On The Creative Essence Of Literary Translation

During the long history of translation practice, people have come to realize that translation is a rather complicated activity, and despite of the fact that it is outwardly language transformation, it involves a variety of working elements, the relationship among which is beyond simple expression. What is encouraging, however, is that countless practice has revealed to the full its nature and feature, and rich translation theories at home and abroad have kept records of peoples'recognition through out the history.Translation is difficult, but the difficulties in literary translation culminate.Literary translation is, among all types of translation, of unique characteristic for its inseparable connection with literary creation. Literature originates from the appreciation of beauty, and it exists and develops for the spiritual needs of human aesthetic consciousness. Writers portray social life through imagination instead of imitation, and literary depiction always means more than real life. This special connection between literature and life determines the basic essence and main features of literature. Social life is the only resource of literary creation, and writers can never produce impressive works unless they have got enough social experiences; while in literary translation, translators work to represent the feelings and thoughts in the original texts, which can hardly be achieved by simple language transformation. The ancient Chinese poet Jia Dao had already noticed the hardness in deciding whether to use"push"or"knock"in his lines, let alone the translator's decision in transformed languages. Hard as the work is, literary translation has been proved possible and can be done well.Since translators need first to read the original texts, then to feel and comprehend them, and finally to give faithful representations of them, it is safe to say translators are actually writing in target languages while they are doing literary translation.As a matter of fact, many translators have talked about their points of view concerning literary translation, including the concepts involving the relationship between...