Another Wang Wei Translation

SONG OF SUFFERING FROM HEAT


Red sun dominates earth and sky.
Fire clouds top off mountain peaks.
Grass and trees are scorched and shriveled.
Rivers and ponds have all gone dry.
Lightest white silk is too heavy.
Densest wood gives too little shade.
Sleeping mats are too hot to use.
Linens are washed and washed again.
Thinking of leaving space and time,
where all is emptiness and void.
Long winds come from ten thousand li.
Great waters wash away dirt and care.
But to see flesh as affliction--
that is the unawakened mind.
Just then the Sweet Dew Gate opens
on clear joy, sinuous and cool.
     --Wang Wei

王维
苦熱 
 
赤日滿天地，
火雲成山嶽。
草木盡焦卷，
川澤皆竭涸。
輕紈覺衣重，
密樹苦陰薄。
莞簟不可近，
絺绤再三濯。
思出宇宙外，
曠然在寥廓。
長風萬裏來，
江海蕩煩濁。
卻顧身為患，
始知心未覺。
忽入甘露門，
宛然清涼樂。

I have perhaps over-interpreted the next-to-last couplet in the interest of having it say what I think it says.  This is a literal translation from Hugh Grigg's blog East Asian Student:  "yet worry body as contract disease/begin know heart not yet wake up."  Some translations emphasize the notion that the body is the source of suffering and the enlightened mind escapes the flesh.  But Wang Wei was a Buddhist, a Zen Buddhist.  And, as such, would certainly not have denied the flesh can be a source of pain, but suffering--that he would have seen as a matter of mind.  So I think that his seeing that his mind was focused on bodily distress--and on dreaming of escaping it--was his entry into the realization that it was that focus itself that was the source of his suffering.

The "Sweet Dew Gate" is a reference to how the teachings and practice of Buddhism open on enlightenment.  Less poetically, it could be called the "Dharma Gate."

Then in the last two lines there a sudden awakening, a throwing open of that gate.  There are two schools within Zen, one sees enlightenment as achieved incrementally with long study and practice and the other sees enlightenment as coming suddenly, say, by hearing a hoe clatter on a stone--after long study and practice.  Wang Wei's dates are 699-759.  The idea of sudden enlightenment is associated with Huineng, the sixth Zen Patriarch, 638-713CE.  Wang Wei's dates are 699-759.  So the doctrine of sudden enlightenment was relatively new.  Zen arrived in China, where Buddhism in general was already established,  from India with Bodhidharma, the First Patriarch, in the 520's.

A couple more translation notes:  I'm not sure whether the second line means the that the mass of the clouds looks like mountains or that the clouds are above the mountains.  And with the line "Sleeping mats are too hot approach," the general meaning is correct, but I've lost the parallelism with the following line as in Hugh M. Stimson's literal translation, "rush-mat bamboo-mat not can approach/fine-linen coarse-linen again three wash."  I'd like to do better with these two lines, but have so far failed.

A Few Scenes from My Life at Work

BEING A NURSE



when they burst in on him

he jumped out the window
the mob caught him
and left him dazed and bleeding
naked in the street
in the hospital
the night shift heard
there were death threats
and pushed furniture
against the back door
of the nursing unit
in the morning
one of the two policemen
takes off his kevlar vest
my patient is impassive
and silent
I rub lotion on his back
and put vaseline
on his puffy lips
he says thank you
out at the station
they say
oh that one's yours
how could someone do that
to a five-year-old girl

Amazing,
said the former Barbeque King,
looking up with his sweet smile
from where he'd fallen in urine,
after all that's happened to me,
how many people
still
want
to come by and talk.

HOME CARE WITH AN OPEN WINDOW

Bone-deep pressure sore.
Waved away again, two flies
land on his penis.

Isolation room,
fourth floor: ladybug enters
on my yellow gown.




Waking in the light
from the bathroom 
as the nurse empties his urinal,
he recalls his diagnosis.

