In The Emptiness of Wang Wei, I transduced Wang’s famous eighth century  poem titled, in English, Deer Park , Deer Enclosure or Deer Fence.  “Transduction”  is my term for a process that reworks a poem’s existing translations (literal or poetic) into a new poem.  It seems most often a strategy applied to ancient Chinese poems.  Ezra Pound in his Cathy Poems was the first to take this approach.  Octavio Paz asserts that despite not knowing any Chinese, Pound created “the modem tradition of classical Chinese poetry in the poetic conscience of the West”. [1]

In my previous post I said  transduction “is an attempt to transform a distant literary energy to a local one”.  Now I might compare it to 3-D printing a mask of an ancestor’s face using the DNA from a lock of hair found in a piece of jewelry.