Where I Got Hung Up On the Translation

Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China by David Hinton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

[Some great poetry here. Skip down to the dashes if you want to know how I feel about the original writers rather than my experience with this collection in particular.]

Lots of people love this translator. I just don't. I keep trying, but I can't get past his style.

The poetry in here, or at least a good bit of it, is familiar to me from other collections, other translators. Poetry I responded to positively elsewhere doesn't work for me. To be fair, he's doing exactly what he means to do, and other readers completely approve, but I don't like it.

The biggest difficulty for me is how he rearranges the original end-stopped phrasing and makes it break over lines and even between the unrhymed couplets. The break has no connection to meaning. It's entirely visual. In fact, the poems look like he's trying to right-justify everything. Why? Poetry that's supposed to breathe between lines instead rumbles on to the next line and the next verse. Once I become aware of the translator behind the poetry, I can't unsee it, and I can't focus on the poems. I pause at the end of the line and discover the thought continues below, and that little interruption takes me out of the poetry and back into my head. It feels like he's standing between us instead of bringing the reader and the poet together.

Did you ever watch a TV show or go to a movie where the music was too loud and the dialogue was buried in the mix? And it distracts you and it bugs you and frustrates you, taking you out of the show? That's me with this translation.

Other people seem to like it. Lots of 5 star ratings. I'm the outlier. If numbers mean anything, he's going about this the right way, and I can be safely ignored. But if you're like me and get distracted by stuff, be aware.

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As far as the original poets--I love these guys. I already have collections by many of them and find them not just esthetically pleasing by somehow deeply emotionally satisfying. Talking about escaping the day-to-day grind of the city to hike mountain trails and lose yourself in nature, traveling down rivers, visiting remote monasteries, reading your books on the farm, just letting life happen, really appeals to me. I may not be making sense of all the philosophical nuances, no doubt missing a lot of the chan doctrine (which is nicely summed up in the brief chapter introductions), but even without every layer of deep meaning, these poets and their work is probably my favorite.

Several of these poets, though, were new to me, so I'm gonna look for other books with more of their poetry. But hopefully I'll find someone whose translation ethos and style match my preferences.

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