A Study On Tz'u Poem's Yijing And Its Reconstruction In Translation

China is a country known for its poetry. In traditional Chinese culture, poetry held such a high position that it was unrivaled by any other single talent, ability, or practical accomplishment which would bring prestige, affluence, and even political power. The great poets were admired for their talent in poetry and their masterpieces have survived their periods and remained alive on people's lips ever since they were written. Poetry composed a significant part of traditional education, which explains the phenomena that almost all the statesmen and officials composed poems, and our readers today are left with a legacy of such a huge anthology of poetry through all the ages. Among the classical Chinese poetry, ci poem (tz'u poem or lyric song), a second poetic form which developed during the Tang dynasty and prospered in the Sung dynasty, constitutes a high proportion and stands in the history of poetry as a rival of shi poem (regulated verse).Ci poem originated from the entertainment songs written for the courtesans or singers to perform at banquets or for the embellishment of a social occasion in the Tang dynasty. The entertainment quarter of the Tang capital Chang'an witnessed the popularization of melodies and musical instruments from Central Asia. First the workers of music studios (教坊乐工) composed new words in Chinese to fit these melodies, and later some members of the literati followed suit. Each ci poem had to be fitted into an existing tune pattern bearing such titles as Butterflies Adore Flowers (蝶恋花), Moon on the West River (西江月), Prelude to Water Melody (西江月), Silk-Washing Stream (浣溪沙), etc. Hence there was a correlation between ci poem and music. This explains why ci poem was described as a musical literary genre expressed with voice and accompanied by musical instruments (啭之歌喉,被诸管弦的音乐文学) (Hunag, 2001: Prelude). The first ci anthology by known authors, most of whom literati, the Hua-chien Chi (Among the Flowers) was compiled by Zhao Chongzuo in the tenth century.The most important reason why ci poem prospered in the Sung dynasty as a reaction to the shih tradition and developed into a full-fledged poetic genre mainly lies in the life attitude calling for freedom and individuality prevailing in Sung dynasty. Since Sung verses in the shih form are manifestly different from Tang poetry in that the former appeal more to human intellect than to emotions, the poet's individuality is often blurred by the form and wit. Besides, the shih form of Chinese poetry has a long established tradition of"expressing intention or aspiration"(yen chih言志), which limits its function as an outlet of private emotions and individuality. Or in other words, the shih form in the Sung dynasty has become more a vehicle for ideology than an expression of self, while the ci form is mainly composed to express the poet's delicate personal feelings, such as the sorrow of departure from beloved ones, the joy of reunion, the grief over the passing spring and the fading youth, the regret at disappearance of beautiful things, the melancholy over the coming of autumn and old age. Thus, it has formed the convention that shi poem is for expressing aspiration and ci poem is for delivering emotions (诗言志,词娱情).Ci poem is different from shih poem in form as well as in content. Shih poem has a fixed form with a clear-cut regular verse-line scheme (either five or seven characters to each line) and one of the fixed prosodic patterns. Unlike shih poem, ci poem is made up of irregular verse lines, ranging from two or three words (in rare cases, even only one word) to nine words or even ten to the line. With its form determined by a specific tune, ci poem often consists of an arranged mixture of lines of various lengths (hence this form is also called long-and-short lines长短句) and is featured by a fixed rhyming scheme and a regulated prosodic pattern.Yi-jing, which in a narrow sense, is a typical and unique aesthetic concept in Chinese art and literature, especially common as a poetic term, is used to refer to the very essence of poetry and what makes poetry untranslatable. Due to its intangible and indescribable qualities, Yi-jing is often compared to the flavor of flowers, most of which will be lost during the process of translation, or"the realm of the wordless and visionary"(Dante), which can be visualized in mind but not expressed in word. This dissertation does not try to give a clearly termed definition of it for fear that it might leave out more when trying to include everything essential. Since it is a concept developed through the history of changing poetic criticism, so the best way to define Yi-jing is to describe its critical artistic characteristics and let the readers figure out its essence by themselves.According to the poetic criticism in more than one thousand years'history, the artistic characteristics of Yi-jing can be summarized in seven aspects, namely, the mutual enhancement of the virtual and the real (虚实相生), the formation of Yi-jing beyond the imagery (境生象外), the unity of subjects and objects (物我齐一), the fusion of feeling and scenery (意与境浑), the naturalness and truthfulness (真实自然), the embodiment of commonness in uniqueness (因小见大), appealing for perception and interpretation (心领神会). Besides the above mentioned seven characteristics, there are another two major ones specific to the Yi-jing of ci poem: one is being subtle and exquisite (幽微要眇), the other is being implicit and open for interpretation (言长意远).The subtlety of ci poem is mainly contributed to its conventional double context. Since the members of literati took up composing ci poem, they used it as a means to express their personal and private feelings and emotions. Most of them had great ambition to advice the emperor on state administration or to lead the army to fight for the country, but few of them realized their dreams, and a large majority was filled with a mindful of grievances. To make it worse, the real feelings were not supposed to be revealed directly; therefore, they tend to express it in the guise of women's voice. Writing in women's voice, a common practice in classical Chinese poetry, became more pronounced in ci poem, partly because the female guise allowed men to express more tender emotions or personal feelings that might conflict with their official images as statesmen and administrators. Writing with borrowed voice also allowed poets to explore the experience of others, such as the female entertainers who sang and danced, the courtesans who provided intimate services for them, the beloved ladies who loved them, the lonely women waiting for their lover or husband, or the young beautiful girls who grieved over the fading flowers. At certain times it was conventional to use women's voice, and love poetry, to express a broad range of male desires, even political sentiments as well, such as frustration over lack of recognition for their accomplishments by their superiors. Chang Hui-yen (张惠言), who started the Ch'ang-chou School of Ci Criticism (常州词派) with his Anthology of Song-Lyrics (《词选》), justified allegorical interpretation by examples such as Wen T'ing-yun's ci poems. This proves that the poets who wrote ci poems for singing girls in order to take pleasure in the voice of a forlorn beauty could also turn impersonation into an allegory of their own experience in political life. Due to its allegorical interpretation or double context, ci poem is featured with subtlety.The exquisiteness of ci poem lies in both its content and form. As mentioned above, ci poems were originally composed for the singing girls to perform on the banquet, the content usually focused on women's sentiments, love, loneliness, melancholy, grief, etc. ? ?Though they may have double context or political reference, the surface layer of the theme is still about love or boudoir repining. The relatively narrow and feministic theme tints ci poem with a colour of delicacy. Besides, the fixed tune, the particular vocabulary, together with elaborating techniques help form the exquisiteness of ci poem. The fixed tune which prescribes the rhyming scheme and the flow of tonal movement and the elaborate composition techniques which intend to develop the theme in an artistic way refrain the poets from draining off their emotions, and the particular vocabulary inherited from those Tang poets with a delicate writing style like Li Ho, Li Shangyin helps enhance the exquisiteness of ci poem.The implicitness and openness to interpretation compose another feature of the Yi-jing of ci poem, which means that ci poem, though short in form, would awaken long reverberations in the reader's soul, as Su Shih once said,"The words stop, but the sense goes on to infinity"(言有尽而意无穷)."We might call the art one of eloquent or pregnant silence. What is said matters much less than what is left unsaid and only adumbrates what cannot be said. It springs from the same root as the subtle flair of leaving spaces beautifully empty in Chinese painting and Chinese gardening."(Qian, 2005: 287) The formation of implicitness involves three factors: the imagery, the symbolic vocabulary, and the allusions. The imagery refers to the images which are used to denote verbal expressions that evoke mental pictures or physical sensations. The multifacetedness of images and the readers'individualized perception of the images work together to constitute the semantic ambiguity of ci poem. Besides, the poets were supposed to use no diction which had no origin in the earlier poems (无一字无出处), and thus they gradually formed a relatively fixed vocabulary for ci poem composition. The highly repetitive vocabulary which could be traced back to a variety of poems either of earlier dynasties or of the same period might endow some of the words with a symbolic meaning. The plural possibilities of back reference and conventional symbolic meaning of certain vocabulary are another factor that caused the implicitness and openness to interpretation of ci poem. The third factor