What the poem is. The book’s framing is short and should be read before the poem: 作曲家的塔 “illustrates the wealth of images that Yang might cover in any one work. They range from the coldness and wetness of fish and lake, the rawness of flesh and blood, the haunting eeriness of dark and burial. The poem alludes to Yang’s own terrifying experience, as a child of eleven, during the Cultural Revolution, when his father was interrogated by Red Guards.” Section 3 is where that arrives: 塔裏有一隻十一歲的耳朵／卻以全部年齡贴著墙 — an ear aged eleven, pressed to the wall with the whole of its age. Read sections 1 and 2 again once you know.

What Holton refuses to smooth — line by line, because this is the teachable part.
· 腐爛的方向 stays “the rotten direction” although English wants “the direction of rot”. The Chinese line sets 方向 against 方向 and the repetition is the point; a smoother English would break it.
· 一朽得讓根抓住 → “rotted to let roots clutch”. The 得 construction is strange in Chinese and the English is left strange. Note that the Chinese as printed reads 一朽 where 已朽 would be normal — Holton translates the sense, not the oddity.
· The gaps are kept as gaps. Yang uses no punctuation at all; internal white space does the work of a comma, a caesura or a full stop, and Holton reproduces every one of them as literal spaces in English. That is a formal decision most editors would reverse, and it is the single most visible thing about the translation.
· 而昨夜再也不會過去　你 → “but last night will never again pass by you”. The dangling 你 after the gap can be the object of 過去 or the start of the next line’s subject. English cannot hold both either — so Holton holds neither, and leaves the gap to do it.
· 全新口音 → “novel accents”, 教誨著 → “lectured by”, 堆砌 → “heaped”. Ordinary words for ordinary words, in a poem whose difficulty is never lexical.
· 吞下黑暗星星塞進小手的邪惡 → “swallows the evil dark stars stuff in his little hand”. Ungrammatical in English, exactly as it is unparsable in Chinese: is 黑暗 an adjective or the object? does 塞進 govern 小手? Holton reproduces the ambiguity by producing an English sentence that will not resolve either.

Printed as it stands. The Chinese mixes forms — 陰郁 for 陰鬱, 贴 and 墙 in simplified inside an otherwise traditional text. In a poet who plays deliberately with the shapes of characters in their modern and ancient manifestations, you cannot assume these are typesetting accidents — but neither can you assume they are not. Reproduce, and flag.

Theory

Practicals