Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (with More Ways) by Eliot Weinberger

Author:Eliot Weinberger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2016-09-20T16:00:00+00:00

POSTSCRIPT

After the publication of this essay, along with Paz’s afterword, in the Mexican magazine Vuelta, the editors received a furious letter from a professor at the Colegio de México, charging me with nothing less than “crimes against Chinese poetry.” Among those criminal acts was the “curious neglect” of “Boodberg’s cedule.”

The cryptic reference, I later discovered, was to Cedules from a Berkeley Workshop in Asiatic Philology, a series of essays privately published by Peter A. Boodberg in 1954 and 1955. Boodberg was of Russian nobility, was exiled to Manchuria and later the United States after the revolution, and became a beloved and eccentric professor of Chinese at the University of California. (Gary Snyder was one of his students.) He died in 1972.

The relevant essay, “Philology in Translation-Land,” is 1½ pages long. It begins:

Recent readings in translations of Tang quatrains have left us immersed in deep sadness in the face of the lack of philological acumen, the critical shallowness, and the self-centered irreverence towards great poetry exhibited by would-be competent writers seeming unable to resist the lures of precocious publication.

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