Riprap

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
                    –“Riprap” by Gary Snyder

The first time I read “Riprap,” I felt at home. Every word fell in the right place. Every image took me to a magic world. I had no idea how it happened. I had no need to ask why.

The first time I tried to translate “Riprap” into Chinese, I fell into a rabbit hole. The familiar words turned into strangers. They stopped being transparent, fluid, and playful. The translation came out dry, stiff, mangled. It was no longer a Gary Snyder poem.

I tried to doll it up with pretty words, fancy syntax, line breaks but only made it worse. I stopped struggling and waited till I had a chance to see Gary.

In 2022, I spent a week at Kitkitdizze, Gary’s home in California’s Sierra Nevada. I brought up my predicament.

“Ah, riprap; first, you need to know the word,” he said.

He started pulling dictionaries from his bookshelves, small, big, old, and new, including the massive multivolume OED, the Oxford English Dictionary. He first opened three small dictionaries but none listed the word.

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “The word exists in the mountains and rivers. It’s used by people who build roads and shores with rocks and pebbles. Dictionaries often don’t bother with it. But we mountain people know better. We use it daily. We love the word.”

Gary went back to his bookshelves, dug out volumes of his OED, and hauled them to the dining table. Soon he started huffing and puffing.

“No, Dad, stop it!” His son Kai rushed over. “You can’t do this. You just broke three ribs from your fall, remember?” Kai took the OED from Gary’s arms and brought them back to the shelf.

“Oh stop it, Kai! I’m fine. I can carry the dictionary.”

Gary wrenched a volume of OED from Kai’s hands and brought it back to the table, opened it, and looked for “riprap” with his magnifying glass. The word wasn’t there. He went back for more volumes. Kai sat in front of the bookshelf like a mountain.

Gary sighed, went back to his table, and opened Merriam-Webster. “Aha, found it!” he shouted, laughing like a child who had just stumbled upon a treasure. I looked up with curiosity. How would he interpret Webster’s definition?

Riprap: a foundation or sustaining wall of stones or chunks of concrete thrown together without order, to prevent erosion.

Gary read each word slowly. He didn’t sound convinced.

When I first read the poem “Riprap,” I didn’t know the meaning of the word. I relied on the sounds and the formation of the poem to explore it: rip rap, riprap, rip rap… It sounds like water slapping, wood splitting, stones rubbing. Order, disorder, then order again. The title seemed to fit the poem perfectly. I felt I got everything I wanted from the poem. No need to look it up.

When I started translating the poem into Chinese, I consulted the dictionaries, to get the exact meaning of the word. Like Gary, it took me a while to find it, and that’s when I felt stuck. The moment I pinned down its definition, its magic vanished.

Did Gary feel the same as I felt, that the dictionary somehow sucked the soul out of the word?

“Hmm, it’s more than that. It’s got to be more than that!” Gary murmured, frowning, waving his magnifying glass up and down, left and right.

“What’s riprap, really?” I asked. I knew I had annoyed many people asking the same question over and over, but something surprising would come, always.

“It’s a word from the mountains, for the mountain people,” said Gary, looking up from the dictionary, into the distant mountains outside the window. “We say riprap when we put down the stones to make a path through the woods, when the path is formed after horses, mules, when people walk on it day in and day out. When the rain comes and the path is flooded, the pebbles hold the road together. We don’t know how the stones work, but we never cement them together. In fact, cement will only destroy the road when the storm comes. The stones need room to move around in order to stay together, just like the buildings in Japan, built to dance with the earthquakes. So you just got to trust the stones to do their magic, to hold everything together somehow, the way the world is held together.”

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We gazed out the window at ponderosa pines and the cherry blossoms, listening to the sounds of birds. Gary opened the door, and suddenly I was feeling the magic of the poem again.

“Trust the stones … in the mountains, you don’t have the choice but to trust the stones,” he said.

Many masters have told me the same thing.

