Читать книгу Seeking the Cave - James P. Lenfestey - Страница 16
ОглавлениеENCOUNTER WITH THE ARCH-TRANSLATOR
After breakfast, Mike tested his cameras while I ordered an extra cup of tea. Mike was prepared. I was not. As a newspaper editorial writer for a decade, I had routinely interviewed major business, scientific, and political leaders without the slightest trepidation. But this was Dr. Burton Watson, preeminent translator and scholar who, at eighty years old, still produced elegant texts! What enduring work had I ever really done? Yes, I was in love with the sound and rhythm of Watson’s translations, but I understood little of China, Japan, Buddhism, or, really, of poetry, though I was helplessly seized in its grasp much of my life.
I paced the hotel lobby. Right on time, a slight American pushed slowly through the revolving entrance door. He was lightly stooped, bald with a large mole decorating his forehead, wearing black heavy-framed 1950s-style glasses. He had warm, watery brown eyes, full lips, and the soft, gentle voice of a shy man. I awkwardly shook his hand (I had imagined a bear hug!), and gingerly ushered him into the elevator to our room. After introducing him to Mike, I prepared three cups of green tea while Mike seated him in the corner chair and arranged the lapel microphone.
There were surprises all around. I showed him my cherished edition of his Cold Mountain, my responses chicken-scratched all over the margins. He showed us his two-volume manuscript of Cold Mountain’s poems, woodblock-printed in 1756, that he had purchased in 1956 at a bookstall in Kyoto. Stab-bound like my book dedicated to him, it held 303 poems, the vast majority attributed to Han-shan, the rest to his two friends, the Buddhist monk Feng-kan (Big Stick) and the foundling temple kitchenboy Shih-te (Pickup). The text was surrounded by extensive commentaries by Japanese Buddhist monks, who admired the eccentric and unpredictable Cold Mountain far more than Chinese Buddhist or Confucian scholars ever did.
He told us he fell in love with Chinese characters as a boy taking his parents’ shirts to the neighborhood Chinese laundry in suburban New York, fascinated by the mysterious written forms. He joined the navy at seventeen before finishing high school, and while stationed in Yokohama harbor in 1943 made many trips into that devastated city. After graduation from the Chinese program at Columbia on the GI Bill, he immediately booked ship’s passage back to Japan, seeking to get as close to China as the Cold War would allow. He landed in Japan in 1951, the occupation still under way. “Really,” he said, “American missionaries were the only non-military people supposed to be there, but somehow I came as a teacher of English to Kyoto.” He had left Japan infrequently ever since, including for a stint on the faculty at Columbia, which he fled when they wanted him to chair the department.
After finishing his PhD back at Columbia, he returned to Japan, part of the small expatriate community in Kyoto in the 1950s that included the poets Gary Snyder and Cid Corman, and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, the pioneering American Zen practitioner who later became a priest. Unknown to Watson at the time, Snyder had already translated twenty-four of Han-shan’s poems as a graduate student at Berkeley (later published in Evergreen Review and in book form in Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems).
A beginning poet himself in those days, Watson told us translating Han-shan’s poems became his first substantial undertaking. Watson worked for a time for Mrs. Sasaki at the First Zen Institute in Kyoto. When she read Arthur Waley’s translations of twenty Cold Mountain poems in Encounter in 1954, she asked Watson to seek out the originals.
Cid Corman readily agreed to help edit Watson’s early efforts at translation. “Cut this out, cut that out, this isn’t doing anything . . . get rid of the verbiage,” a confident Corman insisted to Watson’s amazement, as Corman knew no Chinese (nor Japanese!). But Watson felt his advice sound and edited accordingly.
Watson trusted Corman, I guessed, because Corman was a poet. Watson said he still tries to keep his ear attuned to American English by reading contemporary poetry. I asked him to read out loud to us some of his Cold Mountain translations. In doing so, his voice dropped into a deeply moving poetic cadence. “I should have known!” I exclaimed to myself. “He has a poet’s ear, that reverence for rhythm and sound. That explains the exceptional music of his translations.”
In describing his translation technique, Watson confirmed that thought. “I know what the Chinese character means and implies and so on,” he said. “And I can’t just make up some other thing. On the other hand, I have a certain amount of leeway. It’s what translators always say: because I’ve lost so much in other places, I should be allowed to make it up in places where I can . . . make it a little better than the original. So within those limits, I try to get the best language, the most vivid, effective—and the sound, of course, I’m always thinking of the sound. Some people apparently don’t pay much attention to the sound.”
He said he followed the Chinese form rigorously as well. “If it’s an eight-line poem I come out with an eight-line translation. Because the lineation is very pronounced in the Chinese. Now [Kenneth] Rexroth didn’t like that, so he runs it over into the next line. And [David] Hinton does the same, because he admires Rexroth. But the Chinese is so strong that it forces it on the English. . . . If you are going to use enjambment you have to enjamb every next line. I don’t know why Rexroth did that. He didn’t like end-stopped lines, but the Chinese form is very strong.”