is the employment of allusion in ci poems. Many poems quote or allude to earlier poems or historical figures. This tradition became especially pronounced in the Southern Sung dynasty. As Julie Landau (1997: Introduction to Symbols and Allusions) says,"The literate in China were, however, for millennia, a homogeneous group. They studied the same classics, memorized the same poems, led similar lives. In this context, a few words could do anything from play cleverly with a well-known image to evoke another situation that, by contrast or comparison, might add a new dimension to the poem."The situations evoked or the context referred back to were another factor which contributed to the multiple layers of interpretation of ci poems. Chou Chi, another major theorist of the Ch'ang-chou School, valued ci poems more highly in proportion to their openness to the reader's subjective response."The reader of such a poem is like a man standing on the edge of a pool admiring the fish, who wonders whether it is a bream or a carp; or like someone exposed to a lightning flash in the dark, unable to tell whether it came from the east or the west."(读其篇者,临渊窥鱼,意为鲂鲤,中宵惊电,罔识东西。) (《介存斋论词杂著》).The Yi-jing of ci poem consists of two essential elements: sound and meaning. The sound effects are mainly achieved through tonal arrangement, rhyming scheme, style of the tune, internal rhythm, and phonetic rhetorical devices, the combination of which will produce some sound pattern that is suitable to convey a certain emotion or feeling, and thus help form the Yi-jing aimed by the poets. The beauty of meaning lies in both imagery and diction. The imagery is an indispensible part of Yi-jing in the sense that we can say Yi-jing is composed by imagery, but their relationship is far more complicated than that of a house and bricks because the Yi-jing produced by the combination of images extends far beyond the simple amount of the individual effect of separate images. Coincidentally, this fits well with one of the key concepts of Gestalt psychology originated in Germany in the 1920s, which states that the sense of whole is not the simple sum of all of its individual sensations; neither is it a separate sense which is isolated from its individual sensations. As Blocker once said, if you put a lemon beside an apple, the information they convey is no longer a lemon and an apple, but fruits. (Arnheim, 1998: 636) This implies that the images deliberately chosen and arranged will result in an interconversion and magically cause some chemical change among them, which will produce some indescribable but expected artistic effects—Yi-jing. Of course, the perception, selection, and combination of the images, to a great extent, depend on the composer's talent and sensitivity as a poet.The diction of ci poem is another critical factor related to meaning which contributes to the formation of Yi-jing. As Geoffrey Leech (1981: 9-23) has summarized,"meaning"in ? ?the wider sense may embrace conceptual sense, connotative sense, social sense, affective sense, reflected sense, collocative sense, and thematic sense. To ci poems, the conceptual sense, connotative sense, affective sense, reflected sense and thematic sense of the diction are especially important in expressing their Yi-jing.Due to the great differences between Chinese and English in language such as phonetics, semantics, and syntax, and in culture such as aesthetic psychology, imagery perception, symbolic reference, and historical allusion, the translation of classical ci poem is no easy task and the reconstruction of Yi-jing in the translation is an even more challenging job. However, no matter how hard it is, the translator has no way to retreat. The only choice is to produce a text in the target language as close to the original as possible. Because of the large gap between the two languages'phonetic system, it is near impossible to keep the original rhyming scheme and flow of tonal movement in the translation. If we try to use a similar prosodic pattern in English to correspond to the original one, we will have to sacrifice a part of the meaning which might be more crucial to the Yi-jing of the original text, and hence affect the reconstruction of the Yi-jing in the translation. After weighing the pros and cons, we had better choose to remain faithful to the meaning than to the prosodic form. Therefore, the free verse is recommended for translating the classical ci poem to avoid possible damage to the meaning, but at the same time the translator should try all means to retain the inner rhythm of the original text in the hope of conveying similar emotions to the target reader. It is also advisable to use other phonetic rhetorical devices in English to make up for the loss of sound effect produced by the original text.As for the translation of meaning, the most important part is the transference of imagery for images are the base which the Yi-jing of ci poem derives from. However, the rendering of images proves to be an arduous and complicated