Dialogism in Translation

Revisiting Gary Snyder’s “Cold Mountain Poems”

Abstract

Literary translation concerns the recovery of meaning and how we conceive ourselves as engaged with interlocutors across cultures. In this respect, the American poet-translator Gary Snyder’s translation of “Cold Mountain Poems” offers abundant evidence of “dialogization” and open-endedness to lend itself to a Bakhtinian analysis. Given that it remains an unexplored angle, in this article, I look into Snyder’s approach to the Chinese Buddhist poet Han-shan through sympathetic co-experiencing and visualizing strategy, as well as how his translation is “against enclosure in a text” from the perspective of the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. This article also argues that Snyder’s engagement with the Buddhist concept of interpenetration has influenced his literary renderings, by which means Snyder has created a third space of exchange in a larger, worldly context.