“Follow the foil. It knows where to go,” said my Russian trainer. “It’s faster than your eyes and brain. It has its own spirit.”

“Trust the blade,” said Sensei Art, as he handed me his Japanese sword to cut the paper hanging from the ceiling. “Left, right, center, left, right, center, till the paper is gone. No eye, no ear, no mind, just follow the blade.”

This was my first time holding the sword. I had no training. I followed his instructions, followed the sword, and won the contest. “Keep the sword, Ping. It’s three hundred years old, and it’s calling your name,” said Sensei Art.

“Your oars know where to be,” said my rowing coach Marlene. “Trust them. Let them do the job.”

I turned to Gary: “Did you follow words the way you follow stones? Is that how you wrote ‘Riprap’? Is that how poetry is made? Can you trust words the way you trust stones?”

He laughed. “That’s a lot of questions, and the same question, Ping.” I laughed. It did lead to the same question: What’s a word, what’s a stone, what’s a language?

Life lays out the same materials for everyone, and it’s up to us if we want to make misery or a pizza with a touch of surprise.

Growing up in China, I had no toys, so I played with words, words from a handmade radio, from banned books buried under the chicken coop. I had a dream: to go to college at any cost, but all schools were closed, so I raised chickens to trade flashlight batteries to read in sealed libraries at night. Food was scarce, so I fished and grew vegetables to feed my family. I learned everything I needed to live, from fish, worms, grasshoppers, chickens, birds. I never studied math, chemistry, or physics, but I learned words, used them to read and tell stories. I got into Beijing University, then NYU for a PhD, became a professor, poet, author.

Gary grew up in the countryside. He worked to support his family at a young age. He remembers the Bible in the house. He spent lots of time in the public library to read what he wanted. At 7, he earned his first award from the Washington State library. He worked his way through school, college, grad school as a fire watcher, sailor, and woodsman clearing forests and making paths with riprap. He’s published countless books, poetry, essays, translations, won awards from around the world, yet his most treasured prize is the reading certificate he got at 7, the only award he hangs in his library. At 94, hunched over the OED with a magnifying glass, he is still seeking the meaning of riprap.

I raised my camera, to capture Gary and his dictionaries. Gary stopped me, pulled two books to him, The Analects of Confucius and The Great Learning (Daxue), two of the four classics from Confucius’s era that set the foundation of Chinese culture.

“This was what I studied with Professor Cheng at Berkeley,” he said, picking up Confucius’s Analects. “They taught me how to seek excellence, how to find the root of everything, how to see the forest instead of being lost in branches, and how to achieve our potential for a better world.”

I’d been staying at Kitkitdizze for days, sitting at the table drinking coffee, eating dinner, and chatting with Gary. The Great Learning and The Analects had been sitting in front of me all the time. I saw them but didn’t see, till Gary picked them up in his hands, till Confucius decided it was time for me to open my eyes and connect the dots.

I raised my camera again, to capture this moment.

About 500 BC, Confucius traveled from state to state in an ox carriage to convince the warring kings that peace could arrive if words were rectified (zhenming). This is what he told the kings:

If words are not correct, language won’t be in accordance with the truth of things. If language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish … people do not know how to move hand or foot. –Analect 13.3

Confucius failed to convince any ruler to take his advice. Wars continued until the Qin wiped out all other states and established China’s first empire. Yet his thoughts became the spine of Chinese civilization. The poems he anthologized became China’s cultural DNA. No ruler of China, be they Han, Mongolian, or Manchurian, could run the Middle Kingdom without Confucian philosophy, including rectification of words, kindness (ren), propriety (li), music (yue), poetry (shi).

According to the OED, riprap is a word of conversion—the act or process of changing something into a different state or form. Rose is a rose is a rose … each time the word is uttered, something is changed, transformed, converted. A rose becomes color, perfume, beauty, royalty, secrecy, love, mysticism, miracles, and beyond.

