| The form of a poem usually is special enough to attract readers as well as topresent a tough question in front of translators. Though other literatures also haveform and meaning interaction, it is in the poem that the feature is more outstanding,and the relationship between the two factors is even closer. The same is even moretrue to the Tang poem, which is know as the jewel on the crown for Chineseliterature. Tang poem has a long history, and the development of Chinese literaturenever seems to bury it underground, but has witnessed its passing down fromgeneration to generation. Many Tang poems are still remembered and chanted bymodern Chinese, and people even have fun from writing their own Tang poems. Thereason for its lasting popularity lies not only in its beautiful meaning or image, butalso in its parallel structures formed by sound, semantic, or syntactic elements.Hence, how to translate Tang poems has always caused heated discussions amongtranslators and researchers, in terms of preserving the form or not. Professor LuShuxiang believes to translate poem with poetic form will cause various problems.He represents the school that advocates translating poems with literature styles otherthan poetry. Though the idea makes sense, there are other factors make it lessconvincing, for example if people think about what makes Tang poem unique andbeautiful, mostly they would come up with rhymes, which is actually one of theparallel structures demonstrated in Tang poem. Also, if we trace back to the writingformat for Tang poems, there are many set rules for poets to follow. All these rulescontribute to the formation of regulate verse, and with these rules also come thepoetic lines and phrases of great literature value. Therefore, form makes Tang poemspecial, and it also motivates poets to generate harmonious sound and wordstructures in poems.In face of the special form of Tang poems, how to translate it properly in itsEnglish version definitely becomes a question worthy studying. The thesis makesthis question a motivation, and shall hereon study the formal characteristics of the Tang poem, justify the necessity and feasibility of presenting formal features inEnglish version, and search for appropriate translation strategies to fit formalfeatures of Tang poems in the English translations. To elaborate on this issue, thethesis intends to have six chapters and devotes each to one sub-topic.In the introduction part, the present situation of Tang poem translation studieswill be discussed, also the present purpose for translating Tang poem to Englishliterature will also be re-interpreted. After that, it shall state clear the problems withTang poem translation and the issues to be solved in the thesis. In this part, the thesisshall argue that to translate Tang poem into a different literary style is trying to erasethe characteristics of this type of poem. Therefore it is necessary to keep the formalfeature of it and turn this uniqueness into its advantage. The reason why to be uniqueis so important lies in the changed target of translating Chinese classics. In the oldtime, translating serves its purpose of bring the east to the west, namely to let thewestern people have a general sense of the literature in China. However, asglobalization goes further, the mission of classic literature translation turns frompopularization to competition. And to become the focus in a competition, there isnothing better than being unique. However, the current problem with poemtranslation is that many translators tend to focus more on the content and less on theform. The translation method erases the formal features for the sake of preservingcontent information, and it also goes against the proposed target of maintainingpoetic features of Tang poems. Therefore, the thesis here shall regard content-basedtranslation as a problematic issue in Tang poem translation. To deal with the problem,in the chapters following, the thesis shall present the necessity and feasibility oftranslating Tang poems under the guidance of parallelism. The thesis shall provideparallelism as the guiding concept for both poetic structuring and for translationpractice and definition of the concept will be given in the second chapter. Also,analysis of translated poems will be conducted, and the poems used in the analysisare selected from creditable sources, which are translations by the famous translatorsand poets.The second chapter will study on the origin of parallelism, as well as to discuss the content of this principle and how to apply the principle to Tang poem translationstudies. This principle has been the subject of study dating from ancient times. Butunder different literary system, the terms might vary. For example, in the ancientGreece, Aristotle proposed the formal study of poems and initiated the proposal oftreating repetition as the rhetoric for poem writing. This idea has been inherited bydifferent schools, and formalism is the most prominent one. Therefore, in the early20thcentury, Jakoson proposed his poetic function based on equivalence, whichserves as the major formal structure in poems. He goes even further to prove thatequivalence is the primary structure of poem written in most Indo-Europeanlanguages, as well as creator of aesthetic function in this literary genre. His theory islater taken by Lotman, who pushed the theory further in discussion of Russianpoems. Even in China the idea similar to parallelism is not strange, for ZhuGuangqian had detailed study of rhyme and rhythm in poems and his study not onlycaught people’s attention, but also influenced translators’ practice. And the mostrecent influential research conducted by Wang Li shows that he sensed thesimilarities and differences between east and west understanding of parallelismstructure and their representations in poems. In his book, Wang Li thoughcontributed large part to the discussion of Chinese poems, actually made acomparison between parallelism structures between Chinese and English poems. It isin Wang Li’s book that the thesis finds the ground for building connection betweeneast and west poetic structures. Hence, the thesis tends to define parallelism as thesimilarity or contrast between the poetry elements which are placed at the similarposition on the poetic lines. The similarity or contrast could be presented throughsound, word meaning and even grammatical structures. Also in this chapter, it isimportant to point out the parallelism has special significance for Tang poems, andthis is why it’s worth particular study, because parallelism is the major principle forTang poem writing. For the same reason sound repetition, similarity or contrast inmeaning and structure could appear in high frequency in just one poem.The paper shall also present a brief discussion on the aesthetic function of theparallelism. As it is said at the beginning of the paper that parallel structure is the formal feature of Tang poems and it is also major factor responsible for the creationof beauty in the poem. The underlying reason for the beauty could be traced back todiachronic and synchronic organization of the signs. According to Saussure’s study,the formation of a sentence under the conventional grammatical rules would bedefined as a diachronic process; on the contrary the formation of a parallel structurewould be formed under the rule of synchronic process. Yet, it is the synchronicprocess that gives rise to the changes in language, and causes the aesthetic feeling ofreaders. The various parallel structures in poems would have the same effect. Inpoems, when poet tried to