books

There is something faintly improbable about a fifty-page book, built around a four-line poem written in the eighth century, becoming a touchstone for anyone who thinks seriously about language. Yet that is exactly what Eliot Weinberger's Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei has quietly done since its first appearance in 1987. The premise is almost absurdly narrow. Wang Wei, a wealthy Buddhist painter-poet of the Tang Dynasty, wrote a twenty-character quatrain called "Deer Park" to accompany a landscape scroll. The original painting is lost. The poem itself survives as a kind of ghost, copied and re-copied for more than a millennium. Weinberger gathers nineteen translations of it - into English, French, and Spanish - and examines them, one after another, with the calm attentiveness of someone turning over stones in a stream.

What emerges is a work that functions simultaneously as a primer on classical Chinese poetics, a compact history of translation theory, and a piece of literary criticism with real teeth. Weinberger is unfailingly lucid on the structural features of the source text: the absence of tense, the parallelism, the Buddhist reticence that allows the scene to register without the intrusion of a narrating "I". He shows how small choices - the species of moss, the presence or absence of a first-person pronoun, whether the sunlight "enters" or "penetrates" the woods - can tilt the whole poem out of balance. His preferred translators, Burton Watson and Gary Snyder, are praised for a clarity that aligns with the Poundian principles of precision and plain speech; his less favoured efforts are dispatched with an economy that can be genuinely funny. One verse rendering has its four lines memorably described as heaving, gasping, and then falling with a thud. The verdicts are sharp, and the book is arguably more entertaining for it, though the tone does occasionally tip from incisive into curmudgeonly, and there are moments when a translator is dismissed more swiftly than their work perhaps deserves.

The inclusion of Octavio Paz is the book's quiet masterstroke. Paz, whose own Spanish version is one of the nineteen under scrutiny, is given space in an afterword to respond, to defend, and eventually to produce a revised translation prompted by the encounter. The exchange turns what might have been a one-sided exercise in judgement into a genuine dialogue between two serious minds, and it lends the whole project an intellectual generosity that lingers.

There are limits worth acknowledging. The scholarship is deliberately unacademic, and readers looking for a thoroughgoing treatise on translation theory will find the book more suggestive than systematic. The expanded edition, which adds further "ways" including German renderings, is welcome but does not fundamentally alter the original's shape or conclusions. And anyone without a prior interest in poetry, or in how languages refract one another, may find the sustained attention to a single short poem more than they bargained for.

For everyone else, it is a small, strange, endlessly re-readable book. It succeeds because it takes a minor object - twenty syllables, a patch of moss, a slant of returning sunlight - and uses it to say something lasting about how meaning moves, and fails to move, between tongues.