I’ve been dipping in and out of this book for months (ever the student) particularly because it contains breakdowns of the poems translated without ornament character by character from the Chinese symbols. While I’d read and enjoyed books of translated classical Chinese poetry many times before, the raw direct glossing directly into an English word character by character without any poetic overview of the whole has been a revelation.
In recent years I went at one point down a deep shan shui wormhole because of the very long history of text/image relationship ideas and perhaps I picked up more than I was conscious of or was drawn in that direction by similarities to my own work. Because looking now at these more literal translations, the similarities to the writing style I’ve developed over the last while for both voice and text in video works is striking. The poems work very cinematically in the sense that they are constructed as a linear collision of images, throwing up associative linkages between characters (and the image ideas they contain) like edits in an Eisenstein film. The Tang dynasty era writing is particularly stark, like this:
1. Wang Wei’s “Deer Enclosure” (《鹿柴》)
空山不見人，
但聞人語響。
返景入深林，
復照青苔上。
Literal translation (character by character):
Empty mountain / not see / person,
Only hear / person speech / echo.
Returning light / enters / deep forest,
Again shines / green moss / on.
Or this:
2. Li Bai’s “Quiet Night Thoughts” (《靜夜思》)
床前明月光，
疑是地上霜。
舉頭望明月，
低頭思故鄉。
Literal translation:
Bed front / bright moon light,
Suspect is / ground on / frost.
Raise head / gaze / bright moon,
Lower head / think / old home.
And this from some of my still ongoing live/linear video work:
Skin
The hill slopes toward the water. As it did on that night.
The soft interiors spacious and quiet. Nobody walks by.
Navigating solely by taste and smell. Background hum of nerve endings. Long seconds of maritime air. Seep slowly into the car and sink to the carpet.
Our voices tumble to meet it. All instructions, accommodations and apologies.Almost the end of the calendar. On a balcony above the roar. Almost softer than was bearable. At one end of the train line. Always in the deep grass. Always close to the turn of the tides. Always dancing in front of the police cars. Crossing town for a word. Always marking out new distances. Pacing out the perimeters.
Reverb was never more welcome. Never closer or fuller.
Steam revealing shapes. Water diffusing every touch.
Every variation of pulse and pace. Nothing left except rhythm.
Nothing remaining except surprise. A cliff overlooking the sea.
The size of the map was surprising. At first it seemed small.
Surface area continued to unfold and unravel. Too large for wonder.
Voices tightening through octaves. Call and slow response.
Sympathetic muscles resonating. Out of the range of hearing.
Straining for telepathy. Among the storms of sensation.
Understanding blood noise. Like a song.
Obviously evoking the concentrated stillness of writing in 890s China while sitting in a wooden studio in the hills around Xi’an during a late Spring full moon remains an unreachable or at least aspirational ideal. But for me at least there is a lot to learn in the starkness of these vivid juxtapositions and how they speak to contemporary writing in sound and image.
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