form the rhymes between words or equivalence of wordmeanings, it would be obvious for readers to point out that equivalence. Thesesynchronically combined elements play an important part in enhancing the semanticconnections between words and building relationship between forms and meanings.The third chapter will further the topic on the necessity and feasibility ofmaking parallelism the guiding principle and judging criteria for Tang poemtranslation. The necessity of applying parallelism lies in the importance this principleholds for Tang poems. The high frequency of sound parallelism in Tang poemsmakes the poems melodious, rhythmic and musical. While the word and grammaticalparallel phenomena present to readers poems with rich imagination and images.Most of the time, people tend to focus on either contents or form. However, this isnot the case with Tang poems. This particular kind of literature demonstratesinteraction between form and meaning, especially in that the meaning of the poemcould not be better presented without the form. It is possible to argue the poem losesits beauty if the form is discarded. What is also worthy to point out is while thetranslators are talking about bringing eastern culture to the west, the form of Tangpoem could definitely be included in the cultural factors. The parallel structures arebased on similarity and contrast as much as it contains cultural influences fromChinese ideology. One example would be Du Fu, who likes to use numbers a lot. Hisnumbers always come on the same position of two couplets and these figures arousespecial sensation among readers. While Li Bai would like to use huge words such assky-earth to create a magnificent view, and there are also other typical culture-loaded parallel structures in Tang poems. Therefore the translation of parallel structures canachieve two purposes at the same time, namely to present readers with a picture ofTang poems and to introduce Chinese cultures into western literature.However, the parallelism-guided translation of Tang poems could not bepracticed if it is indeed impossible or unperceivable by target readers. Therefore totest its feasibility would be a necessary step before the actual translation starts. Thefeasibility of translation is proved by the analysis of English poems with parallelism.Roman Jakobson has analyzed multi English poems with parallelism. One of themost interesting and famous analyses is the research on Shakespeare’s sonnet No.129. In his paper, he made thorough study of the sound, lexical, and grammaticalstructures. From there, he concluded that parallel is present on every level and hadsignificant influence on the reader’s perception of the poem. Hence, in this paper, theauthor emulates his method and makes the similar analysis of Li Bai’s poem, whichresults in the finding of larger amount of parallel phenomena on every aspect. Theanalysis of both English and Chinese poems indicates that parallel structure ispresent in the existing poetic structures of both languages. In this sense, Englishreaders should be able to understand the parallel structures in Tang poems. Also,based on past experience with poems of Victorian age, an aesthetic view of parallelstructure is not strange to English readers. Therefore, the argument that Englishreaders do not pay attention to or understand the formal features of Tang poems willnot hold. What’s more, the existing rhyming scheme or even couplets from thesonnet all prove that to the transfer of parallel structure to English translation isfeasible, though it may not be a complete transfer, it can be a partial transfer. As forto what extent the transfer is possible and what strategies can be used to achieve therealization of formal features in English version, the forth chapter will give thedetails.In the forth chapter, differences of parallelism in Chinese and English literarysystem shall be discussed and corresponding translation strategies will be introducedso as to make the parallelism-guided translation possible. For sound parallelstructures, though rhymes and rhythm are elements of English and Chinese sounds, there fore still differences however. Chinese focus more on the end rhyme, while inEnglish rhymes can be more diversified. Also, Chinese poems tend to use meaninggroup as the unit to form rhythm, while English uses stress as the tool to achieve thesame purpose. Therefore, it is not possible to realize the total transfer of soundfeatures of Tang poem in English translation, but it is possible to have Englishversion with the similar pattern of rhyme and rhythm by using different set oflinguistic tools. And what is also advisable is to loosen the constraints on the formalpattern, considering the linguistic differences between the target language and sourcelanguage. For the lexical parallel formed among the poetic lines, the strategies ofreducing cultural value and exploring connotative meaning would be suggested. In asense, culture value, important as it is, is not easily perceived or understood againstthe background of several poetic lines. Therefore, the introduction of complicatedcultural factors through translation of poems is not feasible. Besides, it usually takeslong essay to explain cultural factors, which goes against the conciseness of poems.As for the syntactic part, the grammatical rules of two different languages shall beconsidered. The pervasive use of function words such as linking words is notfrequently seen in Chinese and this type of words will influence the syntacticcomposition of poetic lines in English. To form parallel structures, by takingstrategies put forward by Fenollosa, the Chinese poems could be translated intoEnglish with reduced using of function words. Hence, English could become moreconcise; however it should not exceed limits to impair the readability of Englishtranslations.The comparative study of translated poems shall be carried out in a way oftextual analysis, through which issues in regard of realization of parallelism ondifferent perspectives will be elaborated. Also the extent of parallelism achieved inthe English version will be considered a standard to judge the quality of thetranslation. The significance of the analysis not only lies in that it shall present in thethesis how to realize parallelism in translation of Tang poems, but also to proveparallelism is completely possible to be achieved even in English translations. At theend of the chapter, the formal features of the sample translations will be made into table. The table will be used to illustrate the formal characteristics of past practice,and also to further prove that with efforts to realize parallel structures will bepossible for poetic translation.In the fifth chapter acceptance of the parallelism-guided translation shall beconsidered, for that though theoretically the translation approach has been provedfeasible, whether the practice will be recognized and accepted by the target readerstill remains doubtful. To remove the doubt, empirical research conducted by Jin Tihas been quoted and re-examined. For the same purpose, the situation of Pound’stranslation and Rexroth’s practice are also included to support that English literatureis both interested in the parallelism-guided translation as well as approving of thispractice. Also, it is believed that English literature creation is open to change andwelcome the formal uniqueness that Tang poems bring to its world.The sixth chapter shall may conclusive remark on the thesis and point out theproblems to be discussed for further study. |
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