task due to several hard-to-remove obstacles. The largest one is caused by the cultural barriers, manifested in different perception of imagery, especially in its symbolic reference and historical allusion. The second is shaped by the ambiguity of imagery as a result of the multifacetedness and the fuzzy arrangement patterns of the images. The obstacle lies in the difficulty in exactly interpreting the images and pinning down the narrative perspective, temporal perspective, and spatial perspective. The main task of the translators'is to challenge the obstacles and reproduce the images employed in the original text to reconstruct its Yi-jing. Technically, the translator can tackle the images in ci poems by labeling them large image or small image. When dealing with the large image, the translator needs to pay more attention to the changing of perspective (point of view), the imitation of mood and tone, and the representation of double context in the layer of text. Chinese is a ideographic language emphasizing parataxis, while English is a phonographic language emphasizing hypotaxis; the former pays more attention to the coherence of the meaning, but the latter the cohesion of the form. Thanks to the elasticity of the syntax of Chinese, ci poem enjoys great freedom in expression by omitting the subject, tense, or linking words such as conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs. It can ambiguously express one thing but refer to another, or juxtapose two persons'activities or two events happening in two different places without even giving a clue of it. The ambiguity in expression is a major source of aesthetic experience, but it remains an obstacle in translation for English requires a clear statement of the subject, tense, and linking words; otherwise, the lines may sound awkward and imperceptible. When the ambiguities are clarified in the translation, the beauty brought by it also disappears.The small images in ci poems, according to their means of expression, can be classified into four major types, namely, the descriptive images, the metaphorical images, the symbolic images, and the allusive images. The descriptive images refer to those images that compose the current scenery without any metaphorical, symbolic, or allusive meaning. The metaphorical images refer to those images containing metaphors; the symbolic images are those with symbolic meaning, and the allusive images are those expressed by means of allusions. The specific rendering techniques vary according to different types of images. For most of the descriptive images, so long as the images are universally common in human life, the translator can use literal translation to transfer the images of the original into the target text without losing any semantic beauty. If the descriptive images contain something unique in the source culture, the translator should add annotation (footnotes or endnotes) to explain what it is and it would be better if with illustrations, which is helpful in introducing the source culture and adding exotic flavor to the target text.The metaphorical images fall into three categories: the metaphorical images comparing forms, the metaphorical images comparing qualities, and the metaphorical images containing cultural elements. Most of the first category needs no special treatment, but if the target language lacks the equivalent of the original vehicle, the translator has to decide whether to use some substitute in the target language to replace it, to add explanatory information, or attach an annotation or illustration to explain what the original vehicle looks like. Only if the original vehicle has a significant role in the original text, usually the translator would tend to use substitution. Substitution means finding another image which conveys a similar meaning and produces a similar effect on the readers of the target language as the original image does in the source language. The second category is similar to the first one. If the similarity between the vehicle and tenor is universally perceptible, the translator can use literal translation. Otherwise, the translator has to rely on explanatory information or annotations. As to those containing cultural elements, annotation is a necessity to reproduce the metaphorical image in the target text for the target reader needs to be equipped with everything which makes for facility of reading and intelligent appreciation.The symbolic image is a product of China's thousands'years of poetic tradition. An image may first appear in a poet's work by accident, but the image was so successfully created and fitted into the poetic context that some other poet borrowed its allegorical meaning in his own poem. When this process was repeated by the same or different poets of the same time or different dynasties, the allegorical meaning became the symbolic meaning of the image and the image itself became what Lotman termed"Cultural Code". Because of different poetic traditions and cultural perceptions, the chances that