9: Pronouns

In my translation, unlike many other translations of this poem, I chose to avoid the English first person until the line

焉知二十载,重上君子堂。

How could I know it would be twenty years

before I climbed again into your family's halls?

This despite the fact that the original has no first-person pronoun in that line, or in any of the lines preceding it. This brings up once more one of the trickiest issues in the translation of Classical Chinese into English. The whole poem "For the Recluse Wei Ba" is presented as one man's address to his old friend. In English, we would naturally expect such a document to make extensive use of "I", but of course, this poem does not. So the translator instead must choose: avoid the same pronouns the Chinese uses and risk awkward English, or add pronouns where there are none in the original and risk changing the meaning.

I decided that I thought the first four lines sounded more like musings about people in general, rather than necessarily referring to the poet and his friend, and so left out English personal pronouns to try and capture this sense of generalization. This inevitably leaves out some of the original, which can be read either to sound general or to sound specific. Compare my first translation with the following alternate translation of the beginning:

Human lives cannot see one another, moving

like the stars Shen and Shang.

What night could be like tonight, when we

share the lantern's glow?

I find that this alternate sounds much more personal and specific thanks to the "we" there. Nonetheless I think I can get away with my original translation, odd as it is, because of the 人生 (human life) in the first line. The sense of big-picture those characters carry seems to me to carry over into the next few lines. In addition, I feel like avoiding the more specific pronouns in English gets closer to the vagueness of the original -- that is, the way it can be read to imply either that we are talking about the poet and his friend, or about people in general. There will always be a problem, however, in that whenever I do start using "I" or "we" it risks sounding like a 'harder' transition than the original merits. I wonder now if I should move the transition from general to specific up earlier into the poem?