Contemplation on Accuracy in Chinese Poetry Translation

Contemplation on Accuracy in Chinese Poetry Translation

石油大学（华东）外国语学院王晓军魏三军

摘要: 本文以翻译标准的“信”为切入点，探讨中国古代诗词英译方法，并侧重其中“准确”标准。并结合具体诗例，容百家之言，评个人之见。同时探讨了达到该标准的具体做法。

关键词: 古诗词英译准确翻译标准

The great German poet Goethe (1749-1832) once said:” Translation is like match-makers, they bring the praise of some hale-veiled beauty and arouse irresistible longing for the original.” Translation means the rendering from one language into another of soothing written or spoken. Essentially, it is the accurate representation, in one language of what is written or said in another language. Translation is a very complicated job, which concerns two different languages: the source language (SL) and the target language (TL). M.A.K.Halliday described in his book, The Linguistic Science and Teaching, “Translation is, in fact, an extremely complicated and difficult task. It is far from being the simple obvious exercise and it is sometimes described to be. In its usual form it is appropriate more to advanced stage of a university special degree course, when literary and historical styles are being studied than to the early stages of acquiring practical skills in a foreign language.”

Translation involves rich background knowledge. It requires a translator to be equipped with various kinds of information concerning different cultures, therefore he must have a fairly wide general knowledge as well as some specialized knowledge.

Chinese poetry translation to some extent, is the most difficult among all varieties of translation. Durian claimed that no poetry translation, a branch of literary translation can be considered in isolation but must be located in the specific cultural temporal context within which they are utilized (Huang Long, Translatology). Translation is a social phenomenon as well as a cultural and linguistic activity.

The following is a brief review of the translation theories in China and in Western countries.

Early in the Tang Dynasty the learned monk Xuan Zang designed the criteria of translation with emphasis on accuracy and general knowledge. In the Qing Dynasty, Yan Fu established three- character standard in translation ,viz. faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance. After the May 4^th Movement, Lu Xun proposed “faithfulness and smoothness” as the criteria of translation.

Meanwhile, in Western countries many foreign scholars brought forth various kinds of translation theories such as the “golden rule (faithfulness, expressiveness and gracefulness)” raised by Herbert Rotherestain and the popular theory of “equivalence of effect” which , as well-known to all, requires the effect of the target language on its receptor to be as close as possible to that of the source language on its own receptor.

Other trends of thought are Brower, Cary and Steiner’s philological approach, Nida, Kade, Neubert, Willss, Vazquez Avora and Reiss’ communication theory and Nida and de Beaugrande’s socio-semeotic theory. These criteria and arguments have made the academic researches unprecedentedly active and ideologically confused..

Among those scholars, Alexander Fraser Tytler, professor of history at Edinburgh University, was an influential one. In the last decade of the 18^th century, he laid down three fundamentals by which a translation should be judged. They are: (1) a translation should give a complete transcript of the ideas of the original work; (2) the style and manner of writing should be of the same character as that of the original and (3) a translation should have all the ease of original composition.(Xiao Junshi, 1982) In his book Essay on the Principles of Translation. Tytler illustrated those fundamentals with a wealth of examples.

The criteria of translation must be definite and practicable, otherwise they could hardly be implemented. For instance, in the criteria Xuan Zand designed, the “general knowledge”, which requires wide scope of a great variety of subjects, practically knows no limit. A translator or an interpreter may always feel the want of his knowledge in certain fields. Yan Fu’s “elegance” is seemingly not definite either for a version should not be “elegant” if the original is not. For instance, if the sentence “You are a damn fool” is rendered into Chinese “ni shi yi ge hen bu zhi hui de ren”, it is far from being accurate though elegant. “Elegance” varies with place and time and it varies with individual, too. In Tytler’s three fundamentals, the third one “ a translation should have all the ease of the original composition” may give rise to diverse interpretations. Nobody could form an accurate conception of what Tytler had in his mind. If faithfulness is to make the version expressive of the original thought and style, and smoothness is to make the translation intelligible to the readers or hearers, then Lu Xun’s two-character criterion (faithfulness and smoothness) should be a reliable one for judging accuracy in poetry translation.

Nevertheless, faithfulness and smoothness are at times contradictory to each other in tradition. It seems to be so painstaking to achieve the agreement of the two , both faithfulness and smoothness, as a translation which is faithful to the original work is sometimes not smooth in the target language and vice versa. An Italian even said that” Translators are traitors”. It is nothing more than an emphasis on the great difficulty in keeping both faithfulness and smoothness in a version.

