{"id":144,"date":"2012-08-05T19:16:11","date_gmt":"2012-08-05T19:16:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/katybutler.com\/site\/?p=144"},"modified":"2012-08-05T19:16:11","modified_gmt":"2012-08-05T19:16:11","slug":"poetry-as-path","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.katybutler.com\/author\/articles\/poetry-as-path\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry as Path"},"content":{"rendered":"

1991 Nov\/Dec
\nBy Katy Butler
\n
\nYears of spiritual work help a new breed of translators illuminate the modern wisdom in ancient verse.<\/em><\/p>\n

EVERY AFTERNOON THE POET Coleman Barks walks up the stairs of his house in the university town of Athens, Georgia, to an airy sleeping porch that his son Benjamin has enclosed and turned into a study. There he opens literal and Victorian translations of the poems of the 12th-century Sufi poet and saint Jelaluddin Rimi.<\/p>\n

\u201cI find a page at random and start rephrasing it, trying to make it accessible, \u201c says Barks, describing the ritual he has followed for 14 years. \u201cI love that randomness. It seems to be a way that the universe can speak through you.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is a muggy Georgia afternoon, after a night of summer lightning storms. Barks, a big bearish southern man who once played football at Baylor Military Academy in Tennessee, wears shorts and a frayed cotton shin. There is nothing ethereal about him.<\/p>\n

He opens an old red book and smooths back a page. \u201cI sometimes leave out the extravagances,\u201d he says. His voice comes slowly, like a man searching for something hidden in a deep well; it ends in questions and caresses, opening ecstatically into talk of Rumi, and then trails away. \u201cIn the Persian, Rumi is fill of rhyming. You can have six internal rhymes in a single line. To the medieval mind, these arabesques, and all the repetitions, were a sign of devotion\u2014it\u2019s like Arab architecture.\u201d He reads a sample from a translation by A. J. Arberry, a turn-of-the-century Cambridge Islamicist:
\n
\nLord of beauty and quintessence of loveliness<\/p>\n

Enters the soul and mind us a man will stroll in the garden at spring.<\/p>\n

Come, come, for you are the life and salvation of men.<\/p>\n

Come, come for you are the eye in the lamp of Joseph\u2026<\/p>\n

Then he reads his own re-translation:<\/p>\n

The lord of beauty enters the soul<\/p>\n

As a man walks into an orchard in spring.<\/p>\n

Come into me that way again.<\/p>\n

Light the lamp in the eye of Joseph…<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cToday, the sign of devotion is the clear plain talk of the man who\u2019s trying to be honest,\u201d says Barks. \u201cThat is the sign of ecstasy\u2014stammering, rather than ornate overstatement.\u201d<\/p>\n

FOR BARKS AND A NUMBER OF OTHER contemporary poets including Robert Bly, Stephen Mitchell and Buddhist poet Jane Hirshfield, translation has become a spiritual path. The result is a wealth of ecstatic poetry, stunningly translated from Persian, Hindi. Japanese, Chinese and even Netsilik Eskimo Unlike the highly qualified academic translators who preceded them, the new poet-translators rarely speak the language they translate from. Working with linguists and literal translations, they re-phrase the poems in simple English words that one might overhear at a coffee shop or whisper to one\u2019s lover in the middle of the night. To sharpen the impact, they acid words or leave out phrases, and their free hand with ancient texts has disturbed some scholars. Yet at a time when contemporary American poetry has become the possession of a remote, closed circle who seem to speak more and more gracefully about less and less, they have returned poetry to a place of vital importance in the lives of tens of thousands of ordinary readers. Nowadays it is not unusual to find otherwise nonliterary people quoting Rumi or the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in conversation; mailing a poem by the 15th-century Hindi saint Kabir to a friend in trouble; or buying Jane Hirshfield\u2019s The Ink Dark Moon<\/em> for a lover on Valentine\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n

