Swings and roundabouts: Strategies for translating colour terms in poetry

Abstract

In Illusion City, a collection of forty integrated poems, the Chinese poet Yang Lian makes great play with colour terms. The poet often uses colour to heighten the atmospheric intensity of his poems. In the larger context of Chinese poetry, the use of colour terms, particularly compound ones, also helps to create special rhythmic effects. While the basic colour terms are straightforward and either conform to both standard and poetic use of colour terms in English or can be exchanged like simple counters to supply appropriate equivalents, compound colour terms cause unintended and bizarre effects. The notion of the balancing out of plus and minus, loss and gain, and their mutual compensation in translation is here brought into sharp focus. This article which is written by the translator of Yan Lian's poetry identifies four possible ways of rendering compound colour terms and concludes, on an empirical basis, that a good translation involves the judicious combination of all these techniques.