Traduire

TRADUIRE… INTERPRÉTER
academics, researchers, poets and critics, as well as foreign readers who admire
Chinese literature or contemporary Chinese poetry.
Since Gu Cheng is considered to be one of the greatest Chinese contemporary
poets, three English versions tend to adopt the approach of semantic translation, in
order to faithfully convey Gu Cheng’s poetic intention. However, it is noteworthy
that although Gu Cheng writes with a relatively simple vocabulary and a mode of
colloquial, everyday expression, making his work appear succinct and seemingly
easy to grasp; its fleeting, contingent, and ambiguous emotion is in fact hard to take
hold of. As his poems are often perceived as being avant garde, modernist or even
postmodernist, 2 and are better understood in terms of Chinese hieroglyphic
characters and pronunciation, they not only free the readers from the conventional
use of words and open up unlimited potential to the poetic performance of
language, 3 but also cause more difficulties and challenges in translation. Thus in
each of the three English versions, different translating strategies are employed to
retain and recreate Gu Cheng’s original imagery and evoke his vision of life and
world.
COMPARISON AND CRITICISM
Due to the length of this paper, I will only cite one of Gu Cheng’s most
well-known works, “Yi dai ren” 一 代 人 (“One Generation” or “A Generation”,
1979) as example to compare how these three versions differ in their translating
strategies and establish a set of criteria, which may help further clarify and define
the ethics of poetry translation at the end.
“Yi dai ren” 一 代 人 is written at the stage of “cultural self” (1977-1982)
when the poet began to identify himself as part of his society and nation. As terse
and ingenious as an epigram, this couplet counterpoints the brightness and the
darkness, the self and the collective, the past and the future, the repression and the
liberation, constituting an impressive contrast to unveil the complex interplay of
expectation, hope and anxiety of his generation, including many Jintian poets as
well as other young artists, intellectuals and political dissidents, in the predicament
of struggling for freedom and democratic reform in China, 4 and thus became
emblematic of a historical conjuncture when the country’s future prospect was still
unknown and the overall social atmosphere was charged with uncertainty.
In terms of form and style, Gu Cheng and Nameless Flowers both faithfully
follow the original sentence pattern, rhythm, and cadence by using rhyming skills,
which is evidenced by the juxtaposition of the original work and its three translated
versions cited below:
Publishing Corporation, 2005) back cover.
1 Chu and Golden back cover.
2 Chu and Golden 178.
3 Chuang Meifang, “Life of Words,” Homecoming: Selected Poems of Gu Cheng (Taipei: Ecus
Publishing House, 2005) 8.
4 Huang Jian, “Misty Poetry’s avant garde Consciousness and its Limitations”, Academic China 12
(2006), 1 Apr. 2010 .
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