That popularity is reflected in a volume of sales unheard of in the field of poetry today. Coleman Barks\u2019s first collection of Rumi translations, Open Secret<\/em>, sold more than 25,000 copies\u2014a bestseller in a field where it is unusual for a collection to sell more than 10,000 copies. The Ink Dark Moon, a collection of love poems by medieval Japanese court women, has sold 15,000 copies, Stephen Mitchell\u2019s version of the Tao Te Ching<\/em>, completed in less than four months, sold more than 80,000 copies and won a $130,000 advance from Harper & Row Perhaps what readers are most hungry for in Rumi, Kabir, Rilke and Lao-tzu is their fluency with a spiritual dimension. Reading these poets helps a person digest the wealth of Eastern religious practices brought to the West in the past 20 years. It brings eroticism and body-based longing into the ethereal diction of Western spiritual tradition. It enriches our culture with ancient wisdom. \u201cOur tradition is very narrow,\u201d says best-selling author, poet and men\u2019s advocate Robert Bly. \u201cThe Persians have 3,000 years behind them, and what do I have-two or three Ludieran ministers who weren\u2019t even sure that what they were talking about was true? It\u2019s the obligation of our poets to go back and eat the literary history of the world.\u201d And when the poets are themselves embarked on a spiritual path\u2014as many modem translators of these ancient texts are\u2014they bring to the eating a keen appetite and a deep appreciation.<\/p>\n

MY OWN INTRODUCTION TO sacred poetry came ten years ago, long after I had stopped reading most contemporary American poetry. It was Christmas, at twilight, and I was being courted by the man whom I later married. We walked through the city streets after Zen meditation to his apartment in the slums. He changed out of his robes and gave me a piece of white paper, scrolled and tied in black ribbon. Beautifully calligraphed and illustrated with a bold Sanskrit syllable evoking Vairo-cana, Buddha of all universes, it contained this poem by Kabir as translated by Bly:<\/p>\n

I said:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the wanting-creature inside me;<\/p>\n

What is this river you want to cross?<\/p>\n

There are no travelers on the river road, and no road.<\/p>\n

Do you see anyone moving about on that bank, or resting?<\/p>\n

There is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman.<\/p>\n

There is no tow rope either, and no one to pull it.<\/p>\n

There is no ground, no sky, no time, no bank, no ford!<\/p>\n

And there is no body and no mind!<\/p>\n

Do you believe there is some place that will make the soul less thirsty?<\/p>\n

In that great absence you will find nothing.<\/p>\n

Be strong then, and enter into your own body;<\/p>\n

There you will have a solid place jar your feet.<\/p>\n

Think about if carefully!<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t go off some where else!<\/p>\n

Kabir says this: Just throw away all thoughts of imaginary things And stand firm in that which you are.
\n<\/em>
\nThe poem grabbed me by the shoulder across continents and centuries. In Bly\u2019s translation, Kabir was spiritual but not sticky He united body and soul. He used common, everyday words as well as an elevated spirituality. (\u201cBy sweeping up and clown the way Kabir does,\u201d Bly has said, \u201cthe body and spirit become connected again. If you want a spiritual point to come across with full force, you need to use absolutely ordinary cat-and-dog language.\u201d)<\/p>\n

I was in love with poetry again. In subsequent years, I stumbled across, and then searched out, other translations. In a Berkeley bookstore, I opened Unseen Rain, a collection of Barks\u2019s Rumi translations:<\/p>\n

The light you give off did not come from a pelvis.<\/p>\n

Your features did not begin in semen.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t try to hide inside anger<\/p>\n

Radiance that cannot be hidden.<\/em><\/p>\n

The poem stunned me with its bluntness. Radiance and semen, anger and light. Again, body and soul were united in language that oscillated between the vulgar and the pure. Later, I found Jane Hirshfield\u2019s translations of the erotic poetry of medieval Japanese court-women, and a book of sacred poetry called The Enlightened Heart, collected by Stephen Mitchell. I did not know then what the poems were doing to me. I only knew that I kept them by my bed and read them before I went to sleep. Looking back, I see they were leading me away from a path of religious renunciation and toward what the medieval Christian mystics called the via affirmativa<\/em>\u2014a reaching for God by embracing the world and the body, with all their yearning, sadness and sweetness, without becoming lost and entangled in them.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Rumi, you feel a constant conversation going on between spirit states and vulgar states,\u201d Bly observes. In Coleman Barks\u2019s versions, he continues, \u201cRumi is being translated for the first time into a language that satisfies the soul as well as the spirit, and simultaneously confuses both. The vulgar language confuses the spirit. And the desirous soul becomes confused when it becomes clear that the wine Rumi speaks of is not real wine, but spiritual wine. In that confusion, as Coleman would say the door opens and we slip in.\u201d<\/p>\n

