Where My Review Doesn't Match the Stars

The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-Jan by Meng Hao-jan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[Please pardon my rant. I have some opinions about 1300-year-old poetry. :)]

The 4 stars are for the poems. (I wonder if it would be a 5 under different circumstances.)

3 for the translation. Barely.

I'm sure the translator is a lovely human, but I struggle to enjoy anything he's translated, at least out of the three books of his I've read so far. (Fool me three times...) One of those was an award-winning translation, so I'm likely an outlier--lots of people obviously thought it was awesome when I didn't. But I bet you money I could identify his translation of a random poem among a dozen others, and not because I love it. (I wouldn't even have to read it, tbh. A glance would serve. He always splits his 8-line poems into 4 pairs of lines. And they're almost always of near-equal length, even if he has to rearrange line breaks to do it.)

Grrr. I object.

(I am perfectly serious, though less impassioned than it might appear. It's fine. I'm fine.)

I like the tone and imagery of these poems. I like the topics. I appreciate the mountain and river locations found in them and the emotions they conjure. There are chunks of the poems here and there I love, and a couple poems work for me from start to finish.

Most don't, however, and that's what I always find with this translator. More than with any other translator of this kind of poetry, I find myself at the end of a poem, realizing I got nothing from any of the lines. I feel like I'm waiting for the verb that never arrives. ("The blue-lotus roof standing beside a pond,/ White-horse Creek tumbling through forests,// and my old friend some strange thing now." Wait what? Reread.)

I get it, the way Chinese poetry is elliptical and evocative, not necessarily grammatical or including complete thoughts. I'm used to that. But he removes most of the cues that a reader uses to parse Chinese poetry into meaningful chunks. He separates what should (IMO) be connected and connects what should (IMO) be kept separate.

Here, in a poem about oranges:

Clambering into branches, she plucks
treasures, opening hidden depths to view,

and touched at how they grow in pairs,
reflections, we feel this mind we share.

I feel like he could have helped us out a little more. I put a pause at the end of the line, after "she plucks." Oops. Nope. "She plucks *treasures*." Okay. Then she is touched... no. Who is touched? "We" are? Isn't that a dangling modifier? And what is "reflections" doing there, stuck in the middle? She's reflecting? She sees reflections? The poet is reflecting? Or is it more concrete than that? It's a noun all on its own. I don't get it.

There are a few notes in the back for some of the poems, and they help, but not too much.

For those who like their poetry to be like puzzles to work out, little riddles, this is probably a good choice. For those (me, I'm talking about) who like to read poetry and connect with the poet's thoughts without the language fighting back, this is a frustrating collection.

Don't rat me out to the author.

Finish on the positive

I still love many of the lines and several of the poems, and the paperback edition is actually very nice, very beautiful. Maybe I'll reread this in a year or two and take back all my ranting.

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