Poetry is that which is worth translating. For example, this four-line poem, 1200 years old: a moun­tain, a forest, the setting sun illuminating a patch of moss. It is a scrap of literary Chinese, no longer spoken as its writer spoke it. It is a thing, forever itself, inseparable from its lan­guage. And yet something about it has caused it to lead a nomadic life: insinuating itself in the minds of readers, demanding understanding. (but on the reader's own terms), provoking thought, sometimes compelling writing in other languages. Great poetry lives in a state of perpetual transformation, per­petual translation: the poem dies when it has no place to go. The transformations that take shape in print, that take the formal name of "translation, n become their own beings, set out on their own wanderings. Some live long, and some don't: What kind of creatures are they? What happens when a poem, once Chinese and still Chinese, becomes a piece of English, Spanish, French poetry? Here are 19 incarnations of a small poem by Wang Wei (c. 100-161), who was 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 River (no relation). The poems were written as par of a mas­sive horizontal landscape scroll, a genre invented by Wang. The painting was copied (translated) for centuries. The original is lost; and the earliest surviving copy comes from the 11th century: Wang's landscape after 1000 years of transformation.