...My translation of this poem by Du Fu, titled “Return to Qiang Village,” was one of the first I ever did:
Shaggy red clouds in the west—
the sun’s foot is down to level earth.
By the wicker gate, sparrows are chirping.
The traveler returns from over a thousand li.
Wife and children panic at my presence,
quieted, they still wipe tears.
In this age of turmoil, I floated and meandered.
A miracle of chance to return alive!
Neighbors crowd the fence tops
and also sigh and sob.
In the deep night, we are again holding candles,
facing each other as in a dream.
[...] When I think about what is lost in this translation, I’m immediately struck by the first line. In the Chinese, the opening five characters are:
shaggy craggy / red cloud/s west
You read the first two characters, pause, then read the next three characters. The opening two adjectives, “shaggy” and “craggy,” have the mountain radical on the left side of the character. With this repeating radical, there’s an expectation of something rock-like; with the caesura, there’s a bit of tension; then a reader discovers that what’s shaggy and craggy is not firm and rock-like but actually clouds at sunset. This undercutting of expectation and tension between appearance and reality runs through the poem, culminating when the speaker is reunited with his wife and children—this poem was written in 757 CE, after a period of civil war—and the reality of the situation is undercut at the end: it’s as if it is all a dream.
Arthur Sze, "On Translation"
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