Kenneth Morris did not call his versions of Chinese poems translations, but, rather, recensions--a kind of revision of a historical text, based on critical study of the original. To Ella Young he wrote:
The business of making these is difficult sometimes and interesting always. Chinese poems mean as much as you can see in them. There is no definite end to the meaning.
Morris kept a small bound book which he told Ella Young was his "dearest treasure," and he described it as follows:
It is my prose translations of Chinese poems, the first step towards the verse versions. I made them from the verses of various translators: where they are marked Fletcher (and in many other cases) comparing the translations with the Chinese originals. "Recensions" they would perhaps be called. My object was to get at the meaning without a word of ornament. I was out in quest of essential poetry, believing that those poets had it, and determined to let no beautiful wording come in. In that last, I failed. I see there are many beautiful rhythmed lines, but they got in in spite of me. I was seeking stark accuracy and truth to the Chinese poets' meaning.
In the making of his recensions, Morris noted:
Chinese verse is far more intricate than any of our Celtic forms. Where in English verse we depend on rhyme, which has to correspond in sound to one other syllable, in Chinese every syllable in the poem has to correspond in sound to some other: making a ripple of chiming music . . . The sound effect got by those chiming repetitions comes nearest to giving the music of the Chinese that I can think of; so you see how free verse must always fail to give any true representation of the true effect of a Chinese poem? . . . There is a thing to remember about the Chinese script and it difference from alphabet-writing such as ours; and that is that it is magical. You read an English poem, and say, Yes, I have the meaning. Not so with a Chinese. You look at the glyphs, and grow interested. Your face lights up suddenly, and you say, Good Lord, does he say that? Startled you watch; and the images of beauty, humour, strangeness and delight come stealing out of the characters, and amaze you. No two translators seem to get a poem to mean the same thing. And I am content to make it mean whatever pictures I see come glimmering out of the characters; secure that if the result is beauty, and poetry, the poet meant it too.
Now we can look at a Chinese original and follow it through the process of transliteration and translation, studying a few translations by other authors, then leading on to Morris's own versions. The poem is by Wang Wei; it was originally written in the eighth century on a long horizontal landscape scroll comprising a series of twenty poems (the earliest surviving copy of the painted scroll dates to the seventeenth century). Here is the Chinese original. It and the two subsequent scans come from a brilliant little book Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated (1987), by Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz, which concerns this single poem:
The title (probably a place name meaning "Deer Park" or something similar) is made up of the two characters (ideograms, each of which represents a single syllable, whose sound is important and suggests multiple meanings, understood best in context) in the first line, and the poem itself follows in four lines, with five characters each. It is read from left to right, top to bottom. Next follows a transliteration of the idea into words
The asterisk on the second character in line three references a note that says "returning shadows is a trope meaning rays of sunset."
Now, here is an English translation by W.J.B. Fletcher (the Fletcher referred to by Morris above);
The Form* of the Deer
So lone seem the hills; there is no one in sight there.
But whence is the echo of voices I hear?
The rays of the sunset pierce slanting the forest,
And in their reflection green mosses appear.
*The place where the deer sleep: its “form.”
W.J.B. Fletcher, Gems of Chinese Verse (1918)
And another:
Deer-Park Hermitage
There seems to be no one on the empty mountain . . .
And yet I think I hear a voice,
Where sunlight, entering a grove,
Shines back to me from the green moss.
Translated by Witter Bynner from the texts of Kiang Kang-hu, The Jade Garden (1929)
And finally, we get to Kenneth Morris's texts. First is his prose translation from his booklet. It is followed by his verse version:
Where the Deer Sleeps [sic]
No one is in sight among the lonely hills, yet I hear the echo of voices. Through the dusk of leaves the slant rays of sunset fall; where they reach the ground, the green mosses shine.
Where the Deer Sleep
Wang Wei
In all these hills is no man’s dwelling;
Whence should an echo of voices come —
A wary whisper? — There is no telling;
In these lone hills is no man’s dwelling.
There’s no wind o’er the tree-tops swelling —
The low sunset breeze is dumb;
And in all these hills is no man’s dwelling —
Whence should a ghost of voices come?
The slant rays from the sunset sheen
Shine through the dusk of the tree-tops o’er me
Till the forest floor glows jewel-green
In the slant rays from the sunset sheen.
Whose could those wary words have been?
There is only the glow on the moss before me,
And the slant rays from the sunset sheen,
And the lonely dusk around and o’er me.
The Theosophical Path, January 1919
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