Wang Wei visits a whirlpool and writes what’s on his mind.
白黿渦（雜言走筆）
南山之瀑水兮，激石瀥瀑似雷驚。
人相對兮，不聞語聲。
翻渦跳沫兮蒼苔濕，蘚老且厚，春草爲之不生。
獸不敢驚動，鳥不敢飛鳴。
白黿渦濤戲瀨兮，委身以縱橫。
王人之仁兮，不網不釣，得遂性以生成。
White Turtle Whirlpool (irregular verse written in haste)
South Mountain Waterfall striking the rocks, spray crashing, startling like thunder.
Face to face beside it, one can’t hear the other’s voice.
The rolling whirlpool, jumping, foaming, grey-green moss drenched, so old and thick that spring grass won’t grow.
No wild animal dares stir, no bird dares fly and call.
At White Turtle Whirlpool, the waves play in the shallows, yielding bodies drift this way and that.
By the benevolence of the king’s men, no nets nor hooks: creatures may follow their nature and grow to full life.
Translation notes
Hello again! I have been working on this translation, on and off, for over a year. But I kept getting stuck for a number of reasons. One of my sources for this website, the excellent Library of Chinese Humanities, carries a translation of this poem that confuses me. In this translation, there is no turtle. How can a poem about a whirlpool named after white turtles not have a turtle in it?
On top of that, since starting this website large language models have become almost more helpful than a dictionary in understanding the nuances of different characters and finding set translations for different phrases. Up until now, I’ve been looking up each character individually across multiple sources and cross-referencing them (a habit that goes back to the Chinese Reading Room at SOAS). However, now ChatGPT can insist, with good reasoning, that there is no better translation than ‘dare not’ in the fourth line of this poem. And suddenly the subjectivity of poetry translation meets an objective truth that I am not clever enough to argue against.
This brings us on to the objective truth that white turtles don’t exist. Yet in this poem, ‘bodies’ live undisturbed (no nets, no hooks), in a spot too intense even for beasts and birds to move, and yet are completely at ease, following “their nature”.
Tang poems are passed down to us via commentaries and manuscripts made at later points in Chinese history. For this one, the Qing dynasty’s Classified Annotations of the Collected Poems of Tang Poet Wang Wei (Leijian Tang Wang Youcheng Shiji ”類箋唐王右丞詩集) gives us a clue. It says that the white turtle (though not directly referenced) is a symbol for a petty minister under a benevolent king, free to work as they please on a course aligned with nature.
Perhaps this is the case. Perhaps Wang Wei really did imagine a turtle in that whirlpool? All I can say for sure, is rather like the deer in Deer Place, the animal is only referenced but never seen. I like to think, even though it’s a stretch, that Wang Wei might go so far as to see this as a metaphor for enlightenment, and would insist that the white turtle exists even if some of us never live to see it.