8: Mountains and Aspects

Footnotes to the previous Du Fu poem:

1. Daizong refers to Mt. Tai, the quintessential Chinese 'sacred mountain', so the poem is about Du Fu contemplating Mt. Tai as he looks on it, or from its heights down onto the world. In China a 'mountain' refers not to a single peaked formation, but to a collection of what Westerners might call individual mountains or hills; a system of heights, like /\/\/\ instead of /\.
2. During the Spring and Autumn period, the border between Qi and Lu ran through Mt. Tai, so this use of the place names parallels the later use of Yin and Yang in the way it divides and dualizes the mountain.
3. Great Transformations is a philosophical term that makes reference to the basic operations of nature itself. Literally, the two characters mean "Creation / Change" but I have chosen "Great Transformations" for reasons I explain below.
4. Yin and Yang are familiar to many in the West as the Twin Forces that underlie certain strands of Chinese metaphysics. In many ancient texts, such as the Book of Songs, they also refer to the northern and southern faces of mountains.

Choices:

I'll get right into it: I've chosen to leave Daizong romanized but untranslated, primarily because it is a name, but also because I feel nothing is gained from replacing it with another name, equally unfamiliar to the first-time reader and more importantly, equidistant from the signified place or emotional content to which Du Fu or one of his contemporaries might find themselves referred. Next, my translation of 造化 as "Great Transformations" deliberately avoids the too-Christian "Creation" and the modern- or Western-sounding "Nature". Great Transformations is also deliberately obtuse, hopefully in a way similar to the original 造化, itself a storied and debated piece of philosophical discourse. "Aspect" for 神秀 is a strange choice of words in many ways, but I like it, especially capitalized, because I think it carries a sense of the grand scale of 神秀, while avoiding any overtly religious words.

Most significantly, I made a series of perspectival choices to make the beginning of the poem a description of the mountain, switch to the birds in the final line (the penultimate line in the English), and then leave the final line unclear. Thus the 神秀, 阴阳, 汤胸, and 决眦 are Mt. Tai's, and the last sentence may be from the perspective of the birds or the poet himself (the last is, I believe, the traditional exegesis). That "technical vagueness" is something I aim for; I always love it when I think I've found a way of capturing the inherent ambiguities of Classical Chinese in English, though it's most often a fool's errand.

Another decision, which I think is a first for me in this space, was to avoid all punctuation. Partly this was an experiment, but partly I thought it went well with the attempt to attain a kind of ambiguity in English that mirrored the ambiguity of the original.

As a result of the above thinking, I've gone with a title slightly different from other translations I've seen. Instead of the gerund, I picked a stranger "Look" -- could be imperative, could be part of a secondary clause describing what one of the characters in this poem is doing. I like the vagueness of "look"; hopefully it defamiliarizes the title just a little bit but not too much.