Name: On translating four lines of poetry
Item: Nineteen ways of looking at Wang Wei
Author: apos

Nineteen ways of looking at Wang Wei →

by Eliot Weinberger

On translating four lines of poetry

apos

Sep 19, 2025 9:29 AM

"Great poetry lives in a state of perpetual transformation, perpetual translation: the poem dies when it has no place to go. The transformations that take shape in print—and not in the minds of readers—that take the formal name of "translation," become their own beings, set out on their own wanderings. Some live long and some don't. What kind of creatures are they? What happens when a poem, once Chinese and still Chinese, becomes a piece of English, Spanish, French poetry?"

This book is a gem. It offers up exactly what the title says—appropriately brief commentaries on translations of a four-line Chinese poem from the 8th century. (No longer just 19 translations, as the updated 2016 New Directions edition with the subtitle "And more ways" includes 9 new translations and an additional postscript.)

Anyone who has researched a sufficiently narrow topic knows that focused depth yields insights that you just can't match if you stick to the enticement of constant breadth and eclecticism in your interests. In this case, the constraint illuminates poetry's indispensable mechanism: language.

This sounds so obvious as not to warrant mention, but we tend to take as given so much besides language's fundamental capacities when we talk about or write poetry. There are constant decisions that we don't register as such—e.g. "Who is the subject?" and "What is the point of view?", rather than "Does there need to be a subject?" These kinds of unexamined "writerly" assumptions are in fact a snag that some of the translators in this volume get caught on.

Weinberger takes a few of them to task for inserting an "I" in their rendition, when there is no equivalent in the Chinese original. Not because a translation's sole or even primary merit is something like fidelity to the original, but because it is not obvious that these deviations are consciously-made choices. Sometimes they're just a byproduct of a translator unable to see themselves out of the ongoing (maybe interminable?) longue duree of confessional poetry.

The book also features a nice afterword from Octavio Paz. It complements Weinberger's project but also has its own unique concerns, which is what a worthwhile intro or afterword should aim for.
I'm glad I've read more of Weinberger's work, particularly his essay collection An Elemental Thing, as it helped me contextualize this book and the criticisms it makes. His approach in the Elemental Thing essays is the exact opposite of what he's doing here, in that the subjects vary wildly and there's only a nearly free associative, thin thread that makes them all make sense in the same volume. That book evinced a generosity of spirit and an openness to various modes of being in and understanding human experience. That seems to be Weinberger's default demeanor when writing about the world at large. On the other hand, he is an enormous curmudgeon when it comes to poetry, as seen in this book and a scathing review he wrote in the 80s that I came across. The counterpoint between the two projects makes it clear that he doesn't take up minor quibbles for the sake of it. His pedantry is not only justified on the basis of his knowledge and devotion to verse, but it's also well-earned in that it seems to be unique to this one area. To me, curmudgeonliness about one specific interest registers as sincerity and reveals a depth of attentiveness and care that I find extremely endearing and enlightening.