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Meaning Beyond the Words: The Challenges of Translating Zen Poetry

Translating Chinese poetry is hard. Translating Chinese Zen poetry is harder. The late Lucien Stryk inspired a generation of readers with Zen translations that are at once understated, seamless, and startlingly evocative. Ordinary objects and scenes are presented inmagnified, hyperreal focus, which impels us to view them as something new and meaningful. The ordinary becomes symbolic and the mundane universal. Stryk’s translations are seemingly effortless, but my own experience tells me otherwise. I am humbled to be asked to contribute to this special issue dedicated to him. My book Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown presents 190 poems by monk-poets of the eighth to seventeenth centuries, in styles ranging from vernacular and direct to imagistic and evocative.1 The simplicity of poetry of the Chinese Chan tradition (Zen is the Japanese pronunciation) belies its complex ideology and sophisticated language. Images as basic as the moon, clouds, boats, reflections in water, plum and lotus, bamboo and pine, monkeys and herons, take on complex connotations based in Chan ideas, famous verbal exchanges, and Chan and Buddhist texts. Most of these poems are no more than a dozen lines, and are designed to encapsulate momentary states of mind of an individual—emotional reactions, philosophical insights, or flashes of religious illumination. Chinese poetry in general is a lyric tradition, and these poems are no exception. Translating lyric poetry, even among related languages, is a difficult—some would say impossible—task. A lyric poem is an indivisible union of meaning and music. Translating the meaning is easy; it’s the music that is hard. A favorite example I use in my teaching is from Ernst Jünger’s essay “In Praise of Vowels,” as explained by Emil Staiger in his Basic Concepts of Poetics.2 Consider the Latin verse: