Collisions of the Past with the Present: Translation, Texts, and History

Abstract

This article begins by articulating a new perspective on the translation of Chinese poetry, arguing that the most important of the three well-known “difficulties” in the translation of Chinese poetry outlined by Yan Fu 嚴複 (1854–1921)—namely, faithfulness ( xin 信), conveyance ( da 達), and elegance ( ya 雅)—should in fact be the one that is least often discussed, da. The author principally interprets da as “conveying” the mood and then the meaning of the original work into the target language. This position is then illustrated by specific examples from Lu Xun’s (1881–1936) emotive and highly allusive classical-style poetry, engaging issues regarding its annotation, exegesis, and translation which have arisen in Chinese literary and scholarly circles. The author suggests that since the deployment of affective images has often been designated as an essential and distinguishing characteristic of Chinese poetry, the translation of Chinese poetry into Western languages must make an effort to engage with the original images—not simply resorting to paraphrases or substitutions—and concludes that poetry in translation can and does have important and lasting effects on the literature of the target language.