In the comments to the Monday translation, Matt pointed out a couple points where my work conflicts with the interpretation of Baidu Baike, a gigantic Chinese online encyclopedia. Reading through the notes on Baidu, I see a couple clear failures of my translation, but I'm not certain how to fix them.
Starting in the first half of the third couplet, "谁知林栖者", the phrase "lín xì zhě" (forest lonely person) properly translates to "hermit" in the religious recluse sense: someone living away from the world in order to seek enlightenment. Baidu identifies the hermit with the 美人 in the final couplet -- grouping the two characters 美 and 人 together as "beautiful person", rather than separating them as I've done in my translation. In that case, Mike's proposed translation of 美 as "virtuous" yesterday gets closer to the truth than my "honor," as it focuses on the hermit's virtue. Moreover, Baidu interprets 坐 in that third couplet as "deep," which I'm not certain how to handle.
相悦, xiāng yuè, I translated originally (on the basis of another annotation) as "like one another" in the sense of resembling, but on retrospect, and realizing the subject is a hermit, I feel that the phrase refers to mutual happiness, along the lines of the dictionary definition. Who would have suspected that the dictionary was right all along? In that case, the mutual rejoicing is probably between the hermit and the flowers, as there are no other people in the poem.
Given this parsing, that line:
谁知林栖者,闻风坐相悦。
shéi zhī lín xì zhě, wēn fēng zuò xiāng yuè
who know forest lonley (type of person), hear\smell wind deep mutual joy
becomes:
"Who knows the solitary forest man, who smells the breeze, deep, rejoicing in their joy?"
Or, if we take "谁知", "who knows," as declarative (Where's John? Who knows!), the sentence might scan:
No one knows the solitary forest man, who smells the breeze, deeply rejoicing in the flowers' joy.
I keep "林栖者" expanded as "solitary forest man" because each of the three characters which comprise the word carries a meaning in Chinese which is lost by the direct translation to "hermit" in English. Maybe I should render it as "solitary forest hermit" to avoid confusion, though.
So much to learn! This is going to be one heck of a project. Oh well; Everyday Study, Everyday Up, as the walls of my classroom in Anhui province said.
One really interesting thing that I've just been thinking about is the great debt this 张九龄 poem and the 杜甫 poem I just did owe to 屈原's 九哥. Here we have the first line compared to a line from 礼魂:
ReplyDelete屈原《九歌·礼魂》中，有 “春兰与秋菊，长无绝兮终古” 句。张九龄是广东曲江人，其地多桂，即景生情，就地取材，把秋菊换成了秋桂，师古而不泥古。
Then in 佳人, near the end we had the line:
ReplyDelete牵萝补茅屋
Kand Laoshi pointed out that this seems like an implicit reference to:
若有人兮山之阿，被薜荔兮带女萝。
That line, from the very beginning of 九哥《山鬼》, would have been extremely well known in Du Fu's, and Zhang Jiuling's time -- and is it really only now that I'm noticing they were basically contemporaries? Cool.
To respond more directly to this post, though, I really like where you've gone with this line. Like you, I'm ambivalent about the word "hermit" -- I've always sort of felt that the 隐士 tradition is so beyond and to the side of the word hermit that it could only lead to confusion anyway. And yet there is something more than just a "solitary forest man" here. In a way the problem is this (with reference to those other recent comments): how to connote what the Chinese connotes, without changes what it denotes? How do we translate the phrase that clearly means "solitary forest man" and yet get it to connote the 隐士 that Mr. Zhang intended?
ReplyDeleteOk, I totally just had a thought. (I know. A thought! Me!)
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking that the 谁 refers to the flowers as well -- although even in doing so it remains ambiguous in that glorious Chinese way, so maybe it'd be better to say it *also* refers to the flowers. This way, the flowers don't know that the hermits are sitting and enjoying them, and then it's also the flowers in the last line who don't need to seek the 美人折. So I'm looking at the last line:
草木有本心,何求美人折?
And in this view it looks the grass and trees have intrinsic worth, or something like that, and 折 is going to be more like plucking. As in, the 美人, identified with the hermits, would in their enjoyment of the flowers pluck them.
Read this way, I feel like the poem is dealing in overlapping metaphors in a really cool way. The hermit of course seems like it's going to be Zhang himself, but it also sounds like he's identifying with the flowers. What do you think?
Reading 谁 as referring to the flowers is excellent, and sets up the "picking" interpretation of the last line very well - another point where I agree with you in retrospect. I think Zhang's being a tricky poet here: he intends for us to initially identify him with the hermit, but he actually identifies more with the flowers. 折 does become "plucking," and from that we have a statement of the common selection theme in exiled official poetry: what does it matter that the flower isn't selected by the hermit? It revels in spring and autumn anyway.
ReplyDeleteIn that sense he's being very kind to the emperor who sent him away, comparing him to an idle, well-meaning forest hermit -- though maybe I'm reading Zhang too much into his poem.
It's a shame we only have one week per poem, really. I could spend another week on this one easily.