IT WASN\u2019T ALWAYS THIS WAY TWENTY years ago, Americans reading sacred poetry in translation were like listeners at a closed door. They heard a few clear notes of a flute, perhaps, but mostly silence, distortion and muffled sounds. As Stephen Mitchell, the poet-translator of The Book of Job<\/em> and the Tao Te Ching<\/em> has commented, about reading The Book of Job<\/em>: \u201cIt was like hearing a voice in a distant room. You know the voice is beautiful, but you can\u2019t make out the words.\u201d<\/p>\n

Very little English poetry\u2014with the exception of William Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins\u2014contained the earthy,<\/p>\n

The words are like a meal. You just serve them. I see my role as a cook, or at least a waiter. I bring the food out and take the plates away.<\/strong><\/p>\n

COLEMAN BARKS ecstatic quality of the non-Western traditions. Except for some translations from Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder and Ezra Pound, most non-Western poetry in translation sounded like The Prophet<\/em> or The Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam<\/em>\u2014 elevated Victorian doggerel, full of thees and thous and strained rhymes.<\/p>\n

According to Bly, that sort of language no longer works for English readers; it lost its credibility shortly after World War I. Bly explains by citing a famous essay by Robert Graves called Goodbye to All That<\/em>, which blames idealistic European language and thinking for failing to foresee or prevent the carnage in the trenches. \u201cIn the West, elevated language is basically the language of denial,\u201d says Bly. Graves believed that it leads directly to mass death because it\u2019s so attractive it hides the shadow.<\/p>\n

Bly discovered this truth the hard way in the 1950s, when he first tried to translate the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke into English. \u201cRilke wrote a great deal in high German, and I tried to use an elevated Shakespearean language to get the elevated quality, \u201c he says. \u201cIt was a failure.\u201d Bly says he abandoned the language of denial as he came to terms with his own family history. \u201cI came from an alcoholic family, and I was already tilted toward that language. My first book was called Silence in Snowy Fields<\/em>, and when I think of the darker things in my own family. I think it meant, I\u2019m not going to talk about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his early 40s, Bly began to admit the truth of his family history, he also translated Pablo Neruda and Antonio Machado, whose works in Spanish contain the earthy language of the village and traces of the Arabic and Jewish influences on Spanish culture.<\/p>\n

Kabir later took him further. \u201cI don\u2019t think that what I\u2019ve accomplished with iron John would have been possible without Kabir,\u201d he says now. \u201cI suppose what I\u2019ve done is urge myself to get out of denial in relationship to my own father. And Kabir has helped. Kabir doesn\u2019t hide the shadow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bly discovered Kabir in the 1960s, when the poet James Wright gave him a copy of One Hundred Poems of Kabir<\/em>, translated by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, Kabir, an illiterate 15th-century weaver who lived most of his life in a back alley in Benares, is claimed as a saint by both Muslims and Hindus. The songs he made up were intensely religious, and yet playful enough to taunt the sacred dogmas of his time. Though they are sung by wandering Indian holy men and women to this day, they were unknown in English until Tagore translated sanitized versions of a few in 1911.<\/p>\n

\u201cI opened Tagore and read, \u2018I laugh when I hear the fish in the water is thirsty,\u2019 and said, \u2018Who is this genius?\u2019\u201d recalls Bly. Working off and on from Tagore, Bly slowly wrote new \u201cversions\u201d\u2014published in 1977 as The Kabir Book. Some years later, Bly says, he heard Swami Muktananda answer someone\u2019s question with two lines from Kabir:<\/p>\n

Let others, go on eating shit.
\nYou just speak the holy name in your heart.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I realized that Kabir was even wilder than I had thought.\u201d Kabir, says Bly, was a \u201cwild man\u201d\u2014part of a soulful, vulgar religious strain that has been suppressed in the West.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Catholic Church not only destroys the people like Kabir and Rumi, it destroys the women, the humor, the vulgarity, the wild man values. In India, both lines\u2014the wild men and the elevated \u2018bald men\u2019 of academic religion\u2014are loved and kept alive by the common people and the saints. That\u2019s why you\u2019re reading Kabir and Rumi rather than American poets,\u201d Bly says. \u201cIt\u2019s very sad.\u201d<\/p>\n

FOR THE POET TRANSLATORS the work of translation has provided both cultural and personal medicine. For Coleman Barks, Stephen Mitchell and Jane Hirshfield, the poems first led toward spiritual practices and teachers. For all of them, translation later became a way of expressing what they had learned.<\/p>\n

