《Gary Snyder and cultural translation》.pdf

Neohelicon XXXIV (2007) 2, 149–163 DOI: 10.1007/s11059-007-2012-8 ROBIN CHEN-HSING TSAI TRANSLATING NATURE: GARY SNYDER AND CULTURAL TRANSLATION Gary Snyder’s translation of Han-shan’s Cold Mountain Poems, and more generally of Eastern thinking, dismantles any logic of domination. In this essay, the author first shows how Snyder’s translation of Han-shan embodies a cross-cultural “journey” beyond the limits of Saidean “traveling theory.” Then, drawing from Snyder’s interviews, criticism, and poetry, and particularly from passages in Cold Mountain Poems, the author looks at the poet’s central concern – the question of the other – as a “geocentric” praxis of “trans- lating the other.” Here he compares the disequilibrium and hybridity of Snyder’s “wild- ness” with that of Bhabha’s “third space” in the context of cultural translation. For Snyder, “translation of the other” may best be referred to as a “cultural translation of na- ture.” The eponymous poet-monk-hermit Han-shan (Kanzan in Japanese) was reputedly born in the Tang dynasty. His Cold Mountain Poems, along with Feng-kan Poems and Shih-te Poems, written by another two “zany” figures, are commonly grouped as Three Hermits’ Poems. After being promoted by the Tang poets, the Sung poets (Wang An-shih, Su Tong-po) and monks, the Qing Emperor Yung-Cheng, and the th th modern Vernacular Chinese promulgator Hu Shih, the 8 –9 -century Chinese graf- fiti poet Han-shan was finally apotheosized in the Qing Dynasty, becoming a canoni- cal poet. The availability of the Chinese Han Shan Poems to English readers owes much to such sinologists