Reviews of translations tend to find themselves in familiar ruts; concern over perceived faithfulness, deftness or lack thereof, that is, if they recognize that it is a translation at all. Below, Mathew Weitman casts a scathing eye to recent criticism of Eliot Weinberger’s The Life of Tu Fu, praised by Forrest Gander as a “distinctive and refreshing” text, and broadens his discussion to include Eric Weiskott’s translation of and expansion upon the Middle English poem Piers Plowman in Cycle of Dreams. Weitman’s essay, through the works of Weinberger and Weiskott, disregards the justification of unconventional translations to explore instead what these works represent for translation, authorship, and humanity’s shared experiences across time and space.
For over forty years, Eliot Weinberger has piqued our foremost and laziest critics. His expertise remains inconveniently wedged between autodidactic and erudite, and his unique blend of formal innovation and wry humor never undercuts the seriousness of his disparate subjects of study. His translations of Octavio Paz, Bei Dao, and Jorge Luis Borges—to name a few—are forever colored by his well-known inquiry into the art of translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (a critical work that is itself colored by Weinberger’s self-reflexivity and ironic dogmatism). This is all to say that though Weinberger’s systematic destruction of readerly expectations—via genre, via tone, via form—should come to be expected, for the past few months I’ve enjoyed the bemused, uncurious, and outright lacking critical discourse around his newest book, The Life of Tu Fu.
In the small pool of Weinberger’s reviewers, two factions have formed in the shallow end. First, there are those who attempt to summarize the work. These blurbists are quick to tell you things you already know—things like (to paraphrase), “Though its title suggests this would be a biography of the Tang Dynasty poet Tu Fu, it is actually a book of poems.” And/or: “Weinberger’s newest collection of poems is not comprised of original poems—at least not in the romantic sense of ‘original.’ Instead, they are translations of various Tu Fu poems collaged together… Like a cento [or something].” These protracted synopses avoid critical engagement with the text almost as assiduously as the text avoids genre.
The second faction of reviewers—who, similarly, make no waves despite their splashing—has panned the book. My issue here is not so much with their derision—especially when compared with the unpaid and unread interns that make up the former group—but instead, with their affected disengagement. In these reviews, you’ll encounter a litany of banal questions in the realm of “Why would Weinberger do this? What makes this poetry? Why not just read Tu Fu’s poems?” But there are no acerbic answers to fill these bellyaches. Instead, these “questions” are raised as ends unto themselves—rhetorical devices used to close off lines of analysis rather than open them. This is bad criticism, pedagogically frustrating, and regrettably trendy.
Though I am tempted to continue writing this review of reviews—in a kind of grand homage to Weinbergerian mimesis—I’ve decided to pick up where this second group of bloggers left off. So then: Why would Eliot Weinberger do this? Well, one could look to the brief explanatory note that follows the final poem. Here, the author directly states his purpose by way of literary anecdote:
In the 13th century, the resistance fighter Wen T’ien-hsiang, imprisoned during the Mongol conquest of the Southern Sung Dynasty, wrote (as translated by Lucas Bender): “As I sat in prison in Yu Yen, I had nothing to do and chanted Tu Fu’s poems. . . Having become somewhat familiar with the feelings and inspirations they contained, I took his five character lines and compiled them into quatrains . . .”
Weinberger then draws a parallel to his own project: “For ‘prison’ in the passage above, read ‘the pandemic.’ For ‘Yu Yen,’ read ‘New York.’ For ‘changed,’ read ‘read.’ For ‘quatrains’ read ‘montages.’” While the language of these extended quotations is characteristically blunt, it is also characteristically ironic. Should readers readily, and without question, accept Weinberger’s insistence that the book is as simple as reading X for Y and Y for Z? Or is Weinberger subtly remarking on the passive approach to reading works in translation that we’ve all been guilty of? Haven’t we been taking Weinberger at his word that where we read “mulberry” we were actually reading “桑?” Was I reading Tu Fu, Du Fu, or 杜甫 ? Or was I reading Weinberger? Have I really read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky? Or only Pevear and Volokhonksy?
In other words, Weinberger’s note on the text serves as a subtle metacommentary on “translation” writ large. Rather than translate word for word, line for line, phrase for phrase, character for letter, insofar is this is ever possible, Weinberger translates anecdote for anecdote, memory for memory, time for time, and place for place. The project is composition by residua: Tu Fu’s words recovered from the wreck of readerly retention: a literal re-membering of the fragments: not a translation but a transmutation of linguistic material. It is a book that seeks to replicate an ineffable sensation that many serious readers of poetry have experienced at some point or another: the formation of reordered, approximated, and appropriated poetic lines that floats through your mind after years of reading: the exquisite corpse of re(-)collection: the pastiche of mis(-)re(-)membering.
For those readers that have not experienced the effects of obsessive reading, Joan Richardson’s essay “In Johnathan Edwards’s room of the idea” offers a more eloquent depiction:
The more fluent one becomes in a language, the more transparent the medium of that language becomes… One no longer thinks about the language, but in it… Edwards became as fluent in the languages of Locke and Newton as he was in that of the prophets and apostles, reading and re-reading their texts until memory and reflection on them were replaced by perception through them.
