“—Subhūti, what is your take? To attain the supreme enlightenment, does the Thus-Come-One (Buddha) speak of any dharma (law)?
—This is what I understand of his intention. There is no set dharma that is called Supreme Enlightenment. There is no set dharma, either, the Thus-Come-One could say. Why? The dharma that he speaks of, are not something that we can attain. What we can attain is that which cannot be spoken of. It is not dharma and not not dharma.”
--Diamond Sutra, my own translation from Jīngāng Jīng, the Chinese translation from Sanskrit
When Buddhism was first introduced to China, the two monks who appointed by the Han emperor to translate the Sanskrit texts made a choice that would affect the history of this doctrine for the next two millennia. They chose to use the terminologies of Daoism to transfer the completely “alien” ideas of “Sutra of Forty-two Chapters.” This created the Chan (zen) School. Two thousand years later, when Ezra Pound was translating poems of Li Bai, he effectively rewrote those poems, and jumpstarted what we know now as Modernism.
In my imagination, translation, by definition, is impossible. How can one carry over the specific meaning in one particular culture to another without the loss of any minutia of context, content, or connotation? At the same time, this revelation comes as a relief: understanding exact transference is unattainable, translation can permit the greatest freedom to utilize anything in a language to approximate the original moment. In this way, translation is always creative: it creates something new every single time.
In this issue, I gather the works of sixteen extremely talented translators who attest to the mantra of translation as creative writing. Sometimes, this is about not bending the original too much to English, and making the reader extend themselves to meet the poetics within. For example, in Dick Cluster’s translation of “Rudolf Josip Lamff” by Paula Abramo, the original Spanish reads “no pero la nube mira/ qué gorda va la nube, where “mira” could be the third person indicative (the cloud looks) or an imperative (the cloud, look!). And the translator used “the cloud look” to preserve this sense of multiplicity. Other times, perfect matches in translation come rather serendipitously, and one only needs the ear to hear it. In Nancy Naomi Carlson’s translation of the Haitian poet Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s French lines, we have “j’enfourchait alors une branche d’arbre/ ou l’une des nombreuses étoiles”. In French prosody, the silent “e” in the middle of a line usually counts as a syllable, a mute beat, and this music is luckily reflected in the English translation with its middle-unstressed choriambs at the end of lines (— ‿ ‿ —): “I straddled a branch of a tree/ or one of the numerous stars”. More often, one needs to make bold changes so that the original, universal, moment can be felt through another language. This is aptly done with languages further from English in the translation of Harper Campbell (from Indonesian), Hyeshin Lim (from Korean), Brian Henry (from Slovenian), and many more. In truth, all of our fifteen translations in ten different languages from fourteen different countries carry over brilliantly the poetics from the original; and more importantly, these are translations of the finest poetry about friendship, loss, beauty, life and truth themselves.
This is what translation is ultimately about, and is also, I believe, what Buddha meant in the Sutra: there is something goes beyond languages that we can all understand. The ultimate truth is not singular nor can be expressed in the words of one language: rather, it is something individual and universal at the same time: an essence that could unite all of us and yet let us be us, like a poem.
