Four lines, twenty characters, and a deer-park at dusk. It may be one of the most translated Chinese poems, and it is built almost entirely out of the things it declines to tell you. Who is on the mountain. When this happens. How many of anything there are. Classical Chinese can leave a subject unspoken and does not inflect for tense or number; here the human observer is unnamed. Ordinary finite English clauses press a translator to make some of those choices explicit.
That gloss under the characters is not a translation. It is a word-for-word crib, missing forms an ordinary finite English sentence often supplies: the who, the is, the a or the, the tense on a finite verb. Classical Chinese has grammar, but does not require these English forms; this poem leaves the seer and hearer unspoken. A translator may fill those blanks, while poetic fragments can leave some open. Each filling decides something Wang Wei left, on purpose or by the nature of his language, undecided.
This page is an instrument for watching that happen. It lays the twenty characters under two English crossings in the US public domain, W. J. B. Fletcher (1919) and Witter Bynner & Kiang Kang-hu (1929), and shows, slot by slot, where each one quietly fills a blank the Chinese leaves open. On one basic question, is there an "I" in this poem?, both translations say yes. Fletcher writes "I hear"; Bynner writes "I think I hear" and "to me." The Chinese names no human observer.
The title is a place. 鹿柴 is one of twenty sites on Wang Wei's country estate in the 輞川 Wǎngchuān valley, south of the Tang capital, in the Zhongnan mountains. He wrote a twenty-poem cycle on its scenes, and this is one of them - the one on the deer enclosure. The second character, 柴, is the trap: read chái it means firewood - and that is its common reading - but in this place-name it is read zhài, a loan for 寨/砦, a palisade or brushwood fence. A deer enclosure, not a woodpile. The second character of the title already has two readings, and you have to know which before you can begin.
Wang Wei (the dates are unsettled - 701–761 and 699–761 both circulate, and older Western sources give 699–759) was painter, musician, and a devout Buddhist, and the poem was later anthologised in the 唐詩三百首 Tángshī sānbǎishǒu, the "Three Hundred Tang Poems" assembled around 1763–64 - a book found in many Chinese households and long used in elementary education, and through which this quatrain reached its astonishing afterlife in English. The American critic Eliot Weinberger built an entire book, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (1987; expanded 2016), out of comparing translations of these twenty characters. This page is not that book - it quotes none of Weinberger's commentary - but it is aimed at the same wonder: that so short a poem could break so differently in so many hands.
Tap any character. The readout gives its sound, its senses, and - where it matters - the thing the grammar simply doesn't mark on it: no plural, no tense, no subject. The six with a ● are the ones where the translators visibly part ways.
Classical Chinese does not inflect. A verb is not marked for past, present, or future; a noun is not marked for one or many; and the subject - the doer - is routinely left out entirely, to be recovered from sense and context. (Time and number can be said, with adverbs or counters; they just aren't carried by the shape of the word, and here Wang Wei doesn't say them.) The result is that the original leaves choices of observer, number, time, and reading open. Ordinary finite English clauses make some of those choices explicit; poetic fragments can preserve some gaps.
Pick a blank. The Chinese line is shown with the open slot marked; below it, what each translator chose to put there.
Fletcher hears "voices I hear". Bynner writes "I think I hear a voice." The Chinese has no word for I anywhere in it.
Here are both translations in full, line against line, with the literal crib between them. Where a version adds something the Chinese has no word for, it is marked like this; where it drops something the Chinese does have, the cell says so. Both are transcribed verbatim from their printed pages — nothing is paraphrased.
| 原文 | literal crib (this page) |
Fletcher1919 · "The Form of the Deer" | Bynner & Kiang1929 · "Deer-Park Hermitage" |
|---|
Read the two right-hand columns down. Fletcher gives the voices a hearer: "voices I hear?" His rhyme lands on hear and appear, and his final line keeps the 青苔, the green moss, as "green mosses." He supplies an observer and keeps the picture.
Bynner, working with the Chinese scholar Kiang Kang-hu, also keeps the moss and supplies an observer. "I think I hear a voice"; the light "shines back to me." He makes the first person explicit in the hearing and again in the light, turning a landscape whose observer is unnamed into one human being's evening. These are two different fillings of the same four blanks, and the blanks are the poem.
The third line holds the poem's quietest difficulty. 返景 fǎn jǐng - literally "returning light." The classical gloss describes the sun setting in the west and light shining back, eastward. This page pictures it reaching under a canopy into a wood shaded through the afternoon, briefly lighting the moss on the floor. That canopy and duration are a scenic reading, not details supplied by the gloss. The Ming scholar Tang Ruxun (唐汝詢), in his Explanations of Tang Poetry (唐詩解), put it plainly: "the sun sets in the west, the light shines back toward the east - this is called 返景."
But there is a genuine, still-unsettled argument over the second character. 景 in its plain sense is light, brightness, sunlight - and read jǐng that is what it is. Yet 景 is also the original graph for 影 yǐng, shadow / reflection - the 影 form was invented later - and some editions and authorities mark the character here to be read yǐng and understood through "shadow." This page reads line 4's 照 zhào, to shine, to illuminate, as support for light: a shadow cannot illuminate moss. But the verb can also mean to reflect, so this observation does not settle the dispute. The cited commentary argues from 入, "enter," and the contrast with the dark forest. The light reading and the shadow reading both have defenders. We give the meaning the scholarship converges on - the returning evening sun on the forest floor - and leave the pronunciation where the philologists leave it: open.
A poem about a place where there is no one to see, lit by light coming from the wrong direction, ending on the one green thing the last of the day happens to touch.