While I cannot account for Weinberger’s fluency in Chinese—nor the “accuracy” or “faithfulness” of his translations—I offer Richardson’s account of Edwards as a way of accounting for my own account of Weinberger. I am accounting for his textual fluency, for the way in which one can see the world of New York during the height of the pandemic through the poems of Tu Fu. I am considering the prismatic possibilities of ancient lines such as “Friends with good jobs have stopped writing” and “Why do stupidities become customs?” and “You’ll weep for reasons other than the war.” I am reading Weinberger’s biography through the biography of Tu Fu, and the life of Tu Fu through the life of Weinberger. I am staking eloquent claims like Richardson, saying things like “Weinberger became as fluent in the languages of Tu Fu and Wang Wei as he was in that of the Modernists and Post-Modernists, reading and re-reading their texts until memory and reflection on them were replaced by perception through them.”
Eric Weiskott, a revered medievalist and professor of literature at Boston College, has taken similar risks in his newest hybrid collection, Cycle of Dreams. While his previous books are serious monographs published by distinguished academic presses, his most recent is the type of lyric experiment that only a handful of small but respectably heady presses would dare to put out. Cycle of Dreams quite literally juxtaposes Weiskott’s translation of William Langland’s fourteenth-century alliterative dream vision, Piers Plowman, with his own poetry: fragments of the medieval poem appear on the versos and the contemporary poems appear on the rectos. As such, the book raises similar Weinbergerian questions: “Why not just read Piers Plowman? Why not just read Weiskott’s poetry or criticism? Why would Weiskott do this?”
To begin with that first question, let me say that if you are unfamiliar with Piers Plowman, you are not alone. Written during a period of plague sometime between 1370–86, Piers Plowman tells the story of a free man named Will (pun intended) who dozes off several times and has a few allegorical Christian dreams. . . Excuse my flatness, but there are only two types of people who read Piers Plowman: students who read it once and medievalists who never stop reading it. It is the same text, but what does that latter group see? For starters, it is a complicated poem. To really understand it, you need a pretty solid foundation in Middle English, more Latin than Shakespeare had, more than “some” knowledge of Christian theology during the Middle Ages, and ideally a tweeded expert explaining its vast marginalia and material history with an overhead projector. You need a Weiskott; probably not a Weinberger; certainly not a Weitman.
It is for these reasons that the poem has been translated and annotated many times by many scholars. And yet, though he is indeed a scholar of such things—and though he could’ve held our hand as we crossed the threshold of this alliterative dream—Eric Weiskott’s “translation” of Langland’s poem is as fragmented, experimental, and contemporary as Weinberger’s translations of Tu Fu. For example, though most (all?) other translations of Piers Plowman clearly note the sections of the poem (which is comprised of a prologue and twenty sections, called Passuses), Weiskott’s translated sections have titles like “Allegory of Corporate Personhood,” and “Here Language Betrays Action,” and “Here the Dreamer Finds Religion in the Form of a Woman.” These chapter titles allow the uninitiated reader to understand and navigate the poem through its central images and moments by offering contemporary and colloquial analogues. Similarly, Weiskott modernizes both the speaker of the poem and its setting. In Weiskott’s translation, the speaker sees contemporary horrors, like “televangelists,” “A loan shark [preaching],” and “Bosses [complaining] to City Hall,” not to mention the many lawyers, yuppies, and provosts. The Will of Weiskott’s Plowman does not gaze upon the failures and corruptions of medieval institutions, but instead contemporary ones:
years ago my dad used to say
‘dark times when the leader’s a liar’
you read the same in the news
undermining our democracy
Rather than translate the poem line for line, word for word, phrase for phrase, insofar as this is ever possible, Weiskott translates exploitation for exploitation, vice for vice, and virtue for virtue.
Then there is the matter of Weiskott’s own poems, which continually interrupt his “translation” of Langland. Much like the fragments of Plowman beside them, these short lyric pieces (which run the gamut as far as form is concerned) explore the speaker’s unrest with the state of his world. In one of many poems titled “The End,” Weiskott writes: “The protester becomes a statistic / and statistics become a form of prayer / and prayer becomes a form of protest.” Though this is a recto page—and therefore clearly the words of the contemporary poet rather than the translator—this image aligns quite neatly with those of Langland’s devoutly world-weary Will. In other words, if not for the physical orientation of the book itself, it would be quite difficult to differentiate Weiskott from Langland. But again, herein lies the great achievement of Cycle of Dreams. By combining his contemporary and domesticizing translation of the medieval poem with his own lyric poetry, Weiskott offers us his own vision: his own view of the world through the scrim of scholarship. As we move from his version of Plowman to his hybrid fragments, we see Weiskott becoming “as fluent in the language of experimental poetry as he is in that of medieval lyrics, reading and re-reading these texts until memory and reflection on them were replaced by perception through them.”
Both The Life of Tu Fu and Cycle of Dreams consider the material possibilities of language, text, and scholarship; and both books are productive provocations meant to incite a succession of questions about these subjects. What happens when the translator becomes visible, when the scholar becomes a poet, when an ancient text is contemporized? What readerly expectations did I arrive with? Can I ever really read Tu Fu? While it might take a bit of work to answer these questions—or, in some cases, to even ask them—they remain much more interesting than “What’s the point?”
Mathew Weitman’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Bennington Review, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, the AWP Kurt Brown Award, the Inprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry, and has received residencies and fellowships from MacDowell, Ucross, and Millay Arts. Currently, he is pursuing his PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston, where he is an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow. With July Westhale and Felipe Acevedo Riquelme, he is coediting Rolando Cárdenas: The Life and Work of a Chilean Master (Pleiades Press, 2026).
*****
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