Musicality Transmission And Reproduction In Poetry Translation

It is commonly asserted that poems have musicality; and musicality has long been explored from both the linguistic and poetic perspectives. But with respect to poetry translation, this quality of poetry has not received its due share of attention, and is sometimes even neglected just because of its intranslatability.A retrospective review of translation studies can find that the dichotomy of form and content stands in the core. Translators and theorists find it hard to reach an agreement on the priority of the two. Musicality transmission is always achieved through translating the musical forms, as some scholars advocate"formal equivalence", while someone makes efforts to transmit the"beauty in form". However, there are also scholars who give up the musical forms and translate the poems into prose, for a form translation always requires the sacrifice of the sense. Form translation is not an ideal way for musicality transmission, not only in its inadequacy, but also in the paradox between itself and the sense.The author reconsiders the poetic musicality from an aesthetic perspective and puts forth that musicality is the essence of a poem. Musicality in the paper is decomposed into internal musicality and external musicality; the former originates from the poet's inspiration and is displayed in flowing emotions, while the latter is the musical form expressing the former out. Hence, musicality transmission can technically be achieved through two phases; one is effective transmission of the internal music and the other, reproduction of the external musical forms. The second phase comes later and servers the first one. Thus, this paper lends a new angle for musicality transmission, and also for the solution of the form-and-content paradox.Internal musicality and external musicality harmonize in each poem, as they should do in each translation. Translators are expected to feel the inspiration and the internal music of the original poems and try to express them with appropriate forms in the target language. A poetry translator had better be a poet, both in thoughts and skills of poetry writing.This approach is applied to the case studies in the last chapter, where four entire Yuefu ballads and their translations are analyzed on musicality. Translations of two different translators, Wang Rongpei and Anna Birrell, are also compared on their achievement of musicality transmission. The principle"传神达意"(transmitting the spirit vividly) held by Wang implies the musicality transmission stressed here, so his translations are better in both internal musicality transmission and external musicality reproduction.