Double Shadows: Selected Poetry of Ouyang Jianghe

TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

xiii TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD Austin Woerner It is tempting to imagine that, as a translator working directly with a living author, one might be able to circumvent the written words entirely and delve straight into the author’s imagination, digesting the work back into its basic inspirational impulses and reassembling it, alive and breathing, in one’s own language. If this were possible—so the myth goes—translation would be no different from the act of creation, and the result would not be a secondary text but another primary one, as faithful to the author’s vision as the original. It might even be possible to create a text more faithful to it, and one might be justified in whatever radical detours were necessary to reach this end. Needless to say, this is an extreme sort of thought experiment. No writer can be a fly on the inside of another’s skull, and most readers of foreign literature would like a guarantee that they are reading more or less what the foreign reader sees on the page. But any translator who enjoys direct access to their author and the gift of that author’s patience in answering endless queries (I was lucky enough to have both) must, to some degree, harbor this fantasy. So I confess that when on a May morning two years ago I first strode through the gate of Ouyang Jianghe’s neo-Gothic apartment tower in northeast Beijing, I felt as if I held the key to his intricate, sometimes inscrutable poems. I imagined that, by picking them apart line by line with their creator, I might unlock the mystery that flashes temptingly through the words, and with it animate my own versions. For almost two weeks we met every day for several hours, dissecting selections from his oeuvre. Sitting at the dining room table in his airy calligraphy-hung flat, sipping green tea out of an Irish coffee glass, I would listen to Ouyang, a slight man with close-cropped hair and the gift of energetic, serious gab, discourse at length about the failure of the Chinese literary tradition to grapple with the physical world, or point out xiv myriad connections between small details in his poems: look, here’s an upward motion, here’s a downward one; here’s light, here’s dark; here’s white, here’s black. Yet when I pressed him too hard about what lay behind the words—what they might hint at, imply, evoke—he would bristle impatiently. “Listen, you don’t have to get everything. Just translate the words. Sometimes the reader isn’t supposed to know.” Let me step back a moment and explain that for a non-native speaker of a language, even a fluent one, navigating a literary text can feel like being face-blind at a cocktail party. You might understand every element of a sentence, yet somehow its import is lost upon you, like staring hard at a pair of eyes, a nose, and a mouth and failing to recognize your boss or your high-school buddy. Take for example these lines from “Dinner” (晚餐 Wancan), translated “literally”: A hand-carved ivory toothpick stirs slowly between loose teeth, in the depths of food’s eclipse. What does this mean? What does it tell us about the speaker’s psychic state? Is a hand-carved ivory toothpick a luxury item or an heirloom? Are his teeth loose because he is old, or because of a dental condition? And what the hell is “food’s eclipse”? The words are there, but their meaning— rather, their poetic argument—is gone. I found it hard to believe that a Chinese poet with an encyclopedic knowledge of Western poetry, encountered mostly in translation (Pound, Stevens, and St. John Perse are as deep or deeper influences than, say, Du Fu or Huang Tingjian) could seriously believe it was possible to “just translate the words.” So one day I came prepared to win him over with what I thought was a killer analogy. “Imagine,” I said, readying pen and paper, “that you want me to make a painting. You tell me the painting is of a forest, and peeking from behind xv one of the trees is a tail. I ask you what kind of animal is hiding behind the trees. You say you don’t want to tell me, because you don’t want...