An extremely interesting look at poetry, translation, culture, and implication. I think it would’ve been interesting to have a conclusion at the end wherein the essayist takes a holistic look at the interpretations. He does draw comparison here and there between the different translations, but a final portion comparing what he deems the best and most lacking translations would’ve been a nice end. ( )

A delightful, grumpy consideration of translation issues through a single Chinese poem. ( )

Weinberger crams more insight and understanding into this slim masterpiece than many other tomes of literary criticism and translation theory. It should be reread on a regular basis by all translators of poetry.

"Not much rhymes with 'moss', it's something of an albatross." ( )

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..." ( )

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 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").