Representing the poetic styles of Hamlet in equivalent Chinese: Perng Ching-Hsi’s literary translation of Shakespeare

Abstract

ABSTRACT As a professor emeritus of the Department of English, National Taiwan University, Perng Ching-Hsi (1945-) has dedicated his lifetime to literary translation and Shakespeare Studies for more than half a century. His Chinese translations of Shakespeare’s plays are adopted by local Taiwan drama companies for their outstanding lingual performability on the stage for the audience of our times. The paper seeks to explore how Perng manages to render the various Shakespearean poetic styles of Hamlet into equivalent, readable and performable Chinese language. First, the investigation will focus on the way Perng resorts to sophisticated domestication strategy in translating the proper names of the play into corresponding Chinese character names, names that are in most cases highly revealing of the characters’ essential roles as well as dramatic functions in the play. Second, the research will probe into Perng’s special literary expressions in the Chinese language, a language that hallmarks formal and semantic fidelity to Shakespeare’s original rhetorics and poetics. Altogether, I argue that Perng Ching-Hsi’s Chinese translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet features a dual contextualization, with which he attempts not merely to represent the original poetic styles of the play, but also to incarnate the poetics of Chinese literary convention.