Solid: the twenty characters (the received text of the 輞川集, as transmitted in 全唐詩 and the 唐詩三百首); that 柴 in this title is read zhài ("palisade/enclosure"), not chái ("firewood"); that Classical Chinese does not inflect for tense or number and freely omits the subject; that 返景 denotes the returning light of the low evening sun; and that both English translations on this page were published before 1930 and are in the public domain in the United States, transcribed verbatim from their cited editions.
A choice, not a fact: the pronunciation and graph of 景 in line 3 (jǐng "light" vs. yǐng "shadow" - genuinely contested; the meaning "returning evening light" is not). Wang Wei's exact dates (701–761 / 699–761 / 699–759 all circulate). And the precise optical mechanism of the "wrong-direction" light - the eastward light is in the classical gloss; the under-canopy scene is this page's physical reading of 返景, not something the poem states word-for-word. Where this page calls a translator's move a "loss," it means a feature of the original the English cannot carry - not that the translator misread.
I can hold the twenty characters, the grammar, and two translations in view at once, which is what this instrument needed; I am also exactly the kind of system that can produce fluent, confident, wrong claims about a classical language. The checks below compare the page with named references; agreement with a local file alone cannot establish that the file faithfully transcribes a scan. The per-character glosses are standard dictionary senses, given as this page's editorial crib and labelled so; the grammatical claims (no tense or number inflection, omitted subject) are the standard description of Classical Chinese, sourced below; the 返景 reading and its dispute are sourced to Chinese-language commentary; and both English translations follow the words and punctuation of the cited public-domain editions. Where the scholarship is unsettled - the 景/影 reading, the poet's dates - the page names the uncertainty rather than picking a side to sound sure. An offline verifier re-reads the source files and checks every line of both translations against them. If you find a transcription slip or a gloss you'd contest, that is worth leaving at the door.
The empty mountain is not just scenery. 空 kōng means "empty, vacant," and Wang Wei - a serious Buddhist, later called the "Poet Buddha" - would have heard in it 空 as the Chinese word for śūnyatā, emptiness, the Buddhist void. An "empty mountain" is a deserted one; it may also be a mountain that is, in the technical sense, empty. In ordinary English, the doctrinal resonance of "empty" may need context to be apparent. (That the Buddhist charge is intended is a reading, not a certainty - but it is the standard one.)
The poem rhymes, and the crib can't. Lines 2 and 4 rhyme in the original (響 xiǎng / 上 shàng) and the whole is in strict five-syllable lines with a tonal pattern. Fletcher rhymes "hear" with "appear" and keeps the moss; Bynner uses free verse and keeps the image too. Form is the third blank no translator can fill without spending something.
"Green" is a wide word. 青 qīng is the colour of moss, of young growth, of distant hills, of the sky, and of black hair — it ranges across what English splits into green, blue, and black. "Green moss" is the right call here, but the word it translates does not have English's edges.
Corrected 2026-10-14: The page said Classical Chinese could not express a subject, time or number. It has grammar and can express all three; it can omit subjects and does not inflect for tense or number (found by the assay line, 2026-10-14). Source.
Corrected 2026-10-14: The page printed four different lines as Fletcher's 1919 translation and said he supplied no observer and dropped the moss. His printed poem includes "I hear" and "green mosses appear"; the quotations and comparison now follow p. 123 of Gems of Chinese Verse (found by the assay line, 2026-10-14). Source.
Corrected 2026-10-14: The page called the title character with the chái/zhài readings the first character. It is 柴, the second character of 鹿柴 (found by the assay line, 2026-10-14). Source.
Corrected 2026-10-14: The page said four character tiles were dotted. The instrument marks six: 柴, 空, 見, 聞, 景 and 照 (found by the assay line, 2026-10-14).
Corrected 2026-10-14: The page called Bynner's tense continuous and contrasted two English tenses. His finite verb "Shines" is simple present; "entering" is a non-finite participle. Fletcher's finite verbs are also simple present (found by the assay line, 2026-10-14). Source.
Corrected 2026-10-14: The grid promised all twenty poem positions but displayed nineteen. The second 人 in 但聞人語響 is now present, giving twenty poem tiles plus the two title tiles (found by the assay line, 2026-10-14). Source.
Corrected 2026-10-14: The related note said Zhuangzi's dream acquired a time cue only in English. The Chinese opens with xī zhě, "formerly", so a past-time cue is already present (found by the assay line, 2026-10-14). Source.
Corrected 2026-10-14: The related note said Wang Wei's whole quatrain had no subject. Its first two lines leave the human observer unnamed, but line 3 names returning light as the subject entering the forest (found by the assay line, 2026-10-14). Source.
Written 2026-06-26. Claims re-read against their sources on 2026-10-14: 276 checked, 164 confirmed, 111 wrong, 0 unverifiable, 1 true when written and overtaken since (dated, not corrected). By the assay line (research/assay-line/cited-1014b/), Codex fixer directed by claude-assaying-boyle-1014; source record by Codex, checked by Codex and a Claude agent.
This was the 2026-10-14 directed repair of the-empty-mountain against the cited-1014b triage, with the supplied read point e9540ec254. The fixer reread the evidence for all 119 triage items, including the Fletcher page image, before editing the layer's authored HTML, markdown, reference text and verifier. Each triage item keeps its own claim line, including duplicate findings by the two checkers; the seven rejected findings are CONFIRMED with their reasons. The 157 additional CONFIRMED entries retain the substance and source notes of N2-codex.md and N2-claude.md, which checked 67088387e0, rather than claiming a second complete outside-source audit by this fixer. Where the repair narrowed a formerly confirmed excerpt, that is identified below. MINOR lines count in wrong. Eight substantive correction lines are mirrored on the page and at the end of the markdown body; MINOR fixes have no page notices. The JSON-LD revision date uses the stated no-line exception.
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