"What birds express" by Han Shan (寒山)

What birds express   my heart just cannot grapple with

at such times   I'll recline in my thatch hermitage

the peach & cherry   blossoming scarlet-scarlet

the willow & poplar   spangling slender foliage

the daybreak sun   o'er-sailing azurite hills

the limpid clouds   awash in the kelly ponds

who'd guess I pass beyond the dust of worlds

in swiftly ascending southerly Han Shan?

鳥 語 情 不 堪

其 時 臥 草 庵

櫻 桃 紅 爍 爍

楊 柳 正 毿 毿

旭 日 銜 青 嶂

晴 雲 洗 淥 潭

誰 知 出 塵 俗

馭 上 寒 山 南

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Some Notes

I've repeatedly worked at / polished my translation of the above poem (now & then) over the past 40 years or so.

This fresh rendering was instigated when I recalled a couple relevant couplets from the Han Shan poem, in the course of dashing out what became an almost-mini-essay (in the form of a twitter thread) late last night. The impromptu Twitter essay grew out of my (initially one-word) response to a one-sentence question posed by a literary acquaintance, Sridala Swami (who lives & writes in Hyderabad, India).

Han Shan (literally Cold Mountain) was an otherwise anonymous (except for his nom-de-plume) poet of Tang dynasty China, believed to have flourished in the 9th century AD. Evidently he may originally have been some sort of petty official, but apparently grew disgusted with worldly life and (like other seekers influenced by Chan / Zen Buddhism in that era) he precipitously withdrew from society, residing (as his collected poems attest) for at least 30 years as a hermit at the eponymous, remote mountain in Suzhou Province, where he took to meditation with his shadow as his sole companion (though sporadically he may've gone down to chat with another poet-recluse at a small temple below).

Gary Snyder translated line 1 of the above poem as "I can't stand these bird songs"! About 40 years ago, I rendered that line as What birds express my heart cannot endure. Till today, I've been satisfied with that version. Why did I alter the phrase? In intervening years, my sensibility has been schooled by exposure to Farsi / Urdu poetics, with those traditions' ubiquitous use of baḥr [cadence] percolating into my poetry practice, this cadence principle impacting how I write in (or translate into) English in the past couple decades.  Today, I felt I needed line 1's cadence to better approximate line 2's cadence. (And last night I newly re-settled on "thatch" [rather than "grass" or "rustic" etc.] for the character 草 cao.)

Re: Snyder's rendering of line 1, there's an idiomatic truth to it (情不堪 qíng bùkān commonly signifies "I can't bear it"), while my old translation ("my heart cannot endure") is arguably more literal. If my latest rendering (w/ "grapple") invokes a new image, c'est la vie.  I might add: I owe much to Snyder, whose Han Shan translations (along with Burton Watson's [that's a PDF link] invited me to read this exceptional poet in the original. I remember first stumbling on a small-edition, large-page printing of Snyder's Cold Mountain Poems at erstwhile Shambhala Bookstore (on Shattuck Ave., Berkeley) in the 1970s. At times, such chance meetings with certain books can have long consequences. I think I only later (albeit not much later) began to appreciate Snyder's own work in its own right (but I digress).

In my above rendering of line 4, the poet's typical & beautiful & rigorous parallelism is admittedly partially obscured, for sake of affording a suggestion of the poet's rhyming (heard in the original); but I'd hasten to point the interested reader to my above-linked "essay" where I offer a more literal (& ergo a more elegantly parallelistic) translation of the parallelistic couplet (lines 3-4).

I might also add a caveat re lines 3 & 4: I'm not 100% sure "willow & poplar" represent (as they seem to) those two trees -- with ditto  re: "peach  & cherry"; or whether, contrarily, these phrases could've (at Han Shan's time) been, e.g., terms signifying a single (more specific) conifer & a single (more specific) fruit tree, respectively. Regarding such lexical questions, if UC Berkeley's late Prof. Edward Schafer were around, hypothetically he could've been pestered to address the issue (as he did many other obscure questions of Tang dynasty language in his writings). I only took one class from Prof. Schafer, and two classes from Prof. Michel Strickmann -- both of whom are now no more. The loss of olden associates (whether eccentric Sinologists or one's immediate family & friends) is a theme familiar in Han Shan's poetry -- as in life.

Re: line 7, the phrase 俗塵 súchén (which I render "the dust of worlds") is from the Buddhist lexicon. This Wiktionary note suggests its general meaning or connotation. To delve into this more deeply might require a new mini-essay. But not today.

p.s.: in my "essay" (comprised of tweets) I didn't bother to translate the Bengali utterance Kolkatar Gaan, Kolkatar Pran -- a motto I'd incessantly hear on radio, when living some weeks in Kolkata a dozen years ago. It means: "Calcutta's song(s) / Calcutta's life-breath." (But Sridala prob. didn't need a translation.) For sake of thoroughness, I append this footnote.

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This is my 1st blog post in abt. 20 months.  Glad to be back to Bhairo in the Morning (in the morning). I'll offer hat-tips to Han Shan, Snyder, Watson, Professors Schafer & Strickmann, and Sridala Swami -- as well as new Twitter-met acquaintance Joe Lamport -- for spurring this prodigal's return.