Guernica has published of my poems!: “Bamboo Grove” & “A Place Named for Deer”

"Bamboo Grove," by Wang Wei; calligraphy by Kuo-Hsiung Chen

“Bamboo Grove” was translated using a “crib” found in Wai Lim Yip’s Chinese Poetry: Major Modes and Genres (University of California Press, 1976).

* (1) to keep him company by shining; (2) illumination; (3) the primary meaning of shining

Yip’s 1976 translation is:
I sit alone among dark bamboos.
Strum the lute and let loose my voice.
Grove so deep, no one knows.
The moon visits and shines on me.

In my distranslation of the poem, the chinese character for “man” introduces a secondary person into the scene, so that the third line, “deep forest man not know,” becomes “so deep no one knows who you’re with.” I call it a “queered translation” of the original because the ambiguity and secrecy of the romantic scene pictured is enriched by queering the characters: two men meeting to literally make music in the woods. My bending the poem toward this reading was also in part brought on by the final two characters of the fourth line, especially the first definition of “shine” offered: “to keep him company by shining.”

The second, “A Place Named for Deer,” was translated after reading 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated, by Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz (Moyer Bell Limited, 1987), using the crib provided in that text.