![]() Thus the line also records a human trajectory: spiritual metamorphosis and then mortality embedded in nature itself. ![]() “Face” 容 is visible in the fourth ideogram, and the fifth contains 化 (transformation). Further, in a simultaneous layer of images, the third character, Cheng writes, “contains the element 天 ‘man,’ which itself contains the element 人 ‘Man’ ( homo),” or person. In the third character, 艹 (the radical for “grass” 艸 or “flower”) bursts forth from the crown of the words 芙蓉 (magnolia) and ends in 花 (flower). The character for “branch” 木 begins to transform at its tips 末 and bud into life. Cheng gives this line from Wang Wei as an example, followed by its literal translation: Chinese ideograms** are composed of strokes, and each of the brushstrokes references others. Word-for-word translations, writes François Cheng in his masterful Chinese Poetic Writing (1977), can give “only the barest caricature.” Ha Jin describes a particular Li Bai poem as obtaining a beauty that “can be fully appreciated only in the Chinese.” Hinton observes that a particular line, severed from its radically different philosophical context, “fails absolutely in translation.” But the incommensurability of Chinese (logographic*) and English (alphabetic) written systems begins the moment a mark is made. Eliot Weinberger, Lucas Klein, Burton Watson, Stephen Owen, and David Hinton, among others, have set down superb translations, while noting that, in bringing Chinese poetry into English, more things go missing than in translations from other languages. The essential experience of Chinese poetry is all but untranslatable. Do you think writing a letter to the editor would be worthwhile? I wonder what your thoughts about it are. I thought the second half of the review cited above in the current issue of the New York Review of Books was pretty appalling. Quite the contrary, I am content with my accomplishments in translating all sorts of Chinese literature into English, and I believe that what I have done enriches the intellectual life of Americans and other speakers of English by making available to them an equivalent emotional and esthetic experience as that afforded to Chinese readers of the works in their original language. ![]() Since I have done a huge amount of translation in my lifetime, if I accepted the notion that Chinese literature is untranslatable, I would long ago have made a gigantic fool of myself. ![]() I have never been a fan of the view that Chinese poetry is untranslatable, or that any other genres of Chinese literature, for that matter, are untranslatable. The Selected Poems of Tu Fu: Expanded and Newly TranslatedĪwakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai (Li Po) " Poems Without an ‘I’", by Madeleine Thien ![]()
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