Is that why Ezra Pound believed that Chinese characters are a medium for poetry? Why he went crazy when he received Fenollosa’s notes on Chinese poetry? He converted those notes into two booklets: Cathay and The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. The publications opened the window to the East and helped launch Western art and poetry into the modern era.

Conversion is already embedded in Chinese language, playing like a trickster: A noun is verb is adjective is adverb is preposition is time is space is cosmos. Confucius plays his trick with my eyes and mind: crouching on Gary’s table, as words, stones, the truth of things … waiting for the moment to whack my head with riprap, to give me a glimpse of the cosmos, its making, its order.

Is that the secret magic of Gary’s poetry? Words convert directly from pebbles, dust, bears, horses, mountains, rivers—a riprap of things, entangled, alive, changing. Pebbles that already know the ingrain of the world? Words that have poetry embedded inside?

In the thin loam, each rock a word
          a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
          with torment of fire and weight.
                    –“Riprap,” Gary Snyder

Life lays out the same materials for everyone, and it’s up to us if we want to make misery or a pizza with a touch of surprise. Our language is a four-dimensional game of Go, a rabbit hole for adventures. Poetry is our guide to explore that Wonderland.

This is how the world runs: Everything we need is already there. All we have to do is trust and let things happen. It allows us to clap with one hand.

Two thousand five hundred years ago Confucius tried to spread his thoughts on how to achieve peace and happiness. Instead, he found poetry: Once our words return to the truth of things, music will be restored, and people will know how to move hands and feet, how to dance in sync to the inner rhythm of all things; life returns, along with peace, harmony, beauty. Gary found it in the forest, after he burned his earlier poems and went to the mountains to pave roads with his hands and his mind with pebbles.

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Riprap is a perfect metaphor for how mind, body, language, poetry work together within the cosmos. It creates an energy field with ants, pebbles, ponies, words. It throws them along riverbanks, on the mountains, into our consciousness. Minds connect dots to make their own new world.

That’s the job for a poet: to create a certain kind of energy field with raw materials for the readers to explore, discover, and create, to keep the Schrödinger cat alive and dead at the same time, to turn our flat world into a four-dimensional game of Go, where everything is connected, alive with endless potential.

And that is the secret of “Riprap,” the secret of Gary Snyder’s poetic magic. He rectifies his words with his way of life, with his whole being. But he won’t tell us the secret. He can’t. We have to find the key ourselves, through patience, persistence, curiosity, and luck.

Gary would not tell me how to translate “Riprap.” The key already lies in his poem, in Confucius’s Analects and Great Learning; it’s on his table, where he reads and drinks coffee with heated milk and honey.

Trust the words the way you trust the pebbles and rocks. They know how to move with rivers and mountains the way animals know how to move with air. “The arms screw up everything,” said coach Marlene. “Forget the arms, forget the hands. The oars know what to do. Let them run!”

I started laughing! I found my problem. I was trying to cement the words with so-called beauty and syntax, and I killed the poem in the process.

I stood up, went back to the beautiful tatami room that used to be Gary and Carol’s room, and translated “Riprap” in one sitting, one breath, one blow. The poem flowed like a wave, rippling through time and space.

 

Riprap

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

 

砌石

在你的意识前，把词语
一个个摆好，如同石头
被双手固定在
选好的位置，把意识
定格在时间和空间：
结实的树皮、树叶和墙
事物的堆砌：
铺出鹅卵石的银河。
走岔路的星球，
这些诗，这些人，
迷路的小马
拖着马鞍—
在颠簸的山道上行走
这世界是一盘围棋
在四维的空间里
永不休止。
蚂蚁和鹅卵石
嵌在薄薄的土壤，一石、一字
被溪水洗涤干净
花岗岩：一条条纹理
诉说火与重量的折磨
水晶与渣滓熔合
一切无常，我们的意识
我们的物质