I enjoyed 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei on the whole, so I don’t mean for the following nitpick to suggest that I disliked it. Here is the excerpt that bothered me a bit (17):
It never occurs to Chang and Walmsley that Wang could have written the equivalent of ‘Casts motley patterns on the jadegreen mosses’ had he wanted to. He didn't. In its way a spiritual exercise, translation is dependent on the dissolution of the translator's ego: an absolute humility toward the text. A bad translation is the insistent voice of the translator—that is; when one sees no poet and hears only the translator speaking.
I may disagree a little with the content (as in, according to my definitely inexperienced and probably wrong point of view, sometimes extratextual ornamentation might work to create a more accurate sensation in a target language than a direct, plain rendering would). But I think Weinberger is generally right. I more so struggle with his delivery. Surely, in fact, it did occur to Chang and Walmsley that Wang could have written his poem that way. Their understanding of the poem’s arc, surely informed by their own aesthetic sensibilities, just happens to differ from Weinberger’s. But overall, really an enjoyable little book!
I really relished Davis’s writing style. It was funny! For example, her discussion of one of her “problem words,” zut, which “is apparently a euphemistic form of merde,” and which Proust employs in a variety of difficult-to-decode ways (61). As I become acquainted with the translation world, it’s interesting to see the little quirks that different scholars have. One of the quirks that seems common to nearly all translators is the self-conscious introduction. Now, I laugh reading them. Nelson’s is a perfect example: “translations… in the shadow of their predecessors” (xiii). Spare me, haha! We know! (Kidding, I’d do the same.)
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