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ON THREE ENGLISH VERSIONS OF GU CHENG’S SELECTED POEMS
POETRY TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATING GU CHENG INTO ENGLISH
The translatability of poetry is always an issue in dispute. Many poets and
critics have argued that poetry is untranslatable, as Dante’s remark in Convivio:
“nothing which is harmonized by the bond of the Muses can be changed from its
own to another language without having all its sweetness destroyed,” and Robert
Frost’s often-quoted line: “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” 1 Since the intense,
intense, self-sufficient linguistic structure inherent in each poem, including
phonology, syntax, vocabulary, literary form, and prosody cannot find exact and
absolute counterpart in another language; 2 poetry translation seems difficult to
avoid betraying, deconstructing, and reconstructing the original organic structure
and eventually exposes the distance and conflicts between the source language and
the target language. 3 A typical example is that in Chinese-English translation, the
staccato that is unique to the one-syllable Chinese characters cannot be reproduced
in English for the latter is a Germanic language characterized by smooth legato
tone. 4 In this regard, every translated version of Gu Cheng’s poem is creating the
possible out of the impossible, thus each of them should be considered as a “possible
version” rather than the definitive transcription. 5
The following section will focus on comparing and analyzing the translating
strategies of three English versions of Gu Cheng’s selected poems, including Gu
Cheng: Selected Poems (in the following text abbreviated as Gu Cheng or GC),
translated by Chu Chiyu 6 in collaboration with Seán Golden 7 and a group of
translators; 8 and Sea of Dreams: The Selected Writings of Gu Cheng (in the
following text abbreviated as Sea of Dreams or SD), edited and translated by Joseph
R. Allen; 9 as well as Nameless Flowers: Selected Poems of Gu Cheng (in the
following text abbreviated as Nameless Flowers or NF), edited and translated by
Aaron Crippen. 10 These three English versions are all edited and translated by
professors from the departments of languages and literature (in Hong Kong and the
United States), while an introduction to the life and work of Gu Cheng, as well as
the translator’s interpretation of these works are also included, aiming to introduce
the works blend with “melancholic,” “innocent,” 11 and “mysterious” 1 mood to
1
Original cited in Robert A. Welch, “The Translation of Poetry: some principles,”
Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 61.244 (1972). 10 May 2010 .
2 Burton Raffel, The Art of Translating Poetry (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988) 12.
3
See Peter Newmark’s comments on poetry translation in Chapter 15 “The Translation of Serious
Literature and Authoritative Statements,” A Textbook of Translation (New York: Prentice Hall: 1988).
4 Raffel cited James J.Y. Liu’s comparison of Chinese and English language features. See Raffel 33.
5 Chu and Golden 177-178.
6 Chu Chiyu is the professor of Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong
Polytechnic University.
7
Seán Golden is the professor of Centre d'Estudis Internacionals i Interculturals, Universitat
Autònoma de Barcelona.
8 Other translators participated in the translation of Gu Cheng: Selected Poems include John Caley, Eva
Huang, Liu Changying, Shi Liang, David Wakefield and Su Kuichun.
9 Joseph R. Allen is the professor of Department of Asian Languages and Literature, University of
Minnesota.
10 Aaron Crippen is the professor of Department of languages, literature, and communications, Augusta
State University.
11 Joseph R. Allen, Sea of Dreams: The Selected Writings of Gu Cheng (New York: New Directions
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