Words by the Look: Issues in Translating Chinese Visual Poetry

Abstract

Partly because of the increased use of the computer in creative writing, from the mid-1990s onward, visual, audio and performing-arts components have been integrated into the Chinese poetic text in an unprecedented manner. This paper presents a number of poems where visual form interacts with literary technique. When dealing with these texts, translators have often opted for non-translation. Indeed, translation of these texts presents serious challenges: How can we translate into an alphabetic language the interplay between verbal and visual so inherently embedded in certain uses of Chinese characters? How can we translate the relation and involvement between different artistic media into an exclusively verbal format? After presenting three different but not exclusive modes of resorting to the visual in contemporary Chinese poetry, I point out unique text-based issues, and derive a number of theoretical implications, which can inform the translation of these poems into English.