Octavio Paz (1914–1998)

This a a very short book, and really quite a riot. Even after reading, what, 29 translations of this short poem... how is the light hitting, where is that moss? Weinberger's comments are short, pointed, and often funny. But he brings it a lot of substantial observations too. The Daoist slant, opposites playing together, the western light as Amitabha's.

The whole thing reminds me of Borges. It's even more fantastical because it is real!

Especially given that this slim volume is barely 50 pages long, I unhesitatingly recommend it to just about anyone who is even vaguely conscious about what they read, especially if they regularly read anything in translation.

On its surface, and a gossamer-thin surface it is, this book is a comparative-literature exercise, with its laser focus on a single, four-line Chinese poem by Wang Wei, dated from about 1200 years ago. Per the title, there are 19 translations investigated by Eliot show more Weinberger, including one by Octavio Paz (in two versions), who also provided commentary on the art of translation.

Weinberger's prose is about as far from the original poem as it could be -- where the poem is placid, interrupted by two sublime instances, he is stalwart, headstrong, and, in a word, loud. At times, it verges on a situation where he, through sheer force of presence, threatens to overshadow the actual subject, but he can get away with it because he is, in essence, almost always correct in his declarations about why one poem works and one doesn't (eg., "Chang translates 12 of Wang's 20 words, and makes up the rest" and, when writing of an attempt by William McNaughton, "Line 1 has been turned into a statement, almost a parody of Eastern Wisdom"). show less

I'm taking a workshop on translation next semester, and my professor assigned this book to us ahead of time. I have learned more than I expected to about the difficulties of translation, particularly the problem of ego inherent to a poet's translation of another poet, from this tiniest of books. The snarky comments about various translations of Wang Wei's short poem are wonderful. My personal favorite: "To me this sounds like Gerard Manley Hopkins on LSD..."

I am reading this book as voicing a broader consensus concerning modern literature shared, to greater and lesser extents, by the core members of the Latin American literary "Boom." Paz writes really, really well, and his positions are quite compelling: his dialectical counterposition of analogy and irony as the dual driving forces of modern literature makes a lot of sense, and the way he uses it to demonstrate the continuity between romantic and post-romantic modern literary movements is show more compelling. Maybe it's best to read this against books like Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde: Paz gives you a strong formulation of the "continuity" thesis, whereas Bürger is interested in establishing the specificity of the avant-garde break with a literary tradition that includes romanticism and the other major movements of the 19th century.

Paz's positions can also be frustrating, especially with regard to the more radical consequences of the student movements of the 60s. While he wants to be magnanimously open-minded, his relative closed-mindedness with regard to sexual orientation and other issues that I consider important is often frustrating. In terms of his particular stances, I often found myself objecting to his positions; in general, though, I really appreciated his panoramic study of modern poetry. show less