A Translation Project Report Of Poetry And Commitment

Is there any other reason ensuring the existence of poetry aside from elegant rhythms,delicate metaphors and inspiring images?What kind of identity do poets have?Poetry and Commitment was first presented as the plenary lecture at the 2006 Conference on Poetry and Politics and was later collected in A Human Eye:Essays on Art in Society.Rich resorts to,instead of writing poems,another method to meditate on poetics and the society where she lives and creates.Cowardice,obedience,immorality and acceptance of all the unacceptable things in this society are clearly perceived by Rich.Many poets,who lack courage and commitment to the society,politics and people,write poems just for decorating.As Rich once said,"Poetry should not aestheticize the cruel reality;instead,poets should make sharp noise for the silenced people." Rich tries to probe into the question by virtue of linguistics that "There is no doubt that all the orders and chaos in this world originate from poetics and politics." In the meantime,everybody is entitled and obliged to the commitment to politics and poets are also one of 'everybodies'.Piously over-quoted,mostly out of poems,it's taken to suggest that simply by virtue of composing verse,poets exert some exemplary moral power—in a vague unthreatening way.Also,they can play an active part in political activities to meditate on the political environment and issues.For instance,Shelly composed verses to explore legislation,which was widely welcomed among those literate proletariats in commune de Paris(Chartism).With a close relationship with politics,poems are the'trumphet of a prephecy' and drive dead thoughts like withered leaves.Poems are composed as people's support and psychological uplift rather than decorations.Poetry and Commitment explores the conversion between poems and politics from the beginning to the end,which has been under discussion before,especially by those communists but does not get wide response.On the part of Rich's previous works,people have been aware of rhythm as well as delicacy in language of political poems,but what they have omitted is the poet's identity and commitments.Hence,with suggestions and great favor from my mentor,I translate this book so as to appeal for more attention towards feminist writers and their opinions in verse composition;thus,poems and politics could be further combined and converted between each other.In this translation project report,some key sentences and words have been chosen and analyzed for solutions towards difficulties in translation and the summary of what I have learned from it.Under the guidance of "functional equivalence" of Nida,long sentences,long adjectives together with nominalization in this book could be well dealt with.Besides,the natural equivalence of styles and images between the source and accepted contexts also draw my attention.After thorough analysis,a conclusion could be drawn:Before translation starts,we should learn more about historical background information and read this book against the relevant political background;also,all the pictures in PDF format should be tansferred to documents,which saves people a lot of trouble in translation;then,the xwhole passage should be thoroughly read so as to form a comprehensive viewpoint towards its style(including diction,syntactic structures and tones).When the translation proceeds,a corpus should be established to unify all the key and frequently-used words in our text;several measures including corresponding,recasting and decoloring could be adopted to achieve equivalence between source and accepted contexts;in addition,extension and conversion of parts of speech could be used for semantic equivalence,easy comprehension and natural expression.After the translation is done,several difficult sentences have been repeatedly read and polished;furthermore,several classmates are invited to read the whole translated context to make sure this text is intelligible and syntactically fluent to readers of the accepted language;above all,I exchange views with Professor Xu and classmates from time to time for further modification so as to ensure the quality of the translated context.