On the Interplay between Poets’ and Philologists’ Translations of Chinese Poetry into German

Abstract

‘[I]t has unfortunately become a fashion that people who obviously cannot claim to have any legitimation or any understanding in the field of sinology […], take hold of the sinological works of others and exploit them merely for business reasons’, complains the sinologist Leopold Woitsch in 1924, referring to Albert Ehrenstein's newest translations of Chinese poetry. The debate on who could authoritatively translate Chinese poetry was fiercely contested in German modernist circles and still rages to this day. Most scholars still contrast ‘poetical’ and ‘scholarly’ translations of Chinese poetry, either claiming that the former in an intuitive way come closer to the original, or criticizing the work of the poets who did not possess the linguistic and cultural background knowledge to dare approach Chinese poetry. However, it is exactly the interaction between the two modes that shaped the German reception of Chinese poetry in the twentieth century. Referring to a number of examples from the early-twentieth-century adaptations of Tang poetry, this article offers a more differentiated perspective on the cooperative and competitive relations between poets’ and scholars’ translations of Chinese poetry. Against the background of controversies surrounding ‘legitimate’ translations which shaped literary modernism in the early twentieth century, I show how the poetic and scholarly approaches were (and remain) closely interconnected, and discuss the thematic and aesthetic implications of this interrelationship.