Over on the Language Log, Victor Mair puts to rest that all English expressions have to be tensed and thus prevent timeless poetry. He shares his translation of a 13th century Chinese poet thus:
Autumn Thoughts by Ma Zhiyuan
Withered wisteria, old tree, darkling crows –
Little bridge over flowing water by someone’s house –
Emaciated horse on an ancient road in the western wind –
Evening sun setting in the west –
Broken-hearted man on the horizon.
And indeed, he is right. The poem exudes timelessness (if a lack of something can be exuded). It is more difficult for some languages than others to avoid certain grammatical commitments (like gender or number) which makes translation more difficult but there’s always a way.
What struck me about the poem was something different. It is so rich in imagery and yet so poor in figurative language . This is by no means unique but worth a note. In fact, there is no figurative language there at all if we discount such foundational figures as “sun setting in the West”, “broken-hearted” or “man on the horizon”. In fact, had I not known this was a Chinese poem, I could have easily believed it was a description of 17th century Dutch master‘s painting or even something by Constable.
But of course, the conceptual work we’re doing while reading this poem is not that different from the work we would do if it was full of metaphor. I’m working on a post of how adjectives and predicates are really very similar to metaphors and this is one example that illustrates the point. In order to appreciate this poem, we have to construct a series of fairly rich images and then we have to blend them with each other to place them in the same place. We have to interpret “the broken hearted man on the horizon” is it just another image, the poet or ourselves? In other words, we have to map from the image presented by the poem to the images available to us by our experience. Which, in short, is the same work we have to do when interpreting metaphors and similies. But the title is the clincher: “autumn thoughts” – what if the whole poem is a metaphor and the elements in it just figures signifying age, loneliness, the passage of time and so on and so forth. There are simply too many mappings to make. And there the escape from metaphor ends.
