Gary Snyder’s translation of Han-shan’s Cold Mountain Poems, and more generally of Eastern thinking, dismantles any logic of domination. In this essay, the author first shows how Snyder’s translation of Han-shan embodies a cross-cultural “journey” beyond the limits of Saidean “traveling theory.” Then, drawing from Snyder’s interviews, criticism, and poetry, and particularly from passages in Cold Mountain Poems, the author looks at the poet’s central concern — the question of the other — as a “geocentric” praxis of “translating the other.” Here he compares the disequilibrium and hybridity of Snyder’s “wildness” with that of Bhabha’s “third space” in the context of cultural translation. For Snyder, “translation of the other” may best be referred to as a “cultural translation of nature.”
