Night Mooring At Maple Bridge/枫桥夜泊 is an interactive Flash program accompanied by a mixed media piece based on a translation of the famous poem by Tang poet Zhang Ji.
I decided to go with a multi-tiered approach to this project because I wanted to portray the multiplicity of meanings to be found in translation. For a work like this, I had to portray not just the specific translations of each term but also the underlying implications of the piece. Traditional Western poetry differs from traditional Chinese poetry in that longer, epic poems filled with bombastic events and retelling are the norm, whereas Chinese works are generally not only shorter in length but also attempt to convey an individualized personal emotion or reaction to an outside impetus (usually involving nature, such as watching the snow fall or drinking wine under the moon).
Zhang's poem, worked in the traditional Tang rhyming style with four seven-character lines, is one of the most well-known poems in China...it is still memorized in schools across the country while Cold Mountain Temple (the Hanshan Si of the poem) is home to a monument to the poet and his poem. Hundreds of tourists visit the temple each year in order to view this memorial and to see the place that inspired the work. This summer I numbered among them; after seeing Maple Bridge I felt for the first time that I was crossing the language barrier that had prevented me from fully understanding this work. It was a very special experience for me (one that, incidentally, I blogged about for the WVU Study Abroad Office - click here to read that entry, complete with photos from Hanshan Temple and Maple Bridge.)
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The following is one of the best known translations of Zhang Ji's work, taken from Witter Bynner's 1931 anthology of T'ang poetry, The Jade Mountain:
A Night-Mooring Near Maple Bridge
While I watch the moon go down, a crow caws through the frost;
Under the shadows of maple-trees a fisherman moves with his torch;
And I hear, from beyond Su-chou, from the temple on Cold Mountain,
Ringing for me, here in my boat, the midnight bell.
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While this was a better translation than some (who do not attempt to portray anything of the personal state), I feel that Western audiences relate more towards meanings that are not so quietly implicit and culturally specific. For example, a Western audience steeped in cultures espousing individualism and heroic adventuring would not necessarily read this work as implying loneliness and homesickness, which are meanings many Chinese readers find within the poem. In my translation, I adhered to seven line stanzas - each line indicative of one of the characters per line of the original work - with a total of four stanzas mirroring the four lines of the original piece. While my translation my not be as delicate or as open for interpretation as the original, I feel it captures something of the essence of the moment as well...as that is one of the highest goals of Chinese poetry (to photographically capture a single experience/thought/emotion for all time), I wanted to follow the spirit rather than the letter of piece. Plus, I strongly believe that FLIT readers should have a side-by-side translation experience with the original work (especially poetry), because some elements simply do not transfer well and a reader needs to view them in their original setting to understand the work fully...the original text should be for study, whereas the translation should be for meaning.
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Here's my translation -
I see the moon fall into the water
hear a crow sing to itself in the dark
as the river surges and rocks
pushes and pulls
I would be asleep but
there are the hundred pepper strokes of frost
the blizzard dusting my face a wet burial.
Somewhere in the fringe of maples
crowning the banks of the confluence
the branches shiver and shudder in the wind
blinking the light of a fisherman's lantern
thousands of living eyelashes dimming that fire
I would be asleep but
I was memorizing the light in the dark.
Outside the rush of Suzhou city
a tiny bed in a jostled boat
a thousand miles from home
I would be asleep but
it is easy to feel forgotten
in the still and moving dark of this coldness
tonight i live in no one's thoughts
But then the midnight bell of Hanshan Temple
softly cracks and crashes this brittle stillness
an unknown friend in a voice of brass chings
all is well/you are safe/goodnight
something in my chest heats up and then
streaks molten over the edge of closed eyelids
now that I am warm I think I can sleep.
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The poem is etched onto the glass of the frame in front of this image of Maple Bridge:
This glass etching poetic overlay of a photograph is something I've been working a lot with recently...it seemed a natural fit to the poem and the image because it mirrored a quality that is present in all great historic sites - while they do bear the marks of previous generations in some respects, largely the individual experiences and passages hover overtop of these places, leaving no physical evidence to last the millenia. In this instance, words are what remain from Zhang Ji's visit to Suzhou so words are what I have chosen to overlay. I will either bring the photograph in during class or I will find a way to photograph this piece that also shows the glass etching...something that has thus far eluded me...
As for the second part of the project...the Flash piece is a user interactive poetic chart of the poem in its original language. Once the reader mouses over any character in the chart, a translation process is initiated that moves from from Chinese character to pinyin (Chinese to Roman alphabet transliteration system) to English to images and inputs...which basically parallels the process I undergo when I translate. For the images in this piece I compiled sources found online and in my own photographic library. Images relating to the characters gusu and hanshansi (Suzhou and Cold Mountain Temple, respectively) were largely pulled from my own travel photographs and are indicative of what I most strongly related to those locations.
The piece is designed to be read sequentially in the Western style (top to bottom, right to left), although translations can occur in any order as well as simultaneously...however, understanding the inputs in the right order is a hard task as it stands, so the reader will most likely find themselves intuitively following the correct sequence of translation once they begin to understand the inputs.
At points in this project I used music as per our assignment - in this piece I used a recording of a scholar reciting Zhang Ji's poem in the traditional style as well as Kid Koala's scratch stylings of the infamous "Moon River". I chose these pieces because I thought the traditional flow of the poem was pretty interesting; additionally, I really liked pairing "Moon River" with this work and particularly enjoyed Kid Koala's remix, which is at once familiar and eerie (as it often is when you find yourself a stranger in a strange land - some things are surprisingly familiar while other things make you feel like you landed on a different planet).
Anyway...here's the Flash part...
Project #2: Night Mooring At Maple Bridge/枫桥夜泊
I'll bring the media piece in as well.
