? 柴
空 ? 不 ? ?,
但 聞 ? 語 響.
返 景 ? 深 林,
復(fù) 照 青 苔 上
The poem is by Wang Wei (c. 700–761), known in his lifetime as a wealthy Buddhist painter and calligrapher, and to later generations as a master poet in an age of masters, the Tang Dynasty. The quatrain is from a series of twenty poems on various sights near the Wang (no relation) River. The poems were written as part of a massive horizontal landscape scroll, a genre he invented. The painting was copied (translated) for centuries. The original is lost, and the earliest surviving copy comes from the 17th century: Wang’s landscape after 900 years of transformation.

In classical Chinese, each character (ideogram) represents a word of a single syllable. Few of the characters are, as is commonly thought, entirely representational. But some of the basic vocabulary is indeed pictographic, and with those few hundred characters one can play the game of pretending to read Chinese. Reading the poem left to right, top to bottom, the second character in line 1 is apparently a mountain; the last character in the same line a person — both are stylizations that evolved from more literal representations. Character 4 in line 1 was a favorite of Ezra Pound’s: what he interpreted as an eye on legs; that is, the eye in motion, to see. Character 5 in line 3 is two trees, forest. Spatial relationships are concretely portrayed in character 3 of line 3, to enter, and character 5 of line 4, above or on (top of).

More typical of Chinese is character 2 of line 4, to shine, which contains an image of the sun in the upper left and of fire at the bottom, as well as a purely phonetic element — key to the word’s pronunciation — in the upper right. Most of the other characters have no pictorial content useful for decipherment.