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On Untranslatability of Artistic Conceptionin Chinese Classic Poetryfrom Long Longing
On Untranslatability of Artistic Conceptionin Chinese Classic Poetryfrom Long Longing
1 Introduction
Poetry is the oldest form of culture. It is the crystallization of age, history and culture. As everyone knows, Chinese Classic Poetry (CCP) is not only the conjunction of the national culture, but also the combination of reality and ideal, time and space, sensation and reason and sentiment and education. It always delivers artistic conception to people’s hearts by a convergent artistic form. It seems a resplendent dripping flower, ardent and profound.
Some scholars, writers and translators home and abroad define poetry in several ways. Emily Dickinson once said: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off I know that is poetry”.（米云辉，20xx：7）Poetry, one of the oldest and perhaps the most primitive form of literature, is also the most refined and delicate of literature genres. Thomas Nash appraised that “poetry is the honey of all flowers, the quintessence of all science, the narrow of wits, and the very phrase of angels”.（米云辉，20xx：7）These two famous elites both regarded poetry as a complex of minds and emotion. Some Chinese great writers have the similar definitions. Zhu Guangqian said: “poetry is a pure literature with temperament” (朱光潜，1984:51） while Lin Yutang had the opinion that “poetry is, in essence, a thought colored with emotion.” (林语堂，1998:43) Many people think that poetry, in a general sense, may be defined as the expression of the imagination. Poetry is an abstract literary form, so the possibility of poetry translation becomes a long-debated issue in translation circle. At first, we’d better look into the purpose of poetry translation.
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Poetry, as the inheritance of human culture, interests people around the world. Appreciation of poetry may help people from another country to have an insight into another culture. As a result, translation of poetry plays an indispensable and important role for those who aim at translating poetry from one language into another successfully. The charm of Chinese Classical Poetry (CCP), the mainstream of Chinese poetic works, has interested so many people. Thus a great number of international scholars and translators who are interested in Chinese Culture have endeavored to recreate the beauty of CCP in other languages. This shows there is no denying that it should be translated.
Because of the necessity of translation of CCP, there may arouse another problem, that is, whether CCP can be translated. Translatability and untranslatability have long been disputed in the area of translation study. Throughout thousands of years of translation history, there were many scholars, writers, thinkers and even translators all over the world, who suspected and even denied the translatability absolutely. As far as poetry is concerned, the problem of translatability is more controversial. Poetry is far more difficult to translate as compared with other forms of literary works. Whether a poem can be translated or not is still in debate. There are some opinions that can favor the untranslatability of poetry. An American poet Robert Frost maintained, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Another poet has the similar explanation of this. Shelley, the famous British poet also held that “it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principles of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet”(Bassnett etal, 1989: 58).
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It can be concluded that a language is the outward manifestation of the spirit of people, so to speak their language is their spirit, and their spirit is their language, you cannot go too far in thinking of the two as identical.
The German translator Humbolt also stated that there is no proper way to convey the original spirit. He argues that “words are not agreed-upon signs but rather sounds which, together with the things and concepts they represent and through the spirit in which they originated and continue to originate, exist in true association—in mystic association, these sounds contain the objects of reality broken up into ideas and able to establish, separate and link them in a way which can not be bounded by the mind”. (1989:59)This is the reliable theoretical evidence.
In the Chinese translation circle, there are also similar views on untranslatability of poetry. Lin Yutang in his On Translation once quoted Croce’s words “all the pure artistic works are untranslatable,” and he also added “The top poems (especially lyric poems) are untranslatable, be it Chinese or western, ancient or modern”. （周仪, 1999: 68）The reason is that it is the load of the elite words of a specific language, and if it acts Zhou Zuoren once said when he translated several Greek Poems in 1924 “poems are untranslatable, only the original text in source language can be named as poems; the others are all the explanation of the poems by different translators” (周仪, 1999: 68).
In conclusion, the literary style of the source text is untranalatable, for the medium of translation is language. Different languages have no ways to express the same literary style. The expression of the literary style is like imitating watercolor pictures in pencil or pen, and it can not reflect the literary style of the source text.
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To sum up the opinions of previous scholars or translators, we can find something in common in their opinions—some writings are untranslatable such as poems. Once poems are translated, the specific taste that is the soul of the poem always disappears. Without its specific taste, poems can hardly be called “poems”. In one word, there exist some features that are difficult or even impossible to be translated from one language into another language, which is always considered as “untranslatability” by earlier translation scholars.
It should be admitted that in the translation process of CCP, certain problems or barriers would be encountered. It is because, for one thing, the abstruseness of the Chinese archaism and the very terseness of the traditional way of writing poetry make it difficult to comprehend the implications. For another, because Chinese is an ideograph language, the form and the meaning of a poem are so often integrated with the Chinese characters that it is not possible to translate them into another language accurately. In addition, on the level of polysemy, symbolism, frequent use of artistic images, anecdotes and allusions, CCP is particularly untranslatable to some extent.
2. Comparison between Chinese and English Version of Long Longing
Nowadays, there are many translators commit themselves to translation of poetry, but there arouses many problems. Let us compare the Chinese and English version of Long Longing to realize the untranslatability of artistic conception. The following part aims at finding out what is lost in Chinese Classic Poetry Translation.
Chinese Version of Long Longing:
长相思
汴水流， 思悠悠，
泗水流， 恨悠悠，
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流到瓜洲古渡头， 恨到归时方始休，
吴山点点愁。 月明人倚楼。
English Version of Long Longing:
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