19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated

Nineteen different translations of a single poem with comments on each version by Eliot Weinberger and introduction contributed by Octavio Paz. The difficulty (and necessity) of translation is concisely described in Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, a close reading of different translations of a single poem from the Tang Dynastyfrom a transliteration to Kenneth Rexroths loose interpretation. As Octavio Paz writes in the afterword, Eliot Weinbergers commentary on the successive translations of Wang Weis little poem illustrates, with succinct clarity, not only the evolution of the art of translation in the modern period but at the same time the changes in poetic sensibility. "This four-line poem, 1200 years old: a mountain, a forest, the setting sun illuminating a patch of moss. It is a scrap of literary Chinese, no longer spoken."--Back cover