#picture from https://www.ccclux.lu/lectures-seminars/137-thirteen-translations-of-lu-zhai-a-poem-by-wang-wei

[autumn-oceanopromises]

13/7/22 - “Lu Zhai”

     It’s 11pm on a Wednesday evening. I’m hunched over, playing video games, an addiction I haven’t been able to shake off for twenty years. One, in particular, I’ve played on and off for nearly a decade. I lost a serious relationship at least in part to this game. I’ve lost days, to be immersed in video games. To play just one more game. I’ve lied to keep my video game time. I’ve lost money, friendships, and mental health to fuel my addiction. I’ve quit, but I’ve backslid. I’m a gamer. I’m a video game addict. It’s part of how I identify myself, both to other gamers, and to myself drinking alone at night.

      A friend messages me on Discord. In a lull moment, I check it. He asks me, “Have you heard of the poem Lu Zhai, by Wang Wei?” I go back to my game, but I’m no longer immersed. I’m thinking about it now. I’m curious.

     One week ago, I was challenged by Stephen Kotler, by reading his book, to list twenty-five things I was curious about. I struggled. Over twenty years of searching up guides for video games, I’ve stopped being curious about topics and started looking for direct answers. I've craved the endings of narratives, instead of living the experience to get to them.

    I carry on a conversation with my friend in lulls. In-game, I’m more aggressive than usual, attempting to make hero plays so that I can get to a lull sooner, rather than later. As far as my friend is aware, I return to his messages within minutes, rather than the half hours that he’s more used to.

     “I have, yes,” I say. I have. Lu Zhai is a poem that I dimly remember browsing over, while looking up obscure poetry forms in Ancient China, one of the entries I finally wrote down on my ‘twenty-five curiosities’ list. But I’m curious about more than this. My friend is a narrator, and a sound editor. He’s also Italian-Canadian. I wonder where he heard of Lu Zhai, and what he intends to do with it.

    “Why do you ask? There’s like, 13 translations of it,” I type out, seconds before my game resumes. Even as I’m speeding through the narrow gap between virtual, brightly flashing projectiles, I’m thinking about Lu Zhai. Something about that poem captured the attention of poets and translators, both solo and in duos, thirteen times. I’m a poet. It’s another of the ways I define myself. I speak - if poorly - the language Lu Zhai was written in. I’m immersed in that culture, but I write my poetry in English. 

    The game starts to drag. Normally, time passes very quickly in-game for me, but at this point I’m thinking more about Lu Zhai, sounding the words out loud, reading it aloud to myself. There is something captivating about the simplicity of this poem, something profound. It throws me into its rhythm, into its imagery. Five words, four lines. Twenty words in total, but there are thirteen very different interpretations in English. Fourteen, if you count the literal.

     I’m dying stupidly in-game so the chat is filled with insults, but I’m already on the empty mountain mentioned in Lu Zhai. I’m inside the fog-outlined forest looking up at the moss. Explosions and screeches abound in my ears, but I’m already listening for the voices that Wang Wei mentions. The game brings up its “Defeat” screen, but I’ve already clicked away from it. Normally I’d go onto the next game, but I want to shape the images I feel into words more.

     My friend sends me the video essay he was watching, that mentioned it: “A Thousand Ways of Seeing The Forest.” Someone’s taken a stab at translating the poem in the comments. There are 1.4K likes.

     I take a stab at it, myself, and immediately run into three snags. Firstly, the title can be translated into a hookup joke - “Deer Tinder...”, which gives the entire verse a whole new context. Secondly, there is a shape to the original that isn’t ever described in any of the translations; the word for person goes, then returns in a direction. Thirdly, translating this poem is hard. It’s simple, it’s incredibly evocative, but while there are words that can mean nothing else (”voices”, “empty mountain”, “forest”, “moss”), everything else is context-dependent. I wonder how many of those translation teams, or poets, looked at a previous translation and thought - “That can’t be right.”

     I’m right here, I’m in the moment, I’m immersed. I’m crafting something, making something, I’m shaping the words that come to me to try to match the shape of the poem that birthed them. I’m only eighty percent satisfied with the end result, but I send the poem to my friend anyway, including the stupid Tinder joke. Regardless, he asks if I would voice the original, because he’s been inspired to organize voice actors into reading the translations, one narrator per version.

     I agree. I close my game’s launcher. I’m curious, and I’m immersed. I watch the video essay, now, experiencing the ways that other people have seen forests, and video games, although a part of me is still in Wang Wei’s Deer Forest, watching sunlight on moss, listening for returning voices on an empty mountain.   

#spilled ink #spilled prose #13/7/22 #homework for life #storyworthy #picture from https://www.ccclux.lu/lectures-seminars/137-thirteen-translations-of-lu-zhai-a-poem-by-wang-wei