The best way of judging a translation demands a dialectical treatment, a criterion, an ideal unity of the two points, faithfulness and smoothness.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that the two can never come to agreement. “Difficulty” is by no means “impossibility” or “incompatibility”. Here the key is: can the two elemtnts be considered in isolation and how to coordinate them in a version?

Evidently, the above-mentioned criteria of translation (whether Yan Fu’s three characters, Tytler’s three principles or Lu Xun’s two characters) have one thing in common: the dual nature--- uniformity and contradiction. The two opponents form a unity of opposites.

A translator is required , first of all, to reduce or to solve these contradictions by some effective means. In this paper, the author intends to do some research on the criterion of translation from a new standpoint.

By the aforesaid description, it can be seen there exist various kinds of criteria in translation. Though this phenomenon is of some advantages, it is inevitably harmful to translators, especially to the young ones. To be more specific, (1) it fails to serve as a guiding principle and often leaves translation studies in chaos; (2) it hinders some capable translators from fully developing their talents; (3) it still interferes with the normal development of young translators.

In this paper the author defines “accuracy” as: a translation, in such aspects as content or meaning (not necessarily the linguistic expressions), style, function, tone, tense and logic must precisely reproduce the original text: smoothness and clarity are indispensable at the same time. In other words, a translation must attain an effective equivalence of message of the source--- language text. “The accuracy of fidelity must be the foremost concern of translators and interpreters (Seleskovitch).” The author of this thesis attempts to regard the principle of Functional Equivalence as the basis, the theoretical ground for studying “accuracy” in poetry translation. This principle means that the receptors of the translation text must acquire the equivalent response to the receptors of the original text.

The response in Functional Equivalence can never be absolutely identical because of different cultural, historical and situational settings. The same is true of accuracy in poetry translation--- no absolute accuracy Gregory Rabassa, an American translator gave expression to that recognition when he write:” A translation can never equal the original; it can approach it and its quality can only be judged as to accuracy by how close it gets.” A translator must not simply produce a version that reads well and sounds right in the target language, but should try to comprehend and interpret the original accurately to attain its precise ideas. An accurate translation should be required to offer an accurate interpretation, a representation of the original.

In short, a translation should be judged by accuracy--- the spirit of translation. If it is accurate (certainly correct), it is a good translation; if not, it is a poor translation; if it is overly inaccurate (e.g. of awkward language expressions), then, it is a mistranslation. It is “accuracy” that should be regarded as the criterion of literary or poetry translation. The accurate effects of content, style, and function may not always or easily be realized in one translation; then the accuracy of content should be given primacy to get a more accurate representation of the original text.

Actually, there is no so-called accurate translation if it is isolated from the original context. For example, how to translate the Chinese “ni zuo che qu ma?”, the possible versions are: A. Are you going to ride? B. Are you going by bus or train? C. Care for a lift? … These versions can not be chosen arbitrarily; it must be decided from the context which fefers to the language usage in a broad sense comprising the tone of a speaker, the situation, connotation and other related factors. What’s more, the cultural and background differences will greatly affect accuracy. For instance, there are important differences in what “zhi shi fen zi” and “intellectual” mean in their respective cultures. In Chins, the former term generally includes teachers, college students and such people as medical doctors, engineers, interpreters. In many Chinese rural areas even middle school students are called so while in U.S. and Europe, however, the latter only refers to people of high academic status such as college professors instead of ordinary college students. So the term conveys a much narrower sense. It is a fact that not in all cases the latter is a complimentary term and sometimes it is somewhat like “chou lao jiu”(egg-head) in China.

Meanwhile, “Each word when used in a new context is a new word” (Firth, 1951). A word-for-word translation is unaccountable in that it follows closely the form of the source language. The exact goal of translation should be to produce an idiomatic receptor language text, that is, one that has the accurate meaning of the source language but is expressed in the natural form of the receptor language.

Let’s take 小薇• 采风 in The Book of Songs (chapter 6) as one example. “The best lines of the whole book” (By xie xuan in Dong Jin Dynasty) are

“xi wo wang yi, yang liu yi yi .

jin wo lai si, yu xue fei fei.

xing dao chi chi , zai ji zai ke.

wo xin shang bei, mo zhi wo ai.”

James Legge’s version is the literal one.

“At first, when we set out;

The willows were fresh and green.

Now when we shall be returning;

The snow will be falling clouds.

Lond and tedious will be our marching;

We shall hunger, we shall thirst.

Our hearts are wounded with grief;

And no one knows our sadness.”

The version is not like a true poem and the readers cannot share the enjoyment of the great lines.

Arthur Waley’s version is one representative of the blank verse.

“Long ago, when we started,

The willows spread their shade.

Now that we turn back,

The snow flakes fly.

