Shuke Zeng

on translating Shu Ting

I took a more experimental approach while working with this poem, and I am aware that some of the literal meanings in the Chinese poem do not exactly match up with the translation. I took this approach because this poem contains a lot of ambiguities, and I wanted to preserve a certain amount of this ambiguity without completely disassociating from my own interpretation of the poem. For example, in my translation, I formatted “你看着你/你看着你” with a series of extra spaces, though they were not intended in the original poem. In Chinese, the circularity of the line comes not only from the repetition of “you,” but also the similarity of form between the characters 看 and 着. Therefore, I emphasize such formal circularity by rendering the spaces in those two lines. Another example of a place where I was more experimental in my translation is the line “like tiny shimmering silver fishes / nibbling their way up to trace the source.” The notion of “nibbling” was not present in the original poem, but the poet’s use of 闻味 signified the blindly primal nature of the fish’s movements, and I considered “nibbling” to be a good alternative to signifying such primal nature.