Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

#13. Three Chinese Poets: Translations of poems by Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu, translated by Vikram Seth
1992, HarperCollins

Here is an interesting double play: a collection of poems by three Tang Dynasty Chinese poets, translated into English by Indian poet and novelist Vikram Seth.

I had not known Seth spoke Chinese (though looking it up on the Internet, apparently everybody else did: he is "a famous polyglot" who speaks German, Welsh and French as well as Hindi, Urdu, Mandarin and English, and one of his early award-winning books was a travel narrative through Muslim China and Tibet (From Heaven Lake, 1983, in case you were wondering)).  In fact, I had not known much about Seth at all except what I decided/learned/concluded from reading about the first third of Golden Gate, his amazingly ambitious and eccentric verse novel about San Francisco, late one night when someone left it in the grad-student work room while I was procrastinating on writing my thesis.  From reading this I concluded that Seth appeals to me.  I like his playfulness, his eccentricity -- his standing-outside-of-the-orbitness; at the same time, his obvious irregular but snooty attachment to the Established.  (Not that this is a universally admirable trait, but it's something I share, so I recognized myself in it.)  I like his queer sensibility, his flashes of nastiness blurred with a deep attempt to reach for compassion and humanity.  I like his baroque attachment to rhyme, which I also have and which is not very popular these days -- is very risky, also, because unsuccessful free verse is just boring, but unsuccessful rhymed verse descends into doggerel, which makes me sometimes too nervous even to make the attempt.

I think some of Seth's translations here are successful, and some of them really aren't.  (Which is okay, right?)  He has taken the -- to me -- very surprising approach of trying to translate the poems in metered and rhymed English versions; they are, in fact, metered and rhymed in Chinese, but of course the process of translation complicated everything... I feel like this inevitably puts such a personal stamp on the end results that in this entry I'm tagging Seth as the author, _as well as_ the translator.  (Eccentric, maybe, but... so? Seth is eccentric; he makes me feel like eccentricity.)  Even though, I should note in fairness, Seth gives the disclaimer that his translations "are not intended as transcreations or free translations" à la Ezra Pound.

( Though you are kind enough to ask... )