One of the first glimpses we get of Japhy in Dharma Bums is in this early scene:
A peacefuller scene I never saw than when, in that rather nippy late red afternoon, I simply opened his little door and looked in and saw him at the end of the little shack, sitting crosslegged on a Paisley pillow on a straw mat, with his spectacles on, making him look old and scholarly and wise, with book on lap and the little tin teapot and porcelain cup steaming at his side. He looked up very peacefully, saw who it was, said, "Ray, come in," and bent his eyes again to the script.
"What you doing?"
"Translating Han Shan’s great poem called ‘Cold Mountain‘ written a thousand years ago some of it scribbled on the sides of cliffs hundreds of miles away from any other living beings."
Naturally, being the inquisitive type, I wanted to see if there was such a poet and, if there was such a poet, had Snyder actually written translations of his poems.
Sure enough, the poems were right there at the beginning of New Nature: New and Selected Poems
“Cold Mountain Poems”
Here’s an excerpt from Snyder’s introduction to the poems. I found the last line quoted particularly relevant for the translation I have chosen to cite.
Kanzan, or Han-shan, "Cold Mountain " takes his name from where he lived. He is a mountain madman in an old Chinese line of ragged hermits. When he talks about Cold Mountain he means himself, his home, his state of mind … They became Immortals and you sometimes run onto them today in the skidrows, orchards, hobojungles, and logging camps of America.
There are several poems in the section, but here is a representative one that seems to fit with Kerouac’s portrayal of Japhy in the novel.
In a tangle of cliffs I chose a place—
Bird-paths, but no trails for men.
What’s beyond the yard?
White clouds clinging to vague rocks.
Now I’ve lived here—how many years—
Again and again, spring and winter pass.
Go tell families with silverware and cars
"What’s the use of all that noise and money?"
Gary Snyder in No Nature
My curiosity piqued, I went another step further to look up Han Shan in one of my Chinese poetry collections. Sure enough, there he was at the beginning of the collection. I found the difference in tone of this translation and Snyder’s interesting.
Man lives his life in a dust bowl,
Just like vermin in the middle of a pot:
All day going round and round,
Never getting out from the inside.
Blessedness is not our lot:
Only nettlesomeness without end.
Time is like a flowing river
One day, we wake up old men.
from Sunflower Splendor edited by Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo
I like both poems, but I’m not surprised that the latter interpretation tends to be more “objective.”
Interestingly, though, each of the eight-line poems ends with a two-line “moral,” something you seldom find in Japanese haikus, and, I must admit, a quality I have come to find particularly appealing. After a long teaching career, I find it more interesting to discover my own morals, if there are ones, rather than being told them by the author.