The Poem Behind the Poem: Translating Asian Poetry.(Book Review)

The Poem Behind the Poem: Translating Asian Poetry, edited by Frank Stewart, Copper Canyon Press, 2004, $18.00 paper, ISBN 1554592000.

Although not exactly what was intended, the title of this book may be construed broadly to mean that there is not only a single original poem behind every translation but also a generic "Chinese (or Japanese, etc.) poem" fixed like a template in the minds of translators. For English readers of the twentieth century that generic Asian poem has been a modernist poem, translated most influentially by poets in the modernist tradition--Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, to name the famous names. Behind our Chinese poem for a hundred years lies an idea about the universal significance, and translatability, of formal elements embodied in all languages, aesthetics, and cultures, regardless of enormous differences in other respects. This idea is all the more appealing now that global boundaries seem suddenly to be permeable, perhaps dissolving. But the question may be asked--and some of the writers here do ask it--whether the modernist idea …