Tag: Liu Zongyuan

作者：柳宗元   (Author: Liu Zongyuan, late 8th century)
千山鸟飞绝，    Thousand mountain bird fly absolutely
万径人踪灭。    Ten thousand trails man trace extinguish
孤舟蓑笠翁，    lone boat grass coat hat old man
独钓寒江雪        Alone fishing cold river snow

Translation:

A thousand mountains: no bird flying.
Ten thousand trails: not one traveler’s footprint.
But an old man wearing a grass coat and hat in the snow,   

Fishes from a boat on the cold river.

 

Translation Notes:   
We make a great, though not always successful, effort to be faithful to the original Chinese by including all images in the poem and not adding any of our own unless we think we must have them to explain a crucial reference to contemporary readers. The results are sometimes awkward as we not only lose the meter and rhyme, but often end up talking about “railings” or “hats” that are not particularly evocative in English. Somewhat wistfully, we compare our translation above to this translation by adel@douban.  The translation was published on douban, a Chinese social media website. 
Not a feather amid the mountains 
Not a soul on the trails 
But an old fisherman in the snow 
Fishing in a drifting boat 

https://www.douban.com/people/des.fleurs/status/3480528599/

 

We think that adel’s version is much lovelier than ours and very much has the feeling of an elegant landscape painting. We do not think she took any great liberties by omitting the “thousand” mountains and “ten thousand” trails, as these numbers were really only used as a way of saying “many.” The “not a feather” is a neat way of reproducing a line that says the birds were “absolutely” gone, and “not one soul” is fairly close to the traces of men extinguished. 

 

In the second couplet, however, adel deviates pretty significantly from the original. She omits the grass coat and hat as well as the cold river. Most importantly, She adds the term “drifting” to describe the boat. The grass coat and hat and the cold river may be seen as superfluous since these clothes are what a fisherman would be expected to wear, and if he’s fishing from a boat in the snow, it’s obvious that he is fishing from a cold river. Even so, inclusion of these terms serves to emphasize the man’s inadequate protection from harsh winter weather. 

 

The term “drifting” is not suggested by the original at all. It gives a romantic feeling to the poem, but it might not describe the fisherman. If he has gone out in freezing weather to earn a living or get a meal, he is more likely to be picking his spots carefully rather than to be drifting along. We believe that our more literal translation is harsher, colder, more focused on the fisherman’s plight, than adel’s is. If Du Fu, who was a great champion of the poor, had written the poem, our translation would probably be closer to the poet’s intent. As it is, who can tell? The title, River and Snow, suggests that this is primarily a landscape painting, in which case, Adel’s beautiful translation best captures its true spirit. On the other hand, the poem was written after Liu Zongyuan had been sent into exile, and some scholars have theorized that the persevering fisherman was meant to represent the poet himself. Comparing the two translations helps us to think more deeply about the purpose of the poem.