A poem by the contemporary Mongolian scholar-poet Zava Damdin Rinpoche (b. 1976) with translator’s notes, glossary, and a personal note on subjectivity.

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TAKING BEARINGS FROM THE CENTRE

(English Translation)

From somewhere,
as though travelling
towards somewhere else,
yet never quite arriving
anywhere at all.

As though moving without pause
from somewhere
towards somewhere else,
as though visiting somewhere,
as though settling there,
yet never truly settling anywhere.

Nowhere,
not even for a moment,
does one remain fixed.

From one world-pasture,
as though crossing into another,
yet no world-pasture
is ever truly crossed into.

Every crossing
from one world-pasture to another
is merely appearance.

As though one person
were meeting another,
yet in the deepest truth
no one truly meets.

What we call a person
has no fixed self,
like a dream.

Somewhere,
someone thinks of someone,
yet that someone cannot be caught,
like a mirage.

Though someone
embraces another,
they cannot be grasped,
like a memory.

Somewhere, someone
is seeing someone off, and waiting.
Yet there is no single time,
nor many separate times.

Time itself
is only a fleeting orientation.

14.12.2024

Zava Damdin Rinpoche

Washington, DC, Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Library

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Translated by C.Pleteshner
English interpretation 4.06.2026 from the original Mongolian 14.12.2024

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ТӨВИЙН БАРИМЖАА

(Original Mongolian)

Хаа нэгэн газраас

Хаа нэгэн газар лугаа одох мэт авч 

Хаа нэгэн газар үнэхээр үл хүрэх

Хаа нэгнээс хаа нэгэн лүгээ завсар үгүй одох мэт

Хаа нэгэн газар зочлоод

Хаа нэгэн газар суух мэт авч 

Хаа нэгэн газар үнэхээр үл суух

Хаа ч нэгэн агшин дор батад орших үгүй

Хаа нэгэн орчлоос 

Хаа нэгэн орчил лугаа шилжих мэт авч 

Хаа нэгэн орчил дор үнэхээр үл шилжих

Хаа ч нэгэн орчил дор шилжихүй инү үзэгдэл төдий 

Хэн нэгэн лүгээ  

Хэн нэгэн бээр учрах мэт авч 

Хэн нэгэн бээр бодит үнэмлэхүй дор үл учрах

Хэн нэгэн хэмээх инү би үгүй болоод зүүдэн мэт

Хэн нэгэн хаа нэгтээ 

Хэн нэгний тухай бодох авч

Хэн нэгэн дор зэргэлээ адил үл баригдах буюу

Хэн нэгэн хэн нэгэн лүгээ тэврэвч дурсамж адил бодит бус 

Хаа нэгтээ хэн нэгэн

Хэн нэгнийг үдэхүй ба хүлээхүй бөгөөтөл

Нэгэн цаг үгүй болоод олон цаг бас үгүй

Цаг хугацаа ану түр зуурын баримжаа төдий 

14.12.2024

Зава Дамдин ринбүчи

Вашингтон ДС, Томас Жефферсоны номын сангийн их тэнхим

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NOTES

Zava Damdin’s original doha in Mongolian moves in a continuous line-by-line flow, with repeated phrases such as “somewhere,” “someone,” and “world-pasture” creating a restless movement of thought. For the English translation, I have arranged the poem into short sense-units, or stanza-like clusters, so that each turn of perception can be felt more clearly: going without arriving, sitting without abiding, meeting without truly meeting, and waiting within a time that is itself only provisional.

This choice is shaped by my predisposition towards teaching, learning and facilitating inter-cutural understanding: I tend to look for ways of making a translated poem’s inner logic visible without flattening its mystery. The result is not meant to impose a new structure, but to make its movement easier to follow in English.

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Translating Four Ways

A resulting translation often reflects the way of knowing through which the translator has approached the task. In translation studies, this is sometimes discussed through epistemic translation: the idea that translation does not simply move words between languages, but also carries, negotiates, and sometimes reshapes forms of knowledge (Bennett and Neves 2024).

With this poem, I first tried a close, textually restrained Mongolian-to-English version. This kept the repeated Mongolian pattern of “somewhere,” “someone,” “world,” “meeting,” and “time” as directly as possible, before later allowing “world-pasture” to carry more of the poem’s Mongolian nomadic texture. The benefit of that approach seemed to be that it preserved the poem’s formal restlessness: its refusal to settle into a fixed person, place, direction, or time. This is an important consideration because Mongolian-to-English translation often has to carry not only dictionary meaning, but also culturally loaded expression and patterned phrasing; if these are smoothed away too quickly, the English may become clearer but less “Mongolian” in feel (cf. Wang and He 2014).