For Barks it began in 1976, when he was a poet and a professor at the University of Georgia with a longstanding but rather academic interest in mystical subjects. At a conference on the Great Mother, Bly showed him A. J. Arberry\u2019s formal translations of Rumi. \u201cRobert thought they were poems in cages,\u201d Barks recalls. \u201cHe said they needed to be let out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trapped in the Arberry translations were the spontaneous utterances of Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi, originator of the Sufi turning practice known as \u201cdervish dancing\u201d and widely regarded as the greatest poet of the Muslim world. Rumi lived in 13th-century Konya in what is now Turkey when it was the western end of the Silk Road and the crossroads of the Christian, Islamic, Hindu and even Buddhist worlds. He was a fairly conventional Islamic religious scholar until age 37 when a wandering Sufi dervish known as Shams of Tabriz threw alt of his theological books into a well. According to legend, Rumi met Shams\u2019s wordless challenge, and the two men entered week-long periods of mystical conversation and merging. Rumi\u2019s conventional students became jealous and plotted revenge. Shams either disappeared or was murdered\u2014the legends vary. Out of the meeting with Shams and the pain of separation, Rumi\u2019s poetry began. The religious scholar was now an ecstatic and for long nights he and his disciples turned in circles to the sound of the reed flute, the lute-like oud and the drum. As the music rose and fell. Rumi began spontaneously uttering his intricately rhymed poems. By the time of his death in 1273 at the age of 66, his students had recorded more than 40,000 odes, quatrains, discourses and teaching stories in medieval Persian.<\/p>\n

Rumi was first translated into English at the turn of the century by two Cambridge Islamicists, but he remained thoroughly obscure to English speakers until Barks returned to Athens after the Bly conference, bent on finding a linguist to help him. In a hallway at the university, he asked a Sanskrit scholar if he knew of any Persian linguists and was given the name of John Moyne, a computer expert at the City University of New York.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wrote John, and wonderful coincidences began to happen,\u201d Barks says. \u201cJohn wrote me back a letter on New Year\u2019s Day 1977. He had always wanted to find a poet to help him translate Rumi. He wrote, I have all the manuscripts. We begin now!\u201d<\/p>\n

Moyne began sending Barks literal translations. \u201cWhen those packets came, it was like food,\u201d Barks recalls. \u201cI would keep them on my person at all times and work on them wherever I was. I was amazed at what was being said, the joy and freedom of it. It was a very strong pull, an opening of some sort that I couldn\u2019t deny.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I first read Walt Whitman and Whitman\u2019s descendants, William Carlos Williams and Galway Kinnell. I fell very free, knowing that anything in my Life could be included in a poem,\u201d he says. \u201cRumi sort of upgraded that sense of freedom to include some sort of soul-work or spirituality that\u2019s ecstatic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barks first undertook the translations as a kind of devotion, with no thought of publishing. As he worked on the poems, the poems worked on him. In May of 1977, four months after he began translating, he slept outside one night near the Tennessee River in Chattanooga, behind the house when; he had grown up.<\/p>\n

\u201cI dreamt a UFO, a ball of light, came off the island across the river and came right over to where I was sleeping and clarified, from the inside. There was a little man sitting there with a white thing over his head. He had his head bowed, but he raised his head and said, \u2018I love you.\u2019 And I said, \u2018I love you too.\u2019 And the whole landscape was filled, saturated with love.\u201d Later that year, Barks met the man he had dreamed about. At the suggestion of a law student who had heard his Rumi translations, he had gone to Philadelphia and entered the modest room of the Sufi teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen The meeting was as important in Barks\u2019s tile as Rumi\u2019s first encounter with Shams of Tabriz. It was the moment when intellectual knowledge gave way to something lived. Until Muhaiyaddcen\u2019s death in 1986, Barks continued translating Rumi and visiting Muhaiyaddeen, listening to his stories and jokes, but learning the most just by being in his presence.<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody quite knows his life history,\u201d says Barks, clearly hesitant to reduce his experience of his teacher to words. \u201cHe spent 50 years in the jungles of Ceylon studying God just through looking at the animals, not taking notes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI would have no idea what Rumi was, what his poetry was about, if I hadn\u2019t sat in the presence of Bawa,\u201d Barks goes on. \u201cBawa, that being, whoever he was, was a real mystery to me. There were boundaries that he just went right through. The normal sense of who we are, he just cracked that to pieces….\u201d Barks\u2019s voice trails off.<\/p>\n

