Punctuation, Exclamation and Tears:The Sorrows of Young Wertherin Japanese and Chinese Translation (1889–1922)

Abstract

Rich in exclamations and ellipses, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther inhabits a linguistic space in German that does not immediately lend itself to literal translation. Its first translations into Japanese and Chinese coincided with periods of linguistic innovation, as writers and translators contributed to the development of vernacular writing. While in Japanese versions the rendered text faithfully evinces intermediate stages of vernacularization, Guo Moruo's 1922 translation represents a radical attempt to reshape language. By finding literal equivalents of Goethe's stylistic idiosyncrasies, Guo actively shapes the Chinese vernacular, i.e. he establishes the syntactical usage of an exclamation particle plus an exclamation mark. Since German and Chinese belong to different language families, his translation artificially creates intralingual affinities.