| Few Chinese people deny that the classic Chinese poetry contains profound literary artistry. And few English people are aware that they are misreading the classic Chinese poetry through various versions. As a result,Chinese poetry has been shining throughout Chinese literary history for thousands of years but kept away from its rewarding position in the world literature only because of the language barrier. How can English people,by reading translations,learn the real beauties of Chinese poetry as the Chinese themselves do? If this is impossible,where do the problems occur? The answers to both questions involve too many aspects,such as culture,history and thinking modes. But when all these aspects combine together to serve the poetrytranslation research between English and Chinese,they provide a new topic------Thetranslatability of Chinese poetry.The translatability of Chinese poetry has been a hot issue in the commentary of literary translation. Most critical essays,however,demonstrate a preference to evaluate versions in terms of identical criteria. Take some commentary popular in China for instance.Poetry translationshould obey only the three principles-----faithfulness,expressiveness and elegance. The threeprinciples,presented from the angle of the translator,actually are an ideal goal in the realm of translation,only fit for the readers who are experts of both English and Chinese literatures simultaneously. The real practice of Chinese poetry translation aims initially at the English speakers,who generally have little knowledge about China and the Chinese culture. Nevertheless,different translators have different evaluating criteria with regard to their assumed readers at different times for different demands;thus their translations highlight different aspects of the characteristics in both the source language (Chinese) and the target language (English). Consequently,judging a version,good or bad simply with identical criteria will easily fall into confusion. This is why a new classification of Chinese poetry translation is worth studying.My dissertation intends to classify Chinese poetry translation into three kinds. The first kind is the traditional way,in which faithfulness to the original meaning is stressed and English idiomatic way of writing is required. Translators confined to this way,despite their debates on form,meaning and sound,share a common notion that a compromise should be made to balance the loss and gain through translation. I present many arguments,including a case analysis and my own trial of a poem,to demonstrate that versions translated in the traditional way are popular among the Chinese readers but usually do not raise the same effect on the English audience.Since the traditional way of translating the Chinese original leads to infidelity,it should be a matter of course to seek for a new method which is conducive to helping the native English readers arrive at the comprehension of essence of the classic Chinese poetry. Literal translation,or rather,word-for-word translation is chiefly concerned with the subtle beauty of the original without too much consideration of the English grammatical rules. It could be thought of as a representative of the way. But the verse converted by the literal way is often misunderstood as a sort of stilted or awkward translation. It is indeed,however,a best choice when the translating of the terse and subtle mountain-and-water poems is called for. Overseas students ofthe Chinese literature may taste the authentic flavor of the kind of classic Chinese poems. As compared with the traditional method of translation,literal translation can hardly succeed in creating independent literary works but it can leave better resources for research on the Chinese literature.The third kind is the adaptive way,whose representative is Ezra Pound,and in which the literal meaning of the original is altered at random so as to meet the translator's demands. The adaptive way goes extremely opposite to the literal way. It is a complete accommodati... |
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