FOR BARKS TRANSLATION IS A KIND of spiritual practice in itself. He recognizes that one can never reproduce the original poem in all its nuances and connotations, and he also knows that his own limitations have affected his translations.<\/p>\n

The poetry of Rumi, he says, has been like a Rorschach test for him. \u201cWhen I first began translating, I saw a lot of erotic imagery That\u2019s in Rumi, but that\u2019s not my focus now. Then I saw a kind of Whitman-like expansion in Rumi\u2014I think it was there\u2014then laughter and comedy. I could do the same poems again and hear different tonalities in them, hear different strains being emphasised of the inner life. It\u2019s an expression of my own growth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which brings up the question\u2014is it really Rumi we are reading or some thinly veiled version of Coleman Barks? Isn\u2019t his presence there in every poem? Perhaps. \u201cRe-working Rumi,\u201d he says, \u201callows me to say things that I want to say, that I say through him.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not simply a case of expressing the views of the small personality of Coleman Barks, he says, and illustrates with an example; \u201cOne year, I had to leave the Bly conference early, and I asked my friend Andrew to hand out Rumi books for me after I left. The next morning the man who was driving me to the airport told me he had dreamed about Andrew giving away books of mine. They\u2019d had no chance to talk to each other. The only conclusion I can draw from that little glimpse into the working of things is that sometimes our minds are not discrete. We go into each others dreams even. If so, then who are we? Do I write out of a voice that\u2019s Coleman? Or is it truer to write out of the voice of a whole lineage of people? And who gets the royalties? It\u2019s a communal effort.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a phraser. I phrase things,\u201d Barks continues. \u201cIt\u2019s a talent that I have, so that I can get out of the way and let something
\n
\nThe main challenge in Lao-tzu is translating the subtlety and depth of the spiritual<\/p>\n

experience. So I had the chutzpah not to learn Chinese.
\n<\/strong>
\nSTEPHEN MITCHELL<\/p>\n

BARKS AND OTHER CONTEMPORARY poets often feel their spiritual experience allows them access to the heart of a poem that lies beyond its words, and this gives them license to depart from the original form. In Barks\u2019s case, rhyming patterns, stilted to the modern ear, are abandoned and bluntness replaces respectful arabesque. Translator Stephen Mitchell simply left out passages of Lao-tzu\u2019s Tao Te Ching that he felt were the product of a \u201cnarrower consciousness\u201d than the rest of the text. In one Kabir poem, Robert Bly substituted the somewhat jarring image of a \u201cloaded gun\u201d for a medieval weapon. Working only from a translation by Tagore, who was working from a Bengali translation of Kabir poems which had been orally transmitted in Hindi for centuries, Bly changed many things freely, calling his works \u201cversions\u201d rather than \u201ctranslations.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are some poets who are so marvelous that you simply pull the fish out and throw it in the pan and see if you can eat it,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m not taking responsibility for the accuracy. I\u2019m just having a good time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such taking of liberties has opened this new crop of poet-translators to criticism from academic purists.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople sometimes ask me, \u2018Why is so-and-so\u2019s translation so much more interesting than yours?\u2019\u201d says Burton Watson, adjunct professor of East Asian languages at Columbia University and the respected scholarly translator of Han-shan\u2019s Cold Mountain and other works \u201cAnd I have to tell them, \u2018It\u2019s because he made up half of it.\u2019\u201d Watson recalls Gary Snyder\u2019s version of poems by Han-shan. a Buddhist recluse in 9th-ceniury China, that came out at about the same time as his translation. \u201cIt was written in a very West-Coast American idiom. For instance, he talked about being \u2018high on mountains.\u2019 Some people who read it complained that \u2018This is the Sierras in California, it\u2019s not Cold Mountain any more.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

RECENTLY SOME ACADEMICS GRUM-bled when Stephen Mitchell received a $130, 000 publisher\u2019s advance for his translation of the Tao Te Ching, a text he had never read in the original. In his defense, Mitchell says his extensive experience with Zen meditation gave him other qualifications for the job.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe main challenge in Lao-tzu is translating the subtlety and depth of the spiritual experience, not the linguistic level. So I had the chutzpah not to learn Chinese,\u201d Mitchell says \u201cI felt I had a kind of umbilical connection through my Zen training that allowed me to understand at a level beneath the words.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mitchell\u2019s translations of Rilke and The Book of Job\u2014both from languages that he knows well\u2014were acclaimed for their technical accuracy and poetic brilliance. But those translations, too, depended on a firsthand experience of the spiritual subject matter.<\/p>\n

