May 9, 2007

All of that Coleman Barks bashing on the Buffalo list drove me to revisit Eliot Weinberger & Octavio Paz's Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (1987). As the title suggests, the authors look at 19 separate ways to present the same poem (the original and 18 translations), discussing the merits and demerits of each. Of Kenneth Rexroth's translation, Weinberger writes, "It is the closest in spirit, if not letter, of the original: the poem Wang might have written had he been born a 20th century American" (23). The one thing that this 53 page booklet gets across is that there are many approaches to translation, each coupled with their own flaws. Barks has done a lot to draw attention to Rumi, both through his translations and through his press Maypop. If we don't like his methodology (which follows Pound's Cathay era methods [of not knowing the source language and using someone else's translation as a starting point]), then we should make our own translations that address our particular translational concerns.