I told him about the diplomat’s daughter at Takashimaya, who felt a tremendous conflict between the individuality she’d learned in the West and the conformity she felt living here. I wondered if that difference was part of the ungovernable Han-shan’s charm to America’s open-road ear? I remembered that Jack Kerouac wrote the novel The Dharma Bums after he and Allen Ginsberg visited Gary Snyder in Mill Valley, where Snyder was translating Han-shan for his Berkeley professor. America’s road scholar dedicated that book “to Han-shan.”
Watson confided that at a family gathering back in the States after his father’s death, he chose as a text a Han-shan poem. I asked him to read it to us.
COLD MOUNTAIN NO. 85
I came once to sit on Cold Mountain
And lingered here for thirty years.
Yesterday I went to see relatives and friends;
Over half had gone to the Yellow Springs.
Bit by bit life fades like a guttering lamp,
Passes on like a river that never rests.
This morning I face my lonely shadow
And before I know it tears stream down.
Watson’s eyes welled with tears as he recalled that gathering. Watson too had come to “sit” briefly in Japan and had “lingered” nearly forty years. Now he only rarely visited the States, and had visited mainland China only once. Although he had approached Tientai near Cold Mountain’s cave, he had never reached it.
I asked him to read that poem one more time, but he answered, “Maybe it’s too teary a note to end on.” Instead he recited the final quatrain of his own response to Cold Mountain:
Do you have the poems of Han-shan in your house?
They’re better for you than sutra-reading!
Write them out and paste them on a screen
where you can glance them over from time to time.
We laughed. “I do have the poems of Han-shan in my house,” I said, “and have glanced them over for thirty years, thanks to you.” “Take them along when you go on a picnic,” he joked. “I do!” I answered. “I gave my son his own copy of your Cold Mountain on a picnic. Now he loves Han-shan through me, as I do through you.” “He’s fun to play with,” Watson laughed.
After three hours that felt like three minutes, Mike finally unwound the microphone. I glanced at our cups of tea, cold and forgotten. Watson returned his treasured Han-shan to his travel bag and we left the hotel to stroll the grounds of nearby Zojoji Temple, Tokyo’s cathedral of ritual Buddhism.
Wandering the manicured temple grounds, Watson explained his own Buddhist practice, the much quieter discipline of the Rinzai school of Zen. His master would assign him a koan—a famously enigmatic question or assertion—which he had to puzzle out through meditation. Sometimes the master approved his response right away. Sometimes approval took days or even years. He liked that practice, filled with disciplined probing of the mysterious nature of language and thought, letting go of the rational order of the world. “Zen says if you are happy, be happy, if you are sad, be sad. But don’t hang on. Be where you are.”
In the cemetery behind the temple, Watson explained the Japanese ceremony of death. Families placed the ashes of family members at densely packed vertical grave markers, and ritually honored them by bringing water, flowers, and other beloved objects. “If he smoked cigarettes, they might leave a cigarette. It is too expensive for most families to be buried in Tokyo these days, so they go to cemeteries outside the city. There are also cemeteries for those without any relatives to care for them.” He looked up. “That is where I will go,” he said.
Watson declined our offer of lunch, and so, reluctantly, we left him at the Zojoji subway entrance. He waved good-bye and slowly disappeared down the steps, entering the mouth of the cave called Tokyo, his adopted home, his Cold Mountain.
THE ZOJOJI TEMPLE GATE—the original, constructed in 1613—is engraved with text translated on a nearby plaque: “Gate for getting delivered from earthly states of mind: greed, anger, and stupidity.” Burton Watson passed through that gate many years ago, I thought. Much stupidity remained ahead for me, and probably greed and anger too. But my visit with him felt like an important step to begin to shed the husk of this world, like the cicadas whose freshly minted bodies sang throughout the long Tokyo night.
Bashō said:
Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die
(translated by Sam Hamill)
Sad at Watson’s departure, I felt a burst of happiness too. His vocation, translator, so often lay buried behind the original author’s more prominent name. Yet my life had been affected by his life’s work, and I had been able to tell him so. The voice ringing in my ears these thirty years, dissolving time and space, was his.
ENCOUNTER WITH THE ARCH-TRANSLATOR
He reads Cold Mountain’s poems slowly—
eyes swimming in the ocean of his father’s gaze.
His warm tones soar like a Pacific breeze
over two continents, three thousand years,
one timeless practice—sitting still, making poems.
He is loud as one hand clapping, awake as a slap in the face,
radiant as his original face, a bug escaped from a bowl,
tears wet as a river longing for its home in the sea.
According to ancient Chinese mythology (eighth century BCE) the Yellow Springs were an underground realm where the soul went after it left the body.