Like Bly, Mitchell feels his experience with a spiritual path is what qualifies him in his task as translator. He first turned to The Book of Job in 1966, when he was a graduate student at Yale, studying Hebrew and Hasidism and suffering over the end of his first love affair.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe pain in my heart was so intense that after a year or two of trying to get a handle on it, I felt myself magnetically drawn to The Book of Job,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was the one place I knew where there was a profound encounter with the question of human suffering\u2014and an answer.\u201d he says. Little is known about the biblical book, written in verse, which so drew Mitchell, although scholars think it had its origins in a folktale and was written by a gentile between 600 and 400 B. C. Widely regarded as parable for the post-holocaust age, it tells the story of the faithful job, who loses his children and his fortune and is struck with plagues and boils until he cries out to the heavens for an answer to why suffering strikes \u201cgood people.\u201d Finally a voice speaks to Job from a whirlwind:<\/p>\n

Where were you when I planned the earth?<\/p>\n

Tell me, if you are so wise.<\/p>\n

Do you know who took its dimensions, measuring its length with a cord?<\/p>\n

What were its pillars built on?<\/p>\n

Who laid down its cornerstone, while the morning stars burst out singing and<\/p>\n

the angels shouted for joy?<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought that if I could somehow understand that voice, I would be able to solve the problem of my own personal pain,\u201d says Mitchell \u201cWhat drew me was the sound of truth, the depths of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Six years later, Mitchell gave up trying to understand the words and looked for a teacher \u201cfor whom the words had become flesh.\u201d After years of studying Judaism, he went outside his culture. In a tenement building in Providence, Rhode Island, he met Seung Sahn (Soen Sa Nim), a Zen teacher newly arrived from Korea who was making a living repairing washing machines in laundromats. Soen Sa Nim was sitting at a kitchen table in his undershirt and a sailor\u2019s cap, \u201cHis eyes had a light that I had never seen before in any eyes.\u201d Mitchell recalls. \u201cIt was as if I could walk into them as far as I could go, miles and miles and miles, and at the end of them meet myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mitchell began practicing Zen \u201clike a madman\u201d and sitting a seven-day sesshin every month. \u201cI had painted my self into a comer. Either I was going to die or find my answer.\u201d Six months later, during a sesshin, Mitchell had a spiritual opening from which he said he could understand the voice that answered Job from the whirlwind. The experience made it possible for him to embrace everything that makes up the way things are\u2014the good and the bad. the light and the dark. He returned to his translation with more confidence and quietly polished it for years until it was published in 1979.<\/p>\n

In the process, Mitchell became a biblical scholar, but that alone wasn\u2019t enough \u201cIf I hadn\u2019t bumped into the Zen tradition, hadn\u2019t actually stood at the place where the voice from the whirlwind was addressing Job,\u201d Mitchell says, \u201cI never could have presented my vision.\u201d<\/p>\n

PERHAPS THE MOST CAREFUL OF the new poet-translators is Jane Hirshfield, whose The Ink Dark Moon, a book of translations of poems by two master poets of the Heian Court of 9th- and 10th-century Japan, won a Columbia University translation prize in 1987. The poets, Izumi Shikihu and Ono no Komachi, were court ladies who had numerous love affairs, and their poems are soaked with eroticism and longing, and with the self-consciousness of court society Yet they transcend mannerism because of their vivid brevity and their Buddhist awareness of life\u2019s quick passage.<\/p>\n

Hirshfield first discovered a handful of their poems when she was a literature student at Princeton in the early seventies, \u201cI was young and failing in love a lot, and things were ending.\u201d she recalls. \u201cMy own experience was being given back to me in these beautifully achieved, compressed little poems.\u201d The poems eventually led Hirshfield to study Buddhism, and she spent three years as a monastic student at Tassajara, a Zen monastery organized along Japanese lines in the mountains near Big Sur, California.<\/p>\n

