Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community

2. Translating: The Poetics of Linking East and West

In the spring of 1956, after reaching the end of Myths & Texts, Snyder handed the completed manuscript to Robert Creeley, whom he entrusted with the task of seeking a publisher. He could not have predicted that Myths & Texts would remain in the trunk of Creeley’s car for months on end, despite the best efforts of Phil Whalen to get Creeley to finish and distribute the typescript . “ANY NEWS OF CREELEY?” Snyder asked Whalen in a December 1956 letter. “I’ll bet he sold my MSS to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for a million clams and beat it to New Zealand.” Fortunately, these fears were unfounded. Creeley eventually made contact with LeRoi Jones, whose Totem Press published the influential volume of verse, rather belatedly, in September 1960.1 Snyder would have done the literary legwork himself, but just weeks after completing the manuscript he embarked for Japan, beginning a residence in Asia that lasted the better part of twelve years. In the months leading up to his departure, Snyder was trying his hand at a different poetic mode, one more clearly indebted to the Asian verse forms and Buddhist philosophies capturing his attention. Although Myth & Texts (especially its last phase, “Burning”) was notable for its allusions to Asian traditions , Snyder’s new poems seemed to absorb those traditions as never before. The result was a complex interplay between Eastern mind and Western landscape. Snyder selected twenty-one of these new poems for a volume he 2. T R A N S L A T I N G The Poetics of Linking East and West entitled Riprap. When Cid Corman’s Origin Press published Riprap in 1959, it became the first of Snyder’s volumes to see print. Snyder and Corman printed the volume in Japan and sold it out of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, which had trouble keeping it in stock.2 Like Myths & Texts, Riprap is shaped by Snyder’s work experiences. It should be noted, however, that during the summer of 1955 the poet was doing rather different work in an unfamiliar locale. Instead of migrating northward to work in the lookout cabins of the Cascades or the logging camps of eastern Oregon, Snyder decided to stay in California, where he found work in Yosemite National Park as a member of a trail crew. As he labored to learn the intricacies of cobblestone mountain trails, he not only practiced the art of “riprapping,” but also adopted a new technique for writing verse. Snyder has frequently cited this summer as the time he became a real poet. Back in 1955, though, the experience of staying put in California struck him as somewhat strange. “I just can’t adapt to not packing up & traveling this time of year & my rucksack & boots hang accusingly on the wall,” he confessed to Phil Whalen in a letter from June of that year.3 Augmenting Snyder’s new work experience was his growing understanding of Asian religious traditions. While living in the Bay Area, he immersed himself in the study of Buddhism and came to hold a special affinity for the Jodo-shin or “Pure Land” variety practiced by Japanese immigrants at the Berkeley Buddhist Church. To his great delight, Snyder discovered that this place of worship was “warm, relaxed, and familial,” with an atmosphere of “infinite generosity” (MR 154). Buddhism was “cosmopolitan and open to everyone,” he would later explain, since unlike most American Indian traditions it did not require that one be “born into” the culture in order to participate in its rites (TRW 94, 95). Encouraged by Reverend Kanmo Imamura and other friends at the Berkeley Buddhist Church, Snyder set forth to learn a wide range of devotional practices. “I soaked up Mahayana sutras and traditional commentaries, Chinese and Japanese Ch’an texts, and Vajrayana writing through those years,” he remembers, “taking delight in their scale of imagination and their fearless mytho-psychological explorations” (MR 154). During this same period, Snyder continued his studies at UC–Berkeley’s oriental languages program. In the autumn semester of 1955, having completed his summer work in Yosemite, he enrolled in a class taught by Professor Ch’en Shih-hsiang. It was in Ch’en’s class that Snyder chose to translate the poetry of Han-shan, a mountain mystic who lived in T’ang Dynasty 100 | TRANSL ATING China. Han-shan was the perfect poet for Snyder to study. From an academic standpoint, translating...