60 chapter one
studies over the past several decades is a wonderful thing, most of all
because of their current diversity and inclusiveness. There is room for
projects that keep the text on board, with attention to “minute detail”
like syllable stress and punctuation if need be. This particular type of
respect for the text informs my preference for citing individual poems
in their entirety. For poetry, this is often pragmatically possible and
theoretically desirable.
If only because I have wondered whether this poetry could have been
written in another language than Chinese, a few words on translation
are in order. All translations in this book are mine. This is for practi-
cal reasons—in a book written in one language on poetry in another,
analysis and interpretation are hand in glove with translation—and
out of love for the art. For a few of the poems in question, other trans-
lators have gone before; while I have organized my personal encoun-
ters with the texts in question, I haven’t changed my phrasings if they
coincided with those of my predecessors. As for the issue of academic
versus literary translation, I am inclined to the latter but aware of the
limitations that come with the claim of commenting on the Chinese
originals. There are no hard and fast rules for these things, as I hope
the reader will remember in chapter Seven, where I argue that a par-
ticular occurrence of ♃ ‘lamp’ should really be rendered as window in
English. Another perennial issue is that of the translatability of poetry
per se. While this is obviously not unique to the Chinese case, I would
like to cite fellow specialists of Chinese poetry to clarify where I stand.
I second Brian Holton’s dismissal of the myth of untranslatability, and
I express my admiration for Holton’s own, Andrea Lingenfelter’s,
Simon Patton’s, Michael Day’s and Steve Bradbury’s translations as
some of the strongest English-language evidence against this myth.^72
*
Translatability in a broader sense takes us to a final, contiguous point,
which concerns the very nature of scholarship on literature and espe-
cially on poetry, within linguistic borders or across them. Why speak
about texts, perhaps even claim to speak for texts that should speak for
themselves? The question brings to mind classifications of criticism as
(^72) Holton 1994: 122-123 and 1999: 188 et passim.