《the Ethics of Translation》.pdfVIP

The Ethics of Translation: Gary Snyder and Chinese Literature Robin Cheng-Hsing Tsai This article examines the impact of ancient Chinese ways of thinking and modes of poetics on the American poet Gary Snyder’s own discourse on eco-poetics. First, I discuss Snyder’s notion of an emergent, transcul- tural and “larger” humanism, perhaps a “post-humanism,” a term to which I will return, along with the vital role played in his environmental poetics by the idea of a cross-cultural “translation”—an interrelationship which allows the ancient, other-centered, earth-centered East to edu- cate the postmodern, rational-technological, ego-centric West. I then analyze the impact of an earlier American poetic tradition on Snyder and his works. This tradition is one that was already East-Asianized to a certain degree and included Emerson, Thoreau, and especially Pound, as well as the counter-cultural Beat movement of the 1950s, out of which Snyder himself emerged. The major portion of the article is devoted to a close reading of ancient Chinese poetic texts, themselves influenced by Confucianism, Taoism and/or Buddhism. My aim is to show how Snyder’s West-instructing praxis of cultural translation is at work here, as well as his transcultural ethic of ahimsa or “non-harming” [in Sanskrit a = not; himsa = harm] as it applies to the earth as “other.” Attention is given to specific instances of Snyder’s translation of Chinese texts that seem critical to this eco-poet’s larger project. According to Richard H. Seager, historically in America there have been two major waves of interest in Eastern religions (34). The first came with the American Romantics and transcendentalists of the nine- teenth century, who tended to look to the East for cultural and crea- tive inspiration. Thus we have Emerson’s claim that we do not need a Europeanized Christian view of th