Analysis Of "Truth Transmission" In Yu Kwang-chung's Self-Translated Poetry Anthology The Night Watchman

In his prestigious literature career,Yu Kwang-chung devoted his entire life to poetry,prose,literature criticism and translation.But because of his glorious achievements in poetry,Yu Kwang-chung's achievements in translation are somewhat eclipsed.For poetry translation,he proposes that literary translation,especially the translation of poetry,is absolutely an art and we should use "truth transmission" to replace the word"translation".He further expounds "truth transmission" in comments on T.S.Eliot poem Journey of the Magi from several aspects including the line length,the word order,the choice of words and the style of language.The thesis argues that his t:hought of "truth transmission" is inspired by China's traditional theory on Buddhist Scripture translation"five losses of the original" proposed by Dao An who summarizes the losses from the original intranslating as word order,language style and repetition.Yu Kwang-chung's "truth" differs from but is based on Dao An's ideas of "the original".Yu prefers poems on casual life for his self-translation and the truth he transmits in poetry covers three aspects:the syntactic structure including the line length and the word order,the rhyme and the style of poetry.Yu exemplifies the method of"transmitting truth" in his translation of The Night Watchman in all three aspects.In translation of syntactic structure,the line length should maximally be the same as the original,the difference should be no more than three words and the word order should stay with the original as much as possible.The rhyme in translation should be natural,flexible and comply with the emotion revealed in the original poem.And assonance,alliteration and end rhyme are feasible ways to transmit the original truth of rhyme in both sound and emotion.For transmitting the truth of style,Yu Kwang-chung believes the choice of words is the key and the style of the translation needs to be as close as possible to the original.However,it's hard to attain consistence in all the above three aspects in translation.Sometimes "truth transmission" on one aspect can help the realization of the other one,but sometimes it may lead to the loss.