the English readers notice the symbolic images and identify their symbolic meaning are slight, so the translator has to provide supplementary information to make up for the cultural implications missed during the process of translation. Much similar to supplementation, annotation is sometimes supplied to explain the cultural significance of a more complex nature.Due to the vast discrepancies between the two languages and cultures, it is almost impossible to find any equivalent of the allusive images in the original text. Therefore, the translator has to find a way to make up for the aesthetic effects brought by the original context of the allusion and the ambiguity in meaning which have been lost in the process of translation. Literal translation, literal translation plus supplementation, and literal translation aided by annotation all can be good choices under suitable circumstances. Most of the allusive images composed by quotations can be rendered directly, whereas the choice of rendering techniques of those containing historical figures or events depends largely on their context. If the context has already provided adequate information to help the readers comprehend the allusive image, literal translation is the best choice. If the context fails to provide sufficient information but the implied meaning of the allusive image is simple and easy to understand, literal translation plus supplementation can be a good choice. If the allusive image is ambiguous in meaning or the implied meaning is too complicated to decode and there is not enough information to help the readers figure out the meaning, the translator can adopt literal translation aided by annotation.Although the choice of translation strategy can be greatly influenced by the type and status of the original text, the skopos (purpose) of translation, the target readers, the comparative position of the original culture to the target culture, and the translator himself (herself) and some other elements, the method based on literal translation, either supplemented by explanation or aided by annotation, is strongly recommended when there is no equivalent in the target language to correspond to the one in the original text for the following reasons. First, it encourages the communication between two widely different cultures. Second, it reproduces the inherent cultural meaning and"das Bedeutende"(意蕴) of the original. Third, it increases the exotic flavor of the target text, which might result in arousing the target readers'interest.During the process of translation, the translator has to take another issue into consideration, which is the equivalence of novelty of images. Even if the original images are"faithfully"rendered into the target text, the effect they exert on the original readers can be quite different from that on the target readers due to the discrepancy in novelty of the images in two different languages and cultures. To prevent the possible loss of aesthetic effects, the translator should retain the defamiliarization devices in the original text or invent new ones to keep the sense of novelty of the original ones if the expressions already exist in the second language or are a part of the accustomed or clichéd expressions.The reconstruction effects of Yi-jing in the translation of ci poems need to be testified and evaluated, so a questionnaire including most fundamental but critical questions based on the aesthetic features and composition of ci poem's Yi-jing is designed to check the target readers'response to the translation of the original ci poems, which proves to be an effective and reliable device. It shows that the contemporary English readers tend to favour the classical Chinese ci poem being rendered into free verse English poem with its tune title translated in meaning and those which can lively reflect the internal rhythm, vividly transfer the images, and faithfully convey the connotative meanings of the dictions of the original ci poems are considered successful translations. The English readers who answered the questionnaire also show a preference on annotated translation when there is no equivalent in English.This is a mere tentative study on the reconstruction of the Yi-jing of ci poem in translation conducted in the period of my doctoral research, and during this process I have noticed some aspects of this topic such as the reproduction of sound effect, the significance of the specification of tense, case, number, person related to the narrative perspective, temporal perspective, and spatial perspective, the combination patterns of images, and the equivalence of novelty of images need to be further studied, which are only mentioned or briefly discussed in this dissertation for time pressure and which will be the major directions of my future study. What I dream about is to discover a best way to reconstruct the Yi-jing of ci poem in translation and present its charm to the target readers as it does to the original ones, though it might for a long time remains a dream.