Trials in Translation

The Monk Dōgen & His Birds

世中は何にたとへん水鳥のはしふる露にやとる月影（無常）

Mujō (Impermanence)
To what shall I liken this world?
But to moonlight
Reflected in the dewdrops
Shaken from a shorebird's bill
—Dōgen

1.

Eight hundred years ago, a Buddhist monk, not long into his career, became deeply dissatisfied with the Buddhist teachings available to him in Japan. And so, he traveled across the sea to Song China.

A man on a mission, he wanted to uncover the “true Buddhism.”

It is a story repeated again and again as Buddhism made its way East. Monks and priests, feeling like something had to be “lost in translation,” took to the road in search of the true word. From Japan to China and from China to India—and sometimes as far as to Afghanistan, these early translators were seeking to understand the wisdom that was embedded in the words themselves.

Or maybe what they were really seeking was beyond the words themselves?

The monk Dōgen, after seven or so years in China would return to Japan—his mind filled with all that he had seen and all that he had learned. In time, he would form a new school of Buddhism in Japan: Sōtō Zen.

Interested in notions of time and being, he wrote elaborate philosophical tracts, as well as many marvelous poems.

In the above poem on impermanence, Dōgen compares ultimate reality to that of a reflection: of moonlight reflected in a dewdrop scattering off a waterbird’s bill.

In my first translation attempt, I chose to render mizudori 水鳥 (waterbird) as “shore bird.” It is a valid translation for the Japanese term mizudori, which literally means 水 water 鳥 bird. Maybe I instinctively went with shorebird because I have been taught in creative writing classes to try and be as concrete and specific as possible, so readers can better form mental images. Could this might explain why the translation I found online (made by the great Dōgen-scholar Steven Heine) used the English word “crane” for mizudori.

Dōgen did not choose the Japanese word for crane, which is tsuru 鶴 so why did the translator?

Curious, I looked at another poem by Dōgen that makes use of the same word mizudori 水鳥 (waterbird):

水鳥の行くも帰るも跡たえて され共路はわすれさりけり

Waterbirds depart and return
Without ever leaving a trace
Yet they never forget
The path they have taken 

In reading this poem, it hit me that “migratory bird” is really what is being evoked in the first poem—And yet, that is not what the Japanese says. Migratory bird has its own word: wataridori 渡鳥.And that is not used in either poem.

A question:

When you imagine the disappearing “tracks” of birds flying south in mid-autumn, do you picture cranes or geese? Or maybe some other bird? Speaking for myself, I imagine geese. In Los Angeles, I almost fell off a bar stool once as I tracked a row of geese flying south across the sky, hoping they would land at the lake near my mom’s house.

In Madison, where I went to grad school, their calls were a beautiful constant on autumn nights. I loved watching them soaring in great V-shapes across cloudless skies.

For more than a thousand years, migratory birds have served as a trope for the enlightened mind in the Buddhist poetic world --because these traveling birds evoke another expression: “Activating the mind without dwelling”

詠応無所住而生其心

This is from the Kumarajiva’s Chinese translation of the Diamond Sutra, which teaches that we should aim for an uncluttered mind, free of attachments.

To walk the path without leaving a trace
To not “dwell” on the things of the world

For more of this essay, please see Trials of Translation at 3 Quarks Daily on Monday.