The march before us is long,

We are thirsty and hungry.

Our hearts are stricken with sorrow,

By no one listens to our plaint.”

The “blank verse” here according to Professor Fan Zhongcun in Chinese Poetry and English Translation is” using a stressed syllable to represent one Chinese character and in each line there are a certain number of stressed syllables and an uncertain number of unstressed syllables. It is , to some extent, like the blank verse in English poems.” The collection of versions (1987 Edition) gives a right evaluation of his achievement in this respect:” The interpretation of The Book of Songs is filled with difficulties, both the philological interpretation of individual word and lines and of whole poems. Arthur Waley was a scholar in his own right, as well as being a remarkably gifted translator and he has done his best in these translations (which are at the same time interpretations) to restore to the Songs some of the freshness of their Chou origins.”

It is difficult to be accurate in form; it is more difficult in spirit and the most difficult, in both of them, which is the summit pursuit of poetry translation. The following is the version of Professor Xu Yuanchong of Beijing University belonging to the last sort, which more accurately express the original idea.

“ When I left here,

Willows shed tear.

I came back now,

Snow bends the bough.

Long, long the way,

Hard, hard the day.

Hunger and thirst,

Press me the worst.

My grief o’er flows,

Who knows? Who knows?”

As to Professor Xu’s poetry translation, more words should be said. For example, in translating the famous poet Li Shangyin’s poem (无题), originally he translated in the following way:

It’s difficult for us to meet and hard to part

The east wind is too weak to revive flowers dead

Spring silkworm till its death spins silk from love-sick heart

And candles but when burnt have no tears to shed…

But later he revised it as follows:

It’s difficult for us to meet and hard to part

The east wind is too weak to revive flowers dead

Spring silkworm till its death spins silk from love-sick heart

And candle burned to ashes has no tears to shed…

The only difference between the two versions lies in the last sentence: Professor Xu transforms “candles” into “candle”, more accurately portraying the picture of more dreary and desolate, only candle flickering and one alone sheding tears till morning which contrasts more strikingly, further increasing the artistic flavor.

In addition, in the original poem , in the first line, there are two characters “nan”. Same as they are in Chinese, they connote different meanings although the difference is subtle and therefore in English version, the former is “different” and the latter is “hard”. In the second line, based on the author’s comprehension and deliberation, the author amplifies a word between “dong feng wu li” and “bai hua can”, which is a free translation. “si” is rendered into “silk” and the latter “si”, “love-sick”, thus in this way, similarities in pronunciation and spelling are combined to carry out the original beauty in significant artistic prospect. Compared with this version, the following four ones are seemingly inferior.

(1)(by Graham) Spring’s silkworms wind till death thire heart’s threads.

(2)(by Bynner) The silkworms of spring will weave until they die.

(3)(by Herdan) The silworm dies in spring when her thread is spun.

(4)(by X.Y.Z.) Spring silkworm till its death spins silk from lovesick heart.

Another example is his alteration of Wang Han’s poem (凉州词). The original version is:

The cups of jade would glow with wine of grapes at night

Drinking to pipa songs, we are summoned to fight

Don’t laugh if we lay drunken on the battle ground

How many warriors ever come back safe and sound.

The altered one is:

With wine of grapes the cups of jade would glow at night

Drinking to pipa songs, we are summoned to fight

Don’t laugh if we lay drunken on the battleground

How many ancient warriors came back safe and sound.

In the original version, “zheng zhan ren” is rendered into “warriors”, not taking into full account all the warriors over long period of time and not all the message is conveyed. Therefore, later he adds an “ancient” to more completely and accurately express the original idea.

The last one is his two versions of He Zhizhang’s poet (回乡偶书).

The original version is:

.I left home young and not till old do I come back

My accent is unchanged, my hair no longer black

The children do not know me, whom I meet on the way

“Where d’you come from, revered sir?” they smile and say.

The altered one is:

Old, I return to the homeland I left while young

Thinner has grown my hair, though I speak the same tongue

My children, whom I meet, do not know who am I

“Where are you from, dear sir?” they ask with beaming eyes.

In the original, the translator in the last line uses the rhythm, thus the original poem’s romantic charm doesn’t stand vividly revealed on the paper before readers. In addition, “wen ke” is rendered into “revered” for formality in usage. It seems that the word is uttered by a cautious, cultivated and mature gentleman instead of the casual village children playing beside the lake, losing the lovely childishness blowing on the readers’ faces. In contrast, the polished one is more accurate and vivid, and lifelike, depicting their naïve and curious and pure mien. It is very expressive and refining.

As to the following two poems, according to my own comprehension of accuracy in poetry translation, I will point out the inappropriateness only for reference.

