This past Monday I had the pleasure of meeting David Hinton, who came at noon to deliver his talk on Ch'an Buddhism, "Translating Across Cosmologies," and later in the afternoon, a poetry reading. David began his talk by letting flutter to the floor a slip of paper on which the following proposal was written: "Write a poem about nothing at all of the least possible length." I smiled; what a good Ch'an poem. David began by explaining that he thinks of translation as a philosophical project; particular cosmologies accompany particular languages and cannot necessarily always be translated into another language. He described the Ch'an universe as divided into two parts, one which is non-being, emptiness, nothingness, but which is nonetheless a pregnant void, giving rise to the second part of the universe, the empirical world as we know it. Each individual being has its own emptiness, and as a means of meeting this emptiness, the Ch'an sage dwells or meditates, and Ch'an poetry is part of this practice. If one sits in meditation, one can learn to watch thoughts. The mind can come to mirror the world, so that there is a reciprocal relation between the emptiness "outside" and "within" the mind. At least for Ch'an Buddhists, then, perception is understood as spiritual act. David went on to read a poem by Meng Hao-jan (689-740), "Autumn Begins":
Autumn begins unnoticed. Nights slowly lengthen,
and little by little, clear winds turn colder and colder,
summer's blaze giving way. My thatch hut grows still.
At the bottom stair, in bunchgrass, lit dew shimmers.
I'm paraphrasing David here, so here goes: Autumn is a season of clarity and silence which follows the vibrant life of summer; the frost comes, clearing a space for thinking and reflection. The thatch hut in this poem fulfills an identity between mind, hut, wind, and seasons, in which each passes through the others. The openness of the hut is like the openness of the mind; the walls for such huts were essentially windows, spaces including everything around them. The final part of the last line, "lit dew shimmers," can be read as the moment of spiritual perception. David argued that because perception is understood as spiritual act, much of the poetry is highly imagistic (as aspect of the Ancient Chinese poetry which 20th century poets like Pound and Williams will later appropriate), but this emphasis on the visual is different in Ancient Chinese because it participates in a cosmology not available to the English language. David went on to say that our truest self is that pregnant nothingness, and it is to that nothingness that we will return after a temporary period of embodiment. He suggested that Ch'an cosmology is present in the poems even at the level of grammar. For the most part, the poetic language of Ancient Chinese is emptied; it leaves out conjunctions and articles, subjects and objects, and sometimes verbs. As the reader moves through the poem, she must fill in the grammar according to context (e.g. she may find a place where a subject "I" seems to be implied or where she is able to discern a sense of the temporal). It's almost meditative, David said, "at the edge of language and silence." How wonderful. Everything that comes out of this pregnant nothingness emerges in and of itself, self-creating, and that's how this language works (Julie, cf. your current manuscript). David ended by reading a poem collaged from the lines of other of his previous translations; this collage process, he said, alows him to speak in the voices of others and for other voices to speak through him as well.
I asked him about that as we sat eating lunch together; that is, I asked him whether his decision to do translation was a way for him to write without compromising his Ch'an Buddhist practice. He said probably that was so. I also asked him what model of translation he was working with (ie. a Jakobsonian or a Benjaminian model), and he chose the former, which surprised me a little (given my preference for the latter). But it struck me that perhaps trying to make the Ancient Chinese poems English poems was the part of the writing process--a compromise between the Ancient Chinese author and his own authorial self. I can hardly fault him for that. After all, it is quite a decision to dedicate yourself to the translation of what most will perceive as other people's work, rather than trying to manufacture some indivudual and marketable voice for yourself.
We reconvened for David's poetry reading at four-thirty, and somehow I was roped into reading his visual-map-poem Fossil Sky, along with David, Stephanie Gehring and Roger Gilbert. Wonderful for me because Roger and I had once tried to read the poem together in his office but found ourselves at a loss as to how to go about it. We began by reading bits of the poem, each reader picking up where some one had left off. We continued reading as David began to read a separate set of poems at the podium. We trailed off and returned to our seats. Toward the end of the reading, we resumed reading together until the sound finally trailed away.
I picked up a copy of Fossil Sky for myself, along with David's newest anthology, Mountain Home, and chatted briefly about visual poetry, said that Fossil Sky reminded me of a book I am working on right now by Cecilia Vicunña, cloud-net. He laughed and said he and Cecilia were good friends. Go figure. I went home later only to discover that Cecilia has included in her book a part of the Tao Te Ching, translated by none other than David Hinton.
That was Monday. In other news, I got the sniffles on Tuesday and stayed home in bed, and then dragged myself to class on Wednesday (my teaching was being evaluated) and then sat down with my committee for my qualifying exam. It was quite an interesting and lively conversation (which isn't surprising given the folks assembled), and long story short, I passed. I'm delighted, my friends will get to see me again, provided they still remember who I am, and I am ready to begin work on my thesis manuscript.
