Translation as an Intertextual Dialogue: “Cold Mountain Poems” and Gary Snyder’s Geopoetics

Abstract

In this study, I strive to explore the intriguing relations among translation, textuality, and geopoetics, thereby offering renewed ways of understanding the American poet-translator Gary Snyder’s dialogical rendering of the “Cold Mountain Poems”. Snyder’s translation is based on the Chinese Buddhist poet Han-shan’s original texts, therefore, Part One of the thesis contains the contexts of the rediscovery of classical Chinese poetry in the West and a reflection of the Chinese literary tradition. Part Two involves my investigation of the cultural background when Han-shan’s texts traveled to the United States, in tandem with the intertextual network of references that Snyder has built in his poetry, as they lead to and are augmented by my observations of Snyder’s antidualistic Buddhist stance. For Snyder, certain boundaries are meant to be crossed. As I am working to reconsider aspects of how the “real” and “imagined” places are represented in Snyder’s texts, I focus on Snyder’s natural writing’s potential of becoming vital, radical, fluid, transgressive, or in other words, the world-creating potential of his texts. Practicing geopoetics as both a method and methodology generates new ways of seeing and being in the world. Poetry presents the possibility of articulating and shaping an inner geography, while translating poetry for Snyder is an ecological program, a Dharmic practice that implies specific responsibilities. It is a challenge that relates to Walter Benjamin’s term “afterlife”, which describes the nature of translated texts. Part Three of this study is devoted to close readings of “Cold Mountain Poems”. Given that Snyder’s translation offers abundant evidence of “dialogization” and open-endedness, I examine Snyder’s translation within the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptual framework of textual dialogism and argue how a piece of writing in classical Chinese can persist beyond its originating moment in a meaningful and powerful way. I first look into Snyder’s approach to Han-shan through sympathetic co-experiencing and visualizing strategy with a Bakhtinian analysis. Then, I propose that Snyder has Americanized Han-shan’s Cold Mountain as a rewriting, which is against enclosure in a text. Julia Kristeva’s radical term of intertextuality together with Snyder’s ecopoetic vision is essential here for the discussion. I conclude by arguing that although it is not Snyder’s conscious decision (there is no evidence showing he ever read about Bakhtin), Snyder’s aesthetic impersonality throughout his poetic career has demonstrated a unique connection between the Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia and the Avatamsaka Buddhist philosophy of interpenetration, which shares the common ground with deep ecology and post-structuralism, and this explains Snyder’s ethical position. Meanwhile, the fact that Bakhtin’s concept of superaddressee reiterates the theme of hope for discursive contexts, and maybe less obviously, allows for a space where the deepest sense of what a “good translation” entails yet be redeemed.