The difficulty (and necessity) of translation is concisely described in
Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, a close reading of different
translations of a single poem from the Tang Dynasty--from a
transliteration to Kenneth Rexroth's loose interpretation. As Octavio
Paz writes in the afterword, "Eliot Weinberger's commentary on the
successive translations of Wang Wei's little poem illustrates, with
succinct clarity, not only the evolution of the art of translation in
the modern period but at the same time the changes in poetic
sensibility."