The first is Liu Yuxi’s 竹枝词

Shan tao hong hua man shang tou,

Shu jiang chun shui pai shan liu..

Hua hong yi shuai si lang yi,

Shui liu wu xian si nong chou.

The version is:

Peach blooms in full bloom above,

In Shu River along the hills spring water on the flow.

The blossoms easy to wither like your love,

The water is endless like my woe.

In order to be more accurate, “Shan tao” isn’t the equivalent of “peach” and it is, instead, a kind of illegible plant. “shan tao hong hua”, in this poem, absolutely doesn’t mean “peach blooms” but means extensively all the flowers in the hill. It is a word-to-word translation to render “man shang tou” into “above” which means “ at a high point, over head”. But the poem doesn’t give this hint and in my opinion, here it should be understood in such a way that people look at the beautiful sceneries with blossoms red and trees green in the distance.

In the second line, “shu jiang” is mistakenly translated into “Shu River”. In fact, the term refers to the not a specific river but all the rivers in Shu area (currently SiChuan province). “Pai shan liu” should be comprehended in this way: the rivers are surging ahead and streaming through hills forcefully and irresistibly.

As to the last two lines, a proper translation should be based on the overall comprehension of the essence and the focus of the poem. On the surface, the poem is filled with “hua” and “shui”, but the emphasis is laid on “ai” and “chou’. Therefore, the body is “lang yi” and “nong chou”, and the yuti should be “hua” and “shui”.

Now my version is provided for further polish.

Looking from afar, in full bloom are mountain peaches and flowers,

Shu rivers with spring water surge through hills on a flow.

Like blossoms easy to wither --- your loving desires,

What is boundless, like streaming water, is my woe.

The other is Li Bai’s 黄鹤楼送孟浩然之广陵. The original poem is:

Gu ren xi ci huang he lou,

Yan hua san yue xia yang zhou.

Gu fan yuan ying bi kong jin,

Wei jian chang jiang tian ji liu.

The original version is:

My friend goes east from Yellow Crane, the tower,

To Yangzhou in the spring with mist and flower.

His lonely sail melts in the blue and lo,

To the horizon only the waters flow.

The time is “in the spring” which is too general while in the original poem it is very clear the time is “san yue”(March). In contrast to this, the version of “yan hua” --- “with mist and flower” is too specific and furthermore in it the word “mist” belongs to a mechanical translation and isn’t the equivalent of “yan”.

And I consulted some other versions of the same line.

Ezra Pound’s version is: The smoke-flowers are blurred over the river.

The White Pony’s version is: In March, among smoking flowers, making your way to Yangchow.

Professor Liu Shisun’s version is: He leaves for Yang-chou in the third moon of the spring.

John Tourner’s version is: Mid April mists and blossoms go,…

The poem is remembered and praised “mainly by the second line”(Weng Xianliang, 1981). But these versions are all inaccurate and cannot arouse the associative imagination of the beautiful sceneries.

With regard to the last two lines, it is “lo” that interfere with the effect of the version. According to Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, “lo” is “used to call attention to express wonder or surprise.” In Byron’s Don Juan, some similar usages can be found. For example,

(1) Beseeching she no further would refuse,

Lo! He stumbled o’er a pair of shoes.

“Lo” here introduces a surprising and sudden action without any expectation.

(2) And Lo! A fifth appears. And what is she?

A lady of a certain age…

“Lo” here is used to call readers’ attentions to the appearance of the fifth concubine of the King.

Both of the above mentioned “lo” has very intense meaning of irony, but Li Bai’s poem is consumed by parting sorrows. And if “lo” is used, the poet’s deep feelings towards his bosom friend will be fully destroyed.

Comparatively, Professor Xu Yuanchong’s version conveys the original message more accurately and vividly.

My friend hast where the Yellow Crane towers,

For Yangzhou in spring green with willows and red with flowers.

His lessening sail is lost in the boundless blue sky,

Where I see the endless River rolling by.

Therefore as a translator, he must give full considerations to various kinds of contextual relations of the original, for example, the cause and effect, the cultural background and work oout an effective equivalence of messages of the original work. He should endeavor to produce a version that can represent the facts of the original. It is possible to attain accuracy in poetry translation through it is not an easy job.

In all of the translation processes, a translator must constantly be looking for the receptor language expressions, which will accurately represent the meaning of the source text, and present it in a clear natural way. He should be faithful to the source text meaning and to the receptor language expressions. Above all, he must avoid incomplete, extraneous or different information and understand the text accurately from a different culture. The purpose is to convey messages from the original text to the receptor language, that is, to produce accurate versions.

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