To the east, 
on the marshes 
between route 2 and the lake,
so many ducks, 
down from the flyway, 
drift on dark water.

Arie Antiche

In the late 19th century, Alessandro Parisotti compiled a list of Italian baroque songs that he labeled "Arie Antiche," which has become the standard collection. Unfortunately, my first exposure to these songs was on Cecilia Bartoli's album "Se tu m'ami." I say "unfortunately" because her every note is a polished gem strung one to another in a supple whole--and periodically I look for other renditions and always find them to be disappointingly stiff and strident. Until now. Just came across Emiliano Geant's wonderful recording. He looks fairly young and it seems to be his only album. I never heard the term "coloratura baritone" before, but it certainly fits.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4uBAexJwms&feature=share&list=RDL4uBAexJwms

Grasping Misapprehension

Which is more me,
a lemon drop melting on my tongue
or spittle drying on my chin?

Which is more me,
that paper I no longer understand written for a syntax seminar
or the unconscious grammar that's in us all?

Which is more me,
a mangled, still warm, severed thumb
or a well-formed stool in my sigmoid colon?

Which is more me,
the intention to stop drumming the table
or the fingers persisting?

Which is more me,
I, lying blankly here,
or this yellowed paper in your hand?




  

A New Li Bai Translation

VIEWING THE MOUNT LU WATERFALL

Above Censer Peak, sunlight on purple smoke.

The falls, a curtain hanging in the distance,

is a torrent plunging three thousand feet down.

The Silver River rolls from highest heaven.

Two Poems for Joseph Campbell

1.  THEN IT'S TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN


The god who holds our world
in a slowly closing hand
sits for her moment
in the warm palm of another.




2.  INNUMERABLE GODS AND ALL ARE LOKI


The gods have fled
before our widening gaze,
first beyond the sun and moon,
then beyond the stars,
the galaxies,
the multiverse,
leaving no trace,
not even their laughter.

A Brief Foray into "And" and Beyond

Listening to an installment of the podcast Lexicon Valley about constructed languages, I learned of one called Loglan.  It's an attempt to make a language as logical and free from ambiguity as possible.  This ambition makes for a very complex language because there has to be a one word, one meaning relationship and a syntactical way to make every phrase and sentence univocal.  For example, "and" seems to indicate a pretty simple notion.  But it comes in different flavors.  For example, it can tie two things that do or are something with each other together or two things that are or do the same thing separately.  "Mary and her mom swam across the pool" vs "Mary and her mom had Mrs. Smith for third grade."  Each of these English "and's" would require in different word in Loglan.

What particularly got me thinking is that our "and" can couple both simultaneous and sequential events.  "Mary walked from one end of the block to the other and counted all the sidewalk squares" vs "Mary walked into town and bought a new coat." This distinction reminded me of something about the Khmer language that has nagged at me from time to time.  "Neng" is the Cambodian word for "and," but it can also be a future marker like "will" or "be going to" in English.  Mary neng her mom go to the market" vs "Mary neng go to the market."  I could never figure out what shared meaning underlay these two uses.  But if you think of "and" as a sequencer as in "Mary walked into town and bought a new coat," then it is marking "bought" as in the future with respect to "walked."

Further, if you look at how Khmer expresses the past, it's often with a perfective particle, that is, a word that's added to the end of a phrase or sentence.  This word is "hawy" and I think it's basic meaning is to indicate that whatever came before in the phrase has been fully realized.  Sometimes it can best be translated by making the English verb the simple past or the present perfect.  Sometimes it can be translated as "already."  And sometimes as an emphatic like "very" or "really." I think "hawy" works in Khmer approximately the way "le" works in Mandarin, both in syntactical disposition and in range of meaning.

Anyhow, what I thought was interesting was the notion of time-indicating words having some underlying broader meaning that resulted in their having other meanings that are, at first glance,
unrelated.