A hidden agenda

What's common between the ancient Hebrew rabbinical texts and an iconic Tang Dynasty poem like Wang Wei's Lu Chai (Deer Park)? What makes a series of colophons by Bada Shanren, the late 17th century Chinese ink brush artist, lend themselves to be arranged in the form of a 85-letter constraint on textured gold foil - the sort sometimes used in traditional funerals in South-east Asian cultures - so that they look like a rectangular patch, plotted with letters, equidistant from and apparently unrelated to one another?

Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei's poem Deer Park translated by Robert Majzels.

The translated poems run vertically and are usually read from right to left, although there are no set rules as to how they might be read. In fact, a student of the translators, Claire Huot and Robert Majzels, read the translated poems backwards and managed to make perfect sense.

If the translations of Chinese classical texts into English, as visually represented by Huot and Majzels, both academics with the University of Calgary in Canada, seem like a riddle, it's because they want the reader to work hard. They have challenged linear reading. Majzels, a novelist, and Huot, a Sinologist, have launched a sustained rebellion against English translations that inevitably seem to dilute the essence of the original Chinese, trying to break down and lay out each syllable contained in the lines in a compact form to simplified elements, in the name of preserving authenticity. The duo is trying to restore the element of enigma in their translations of Chinese poetry, in a totally new incarnation. The effort, essentially, is directed towards finding alternatives to the way the West often reads China, on its own terms.

"We like operating on the edge of several disciplines, combining, ancient Western and postmodern philosophies, translation theory, Chinese scholarship, contemporary poetics and visual art," says Robert Majzels, who does most of the translations while Huot's job is to interpret the mystic quality of the original, compare notes with classical literature scholars in China and ensure that the translations are fundamentally accurate.