biography at the bottom of the page and the translation reads that "His biography is unknown. He is very obscure". And then it says, "but the message of the poem is that if you find yourself in times of trouble and great adversity, if you keep hope and faith, you will have a happy life". So it reads like a complicated fortune cookie and is quite uplifting. It got me interested in translation to see how translators deal with the poem. Originals, when translated, become whole new poems and if another translator in another language translated the translations you'd get another view. You'd never have to write again. (Laugh). Gary: Chinese poetry is very interesting because it doesn't have any middle ground. It's either lugubrious, mournful, melancholic or up beat socialist realism. There isn't that complex middle-range of psychology in Chinese poetry. When I was translating a book with George Leong, George would always bring me the most depressing melancholic poems to translate, and I said, "George you gotta give me something else, I can't bear all of this stuff", so he started pulling out a few of the more political pieces from these two poets we were translating. Barry: With my poem one of the mysteries is that it's called "Bushed" which to me is a very Canadian condition: it's a colloquial expression. The Chinese translation reads it as, "lost along the way." Gary: If you called it "Cabin Fever" I wonder what they'd have done. (laugh) Ah "diseases of the house!" (laugh). Don: As you walked around the Terra Cotta Army did you get these personalities very quickly from looking at them? Each one of these poems has a very distinct human personality inside of it. Was that a hard thing to evolve? Gary: No. In fact we went into this quonset hut and we weren't allowed to get down amongst the figures at all. We had to stay about 30 to 50 feet away from them. And I was hosting all these writers and being scurried along. I was stunned by the visual impact of seeing the whole thing laid out there with an arm occasionally emerging from the clay or a head without all the earth scraped from around it. Some parts of it looked like the pictures we've seen of No Man's Land or Vimy Ridge. Extremely powerful, but the impact was a sort of generalized impact. It was only two years later when I realized that none of my fellow writers had nabbed the subject. I thought, I'm going to see what I can do and I found a book of photos of these figures that had been published in China as a catalogue; Methuen had done a version of it in the U.K. So I bought that and I started looking at that and that's when the figures began to emerge for me, out of the energy initially of seeing them, but also out of the specific stimuli of the photos.