I then tried a more explicitly Buddhist epistemological version. This drew ideas such as appearance, non-self, dream-like existence, non-graspability, and the provisional nature of time closer to the reading surface. That version clarified the philosophical logic of the doha, but it also risked making the poem sound more like doctrinal explanation than poetry. Its strength was precision; its weakness was that it slightly reduced the poem’s “atmosphere”.

Next, I tried a culturally interpretive version grounded in Mongolian nomadic ways of orienting: travelling, stopping, settling, crossing, open steppe, wide sky, and taking one’s bearings. That version allowed the poem to breathe in English as a Mongolian poem. It carried the Buddhist insight quietly through movement, distance, relation, impermanence, and orientation. This felt important because Mongolian cultural expression often requires the translator to carry implied worldview and cultural setting, not only direct lexical meaning (cf. Byambasaikhan and Tsedenbazar 2024).

Finally, I arrived at a fourth version, which is the one I chose to further refine. The above version is a hybrid. I hope it has kept some of the culturally interpretive atmosphere of the third version — especially the open steppe, wide sky, and taking one’s bearings — yet also restores more of the first version’s repeated “somewhere,” “someone,” and “turning world.” That restoration was important. It preserved the original doha’s restlessness and groundlessness.

The above version seemed strongest because, from my perspective, it preserves the original’s instability of movement and articulation as well as giving nativist and non-nativist readers in the English language enough space to feel the poem as lived experience.

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Translator Subjectivity

The process of translating this particular doha did not feel entirely steady. Its own subject — the instability of appearances, the continual appearance and then dissolution of people, places, meetings, and time — seemed to enter the act of translation itself. I found that I could not hold the whole doha in view for long. The translation had to be approached through intervals, with my attention repeatedly loosening and returning in small movements: a phrase, a cluster, an image. This felt less like a failure of concentration, than a kind of participation in the doha’s groundlessness and movement itself.

These kinds of self-aware process notes fit recent work on translator visibility and translator subjectivity, where the translator is understood not as a neutral conduit, but as an active, perceiving participant in the translation process itself (cf. Cercel 2026).

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GLOSSARY

The following brief notes clarify for non-expert readers a few Mongolian terms and images that shape the poem’s sense of movement, appearance, and orientation.

1. “Taking Bearings from the Centre” (Төвийн баримжаа, töviin barimjaa) — the phrase suggests taking one’s bearings from a centre: a point of reference, or inward alignment. The “centre” is not necessarily a fixed place, but a way of orienting oneself amid movement and uncertainty.
2. “World-pasture” (орчил, orchil) — is an interpretive rendering of orchil, usually “turning world,” “realm,” or “conditioned world.” I use “world-pasture” here to let the Buddhist sense of a cyclic world meet a Mongolian nomadic imagination of land, movement, grazing, and temporary dwelling. It should not be read as a fixed place, but as a lived field of experience through which beings move.
3. “Merely appearance” (үзэгдэл төдий, üzegdel tödii) — something that appears to one’s experience, but that cannot be held as fixed, permanent, or ultimately solid.
4. “The deepest truth” (бодит үнэмлэхүй, bodit ünemlekhüi) — a truth seen beyond ordinary surface appearances. It points to the Buddhist distinction between how things seem and how they are ultimately understood.
5. “No fixed self” (би үгүй, bi ügüi) — not lacking personality or worth, but lacking a fixed, independent self. In Buddhist thought, persons appear and function, but cannot be found as permanent, definitive, separate entities.
6. “Like a dream” (зүүдэн мэт, züüden met) — vivid and felt, yet not fixed or solid. The image suggests that experience appears clearly, but like a dream, still unstable and hard to grasp.
7. “Mirage” (зэргэлээ адил, zergellee adil) — like a shimmering mirage: visible, suggestive, and compelling, but again impossible to grasp.
8. “Passing orientation” (түр зуурын баримжаа, tür zuuryn barimjaa) — a passing way of taking one’s bearings. Here, even time is treated not as an absolute container, but as a provisional way of locating experience.

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Translation of Buddhist poetry (doha) is always an interpretation into another culture. Any errors in this regard are entirely my own, and for these I humbly apologise.

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FURTHER READING

Bennett, Karen, and Maria Neves. “(Inter-) Epistemic Translation: A New Paradigm?” Translation Matters 6, no. 2 (2024): 1–17.

Byambasaikhan, N., and E. Tsedenbazar. “Translating English Articles from Mongolian: A Case Study of Natsagdorj’s Shuvuun Saaral.” International Journal of Studies in Foreign Language Education 2, no. 2 (2024).

Cercel, Larisa. “Towards a Translator Studies with Enhanced Translator Visibility.” Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, 2026.

Wang, Jinjin, and Lin He. “An Analysis of Mongolian Culture-Loaded Words and Their Translation Strategies.” Higher Education Studies 4, no. 3 (2014): 91–96.