mysterious written forms. He joined the navy at seventeen before finishing high school, and while stationed in Yokohama harbor in 1943 made many trips into that devastated city. After graduation from the Chinese program at Columbia on the GI Bill, he immediately booked ship’s passage back to Japan, seeking to get as close to China as the Cold War would allow. He landed in Japan in 1951, the occupation still under way. “Really,” he said, “American missionaries were the only non-military people supposed to be there, but somehow I came as a teacher of English to Kyoto.” He had left Japan infrequently ever since, including for a stint on the faculty at Columbia, which he fled when they wanted him to chair the department.
After finishing his PhD back at Columbia, he returned to Japan, part of the small expatriate community in Kyoto in the 1950s that included the poets Gary Snyder and Cid Corman, and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, the pioneering American Zen practitioner who later became a priest. Unknown to Watson at the time, Snyder had already translated twenty-four of Han-shan’s poems as a graduate student at Berkeley (later published in Evergreen Review and in book form in Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems).
A beginning poet himself in those days, Watson told us translating Han-shan’s poems became his first substantial undertaking. Watson worked for a time for Mrs. Sasaki at the First Zen Institute in Kyoto. When she read Arthur Waley’s translations of twenty Cold Mountain poems in Encounter in 1954, she asked Watson to seek out the originals.
Cid Corman readily agreed to help edit Watson’s early efforts at translation. “Cut this out, cut that out, this isn’t doing anything . . . get rid of the verbiage,” a confident Corman insisted to Watson’s amazement, as Corman knew no Chinese (nor Japanese!). But Watson felt his advice sound and edited accordingly.
Watson trusted Corman, I guessed, because Corman was a poet. Watson said he still tries to keep his ear attuned to American English by reading contemporary poetry. I asked him to read out loud to us some of his Cold Mountain translations. In doing so, his voice dropped into a deeply moving poetic cadence. “I should have known!” I exclaimed to myself. “He has a poet’s ear, that reverence for rhythm and sound. That explains the exceptional music of his translations.”
In describing his translation technique, Watson confirmed that thought. “I know what the Chinese character means and implies and so on,” he said. “And I can’t just make up some other thing. On the other hand, I have a certain amount of leeway. It’s what translators always say: because I’ve lost so much in other places, I should be allowed to make it up in places where I can . . . make it a little better than the original. So within those limits, I try to get the best language, the most vivid, effective—and the sound, of course, I’m always thinking of the sound. Some people apparently don’t pay much attention to the sound.”
He said he followed the Chinese form rigorously as well. “If it’s an eight-line poem I come out with an eight-line translation. Because the lineation is very pronounced in the Chinese. Now [Kenneth] Rexroth didn’t like that, so he runs it over into the next line. And [David] Hinton does the same, because he admires Rexroth. But the Chinese is so strong that it forces it on the English. . . . If you are going to use enjambment you have to enjamb every next line. I don’t know why Rexroth did that. He didn’t like end-stopped lines, but the Chinese form is very strong.”
I told him about the diplomat’s daughter at Takashimaya, who felt a tremendous conflict between the individuality she’d learned in the West and the conformity she felt living here. I wondered if that difference was part of the ungovernable Han-shan’s charm to America’s open-road ear? I remembered that Jack Kerouac wrote the novel The Dharma Bums after he and Allen Ginsberg visited Gary Snyder in Mill Valley, where Snyder was translating Han-shan for his Berkeley professor. America’s road scholar dedicated that book “to Han-shan.”
Watson confided that at a family gathering back in the States after his father’s death, he chose as a text a Han-shan poem. I asked him to read it to us.
COLD MOUNTAIN NO. 85
I came once to sit on Cold Mountain
And lingered here for thirty years.
Yesterday I went to see relatives and friends;
Over half had gone to the Yellow Springs.
Bit by bit life fades like a guttering lamp,
Passes on like a river that never rests.
This morning I face my lonely shadow
And before I know it tears stream down.
Watson’s eyes welled with tears as he recalled that gathering. Watson too had come to “sit” briefly in Japan and had “lingered” nearly forty years. Now he only rarely visited the States, and had visited mainland China only once. Although he had approached Tientai near Cold Mountain’s cave, he had never reached it.
I asked him to read that poem one more time, but he answered, “Maybe it’s too teary a note to end on.” Instead he recited the final quatrain of his own response to Cold Mountain:
Do you have the poems of Han-shan in your house?
They’re better for you than sutra-reading!
Write them out and paste them on a screen
where you can glance them over from time to time.
We laughed. “I do have the poems of Han-shan in my house,” I said, “and have glanced them over for thirty years, thanks to you.” “Take them along when you go on a picnic,” he joked. “I do!” I answered. “I gave my son his own copy of your Cold Mountain on a picnic. Now he loves Han-shan through me, as I do through you.” “He’s fun to play with,” Watson laughed.
After three hours that felt like three minutes, Mike finally unwound the microphone. I glanced at our cups of tea, cold and forgotten. Watson returned his treasured Han-shan to his travel bag and we left the hotel to stroll the grounds of nearby Zojoji Temple, Tokyo’s cathedral of ritual Buddhism.
Wandering the manicured temple grounds, Watson explained his own Buddhist practice, the much quieter discipline of the Rinzai school of Zen. His master would assign him a koan—a famously enigmatic question or assertion—which he had to puzzle out through meditation. Sometimes the master approved his response right away. Sometimes approval took days or even years. He liked that practice, filled with disciplined probing of the mysterious nature of language and thought, letting go of the rational order of the world. “Zen says if you are happy, be happy, if you are sad, be sad. But don’t hang on. Be where you are.”
In the cemetery behind the temple, Watson explained the Japanese ceremony of death. Families placed the ashes of family members at densely packed vertical grave markers, and ritually honored them by bringing water, flowers, and other beloved objects. “If he smoked cigarettes, they might leave a cigarette. It is too expensive for most families to be buried in Tokyo these days, so they go to cemeteries outside the city. There are also cemeteries for those without any relatives to care for them.” He looked up. “That is where I will go,” he said.
Watson declined our offer of lunch, and so, reluctantly, we left him at the Zojoji subway entrance. He waved good-bye and slowly disappeared down the steps, entering the mouth of the cave called Tokyo, his adopted home, his Cold Mountain.
