1000 poem anthology from the 70s whose translators were scholars, not poets. The book itself is physically repulsive. There are no sunflowers in Chinese poetry.  The translations by Chinese professors (Professors of Chinese, who may or may not be Chinese) are just kind of clunky.   

The tradition of translating from Chinese poetically starts with Wale, Pound, and Bynner and goes through Rexroth and Snyder and Merwin. There is a confluence between modernist poetics and Chinese and Japanese poetry, with the imagist movement. In other words, our idea of good poetry, inherited from the imagists, is a lot of concrete imagery in economical language. 

Chinese poetry is written in rhyme in lines of 5 or 7 monosyllabic words, with complex prosodic rules that nobody cares about in English.  Usually, American translations do not rhyme and downplay parallelism. It's kind of the opposite of English haiku, where people know how many syllables there are (even though the units in question are not really syllables).  

Peach cave

 There is a Chinese poem, maybe more than one but I am thinking of one by Wang Wei, https://www.cn-poetry.com/wangwei-poems/peach-blossom-journey.html based on a legend of a fisherman who finds a cave on a river bank, with peach blossoms falling into the water and entrancing him. He goes into the cave and finds people who have old fashioned clothes and speak an old fashioned dialect. They are peaceful farmers and welcome him warmly.  Apparently they took refuge in this hidden part of the world many years ago, escaping some war or political turmoil, and haven't had contact with the outside world. The fisherman stays a while, but eventually decides to go back. His idea is that he can find the entrance to the cave again. But the landscape shifts shape and he can never find it again. 

The poem takes you to this place. The poem itself is that place. Poetry itself is this world where you can go. The poignancy is in the idea that the return is impossible. The poem can be read again, though. 

The world where the community lives is not magical in and of itself. The people living there are just normal farmers. The magic is in the separation from the outside world, and nothing more. The old fashioned garb and language suggests a kind of nostalgia or quaintness, with an element of time travel. The Qin dynasty is 221 BCE, and the legend arises 500 years later, and is still alluded to centuries after that, in the Tang dynasty.  

The magic portal is one that can be found, in theory. It seems both magical and literally possible at the same time. The shifting landscape is literally possible as well: rivers change their course over the years and human memory is fallible. Peaches actually exist, and the blossoms of the tree might fall into a river, but peaches also symbolize immortality.  

Chinese poetry is all about state craft and war. The poets are government functionaries, and the examination to be a functionary consists of writing poems. Even a recluse fishing in a river in a little boat is likely to be a retired mandarin, or perhaps one who has fallen out of favor. There's one poem where someone wonders whether he can afford to be a recluse, so it is more like voluntary austerity, not impoverishment. 

Maybe the magic, then, is the escape from political turmoil.  In some versions of the legend, the farmers live in peace and "pay no taxes." Utopia is just normal life, then, kind of like how Tolkien envisions the Shire, self-sufficient and peaceful.  

There's another few poems that allude to this:

A bridge flies away through the wild mist,

Yet here are the rocks and the fisherman's boat. 

Oh, if only this river of floating peach-petals

Might lead me at last to the mythical cave!

(Chang Hsu)

Though you think to return to this maze of mountains,

Oh, let them brim your heart with wonder!

Remember the fisherman from Wu-Ling

Who had only a day in the Peach-Blossom Country. 

(Pai Ti) 

The story could have a thousand variations, depending on how the emphasis falls. This is how I envision poetic thinking. That the poem draws you in with a particular kind of cognition that is not exactly like anything else. It reminds me of my idea about music: that it evokes another reality, something that belongs to another world, but that its magical quality is that it does so in our own world.  

Weinberger

 I looked again the Weinberger's 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. I think he is a little unfair with Witter Bynner and some of the other earlier translators, maybe too indulgent with O. Paz, who is also a co-writer of the book. He is right that Snyder's version is great; he is a bit too indulgent with Rexroth. He is harsh with Bill McNaughton, who translated several books with Lenore Mayhew, my aunt.  Maybe his version could have done with some more Mayhew influence, since this particular translation is signed by Bill alone.