Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei

Eliot Weinberger: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei.

A fascinating discussion of various translator’s versions of the same famous quatrain by Wang Wei. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz’s commentary on his version is particularly interesting, as I recall. I’ll also want to review Weinberger’s The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, which brings together translations by Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and David Hinton.