Hirshfield, who has published two well-received books of her own poetry, spent a year translating the two Japanese women poets with the help of native Japanese speaker Mariko Aratani. They met weekly throughout 1985 in what was a labor of love, filling out elaborate charts giving the literal Japanese as well as the cultural connotations of each word. Then Hirshfield worked alone, reproducing the poems\u2019 five-line forms but not their strict 21-syllable meter. Hirshfield tried to recreate each poem\u2019s effect on her, rather than the exact text, but she stayed as close to the text as she could. When the poems seemed too abstract, she added an occasional concrete image or word. To a poem of Shikibu\u2019s reading literally. \u201cWhile lying down without taring about black hair\u2019s tangling, longing for the person who stroked it first,\u201d Hirshfield added the word, \u201cuncombed,\u201d to produce this poem:
\n
\nLying alone, my black hair tangled, uncombed.<\/p>\n

I long for the one who touched it first.<\/em><\/p>\n

Although the Hirshlield-Aratani translations have been praised by Asian scholars, Hirshfield thinks it is far preferable for the translator to speak the language. \u201cWhen I discovered a handful of these poems when I was a college student, I thought that if I just waited, someone who spoke Japanese would translate more of them,\u201d she says. \u201cBut nobody did.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the other hand, she had other qualifications. \u201cI think I am one of the few poets alive today who lived for three years in ways similar to those Japanese court women,\u201d she says, referring to her experience at Tassajara. \u201cWe lived in a world with no heat or electricity, with kerosene lights, temple bells, close quarters and thin walls. I was a poet and a woman who had fallen in and out of love a lot\u2014as the poets had\u2014and these were my other qualifications.\u201d<\/p>\n

To Hirshfield, both poetry and her Zen practice are spiritual paths. \u201cPoetry is a path, and a way to wake up. It\u2019s virtually a yogic practice.\u201d she says. \u201cWhen you read a real poem, you and the poet are different by the end of it, and in this way, poetry and religious practice are<\/p>\n

When you read a real poem, you and the poet are different by the end of it, and in this way, poetry and religious practice are very close to each other.<\/p>\n

JANE HIRSHFIELD<\/strong><\/p>\n

GIVEN THE GIFTS CREATED BY THE present marriage of these poets\u2019 sensibilities and the poetry they have encountered, it is perhaps shortsighted to quibble about the authenticity of their English renderings. Linda Hess, a Hindi scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, notes that the art of translation is always fraught with dilemmas. \u201cIt\u2019s a dangerous business,\u201d she says. \u201cAs soon as you write down a single word, you\u2019ve already committed some error. In a sense, you\u2019re a killer, but in another sense, you\u2019re a life-giver.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hess, who has translated Kabir herself, admires Robert Bly\u2019s versions of the poems. \u201cIf you want to look at things from a scholarly point of view, they aren\u2019t translations,\u201d she says. \u201cBut you should forget the scholarly point of view and see Bly\u2019s work as picking up an oral tradition and transmitting it. giving his versions with real insight. I\u2019m a scholar, but I don\u2019t want to be a scholar when I read Bly\u2019s Kabir, I want to drink it in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Burton Watson says he appreciates the way this new crop of translators is introducing the ancient texts to a whole new readership- \u201cWe need all different kinds of translations,\u201d he says, \u201cvery literal ones for historians and scholars, and something else to reach out to a wider audience. In any case, any translation is going to last only a little while,\u201d he says, referring to the fact that translations are ephemeral and must constantly he re-cast in contemporary language to reach new generations of readers. \u201cThey are creations of their time.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Coleman Barks, the job of translation is to serve as a channel for an understanding that, although it must be couched in words, ultimately points beyond them.<\/p>\n

\u201cRumi is always trying to say the un-sayable, and that\u2019s difficult,\u201d says Barks. \u201cHe believes that all the sounds we make are like the reed flute that could not make any sound unless it was pulled from its source. No matter what song it\u2019s playing, it\u2019s singing, \u2018I want to go back to the source.\u2019 Its hollowness means it\u2019s not where it wants to be, where it came from. But it wouldn\u2019t be able to make music unless it had first been pulled from the reed bed. All human sound, all language is a grieving. All it\u2019s saying is separation.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you hear Rumi\u2019s poems, you don\u2019t feel so disconnected. I hope that when people read this poetry, that it\u2019s speaking in their voice. That somehow the language becomes transparent. There\u2019s no Rumi. There\u2019s no me. It\u2019s them speaking\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a91991 Katy Butler. All Rights Reserved. Not to be reprinted without permission.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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