on recent chapbooks from Salamander, Journeyman, Rivelin and others

It is natural to be suspicious of translations by poets who don't know the language they are translating from - who confess, in the small print as it were, to the 'collaboration' of a scholar with no literary pretensions, or who grudgingly acknowledge the help some crib has given them. If a translator has so little grasp on a culture that he can't even read its texts what hubris makes him think he can interpret it- in its broadest outlines, never mind in its finest nuances - to us? But Ron Butlin's The Exquisite Instrument ('with the collaboration of Kate Chevalier') made me think again. His pamphlet consists of translations from eighth-century Chinese poems, together with a sprinkling by the twentieth-century poet Wen I-to, and it is a remarkably moving little book. He captures with apparent ease the sense of infinite time ('mountains and rivers outlast a thousand empires') and infinite space ('Birds leave no tracks across a thousand hills') which pervades classical Chinese poetry, and which by reducing man to a minor event hardly perceptible in such immensity paradoxically intensifies the poignant apprehensions of his sensibility. Compared with the effaced beauty of these eighth-century poems ('This Embroidery' and 'Climbing the Stork Pagoda' strike me as among the best translations I have seen from Chinese into English verse), the self-disgust and self-absorption of Wen I-to's work, at least as presented to us by Ron Butlin, come as something of a shock: infinite unchanging time has become 